The old onerous ways of bookkeeping and accounting have gone the way of the dodo bird! We’re great at helping shoe box clients but we can do so much better. Cloud accounting means that a lot of the drudgery in accounting has been eliminated. The marriage of cloud-based accounting and open architecture have enabled third parties to come up with some awesome apps to automate your bookkeeping and save 3-5 a week.
Let’s have a look at some apps that can help automate your workflows
The simplest and lowest cost action is to create a designated accounting email. An accounting email can save you 3-5 hours a week. By providing one email such as accounts@yourcompany.com, customers and suppliers can have one point of contact for payments. You can share access to email with your team, set up forwarding rules for each customer/vendor and have them go directly to your record-keeping software.
QuickBooks Online/Xero/Wave and your bank feed. Why would you ever enter data manually when you could have your software supply the data and you merely map it to the right place? Your bank accounts can be directly linked to your accounting software fetching your transactions line-by-line. At this point, you can set up rules to make classifying the transactions much faster. For example, if your purchases from Lowes are always Job Materials…set up a rule and forget about entering them manually. You can set up as many rules as you like, shaving hours off your bookkeeping time every month. Every time you accept a transaction the software will pre-fill the general ledger account, remember the way HST was recorded and map to the correct income accounts.
Dext & Hubdoc – Your virtual filing cabinet. What if there was software that would recognize your bills from your emails, could file your invoices and receipts, fetch bills, set reminders, recognize dates and amounts and push the invoices over to your accounting software? Set an automatic email forward from your new accounts@yourcompany.com, to your new Dext/Hubdoc and they will import all the data from your invoice into your electronic filing cabinet. They also provide a phone app where you can take a picture of a physical receipt. Dext/Hubdoc uses Optical Character Recognition to recognize the relevant details from your bills and upload an image for you to attach to the transaction in your accounting software or they can even push the entries to QBO. Dext offers a similar feature to QBO and Xero where you can set rules by supplier. These services are excellent tools for creating air-tight audit-proof books.
Square – Process payments securely on the go.In addition to processing payments from customers with digital invoices, Square also offers additional hardware to process debit & credit card transactions on-site securely. Then all the information and payments are automatically recorded to your accounting software.
Plooto, Payment Evolution, Payweb and other electronic payment providers – Process and collect payments securely online. You can simply set up your vendors in your accounting software and they will automatically import into payment providers. You can set up batch payments to pay multiple vendors at once. Plooto also offers multiple payment methods including e-transfers, EFT/ Wire Transfers or even by mailed cheque. That’s right, Plooto offers full service of printing and mailing cheques on your behalf.
Sharefile, Dropbox, GoogleDrive – File storage and content sharing. Cloud storage is a great place to keep digital backups of your documents. You can also create folders and invite individuals to them creating a network of vendors and suppliers with easy file sharing. You can also set passwords and access to the logs of when and who is accessing each file ensuring security. Sharefile also offers plug-ins for email services making it even easier to share files securely.
RightSignature, DocuSign and other electronic signature software – Share documents, track access, and get your contracts signed virtually. Paperless and fast, these tools send documents directly to the signee via email. Automatically send your customer and yourself completed contracts and access them from anywhere.
Wondering if any of these tools can help your business? Set up a consultation with us and we can help you pick the right tech for you.