What is Bookkeeping Automation?

Good Question!

As our own internal definition, we define it as:

The Process of Automating and Optimizing Administrative Tasks Required For Clean and Accurate Financial Information

So, what does that entail? Well, let's highlight a few parts

What is Pre-Bookkeeping?

Pre-Bookkeeping is defined as all the tasks required before transactions are actually sorted and categorized within the active accounting ledger.In short - it's all the shit you have to do like receipt tracking, knowing what bill was for what project, and knowing what you pay each staff member for what particular service.

Here's the problem that you are likely running in to:You can see your transactions in quickbooks online. This is great news! We love that it pulls automatically. But...If you just smash the numbers in to the ledger as they come in and do not have them accurately sorted, you run in to all sorts of questions that you need answered to run a profitable operation. Questions like:

• Was That Home Depot Expense for Project A or Project B?
• Did my staff member buy gas at the gas station, or did he or she also throw in some candy and tobacco products?
• Ok so that was my total payroll, but who got paid what? Also, what did they get paid for working on? And were they paid for office work or for work out on a project?
• Was that payment that we made to a bill we had already received? Did we pay the entire bill? Do I still owe people money?
• Nice I got a deposit.....but from who? Who still owes me money?
• What in the hell is a PURCHASE ADJUSTMENT and how come Quickbooks didn't tell me how that happened?
• Some money got transferred to an owner - was that for a reimbursement that should count as an expense or what that just them taking some money out?
• How Profitable was Project B? Oh wait I don't know because nobody ever added Project B to the accounting system, it's just in our other CRM? Well shit did we lose money on it?
• WHAT IS EVERYBODY BUYING ON COMPANY CREDITS CARDS?!?!?! (We have heard a horror story of a staff member buying a fishing trip on a company card...)

So, what do you do? You start collecting pieces of paper for everything (which you should) and use that to sort through things...

...when you have the time

...and if you don't lose those receipts underneath the front seat of your car

...and if you can even remember what each purchase was for

And you end up making guesses, having inaccurate information, as well as wasting a lot of your time that could be used on sales and production.

Bookkeeping automation solves these problems.

By implementing some easy to use decentralized technologies across your team, you can solve this issue so you have tight, accurate financials in 1/10th of the time.

Connecting Your Systems to Each other

A big part of bookkeeping automation is having your systems talk to each other.

If your administrator puts all new projects and contacts into one system, then also has to add them in a second time to a second or third system....you my friend are wasting a heckuvalotta time!

Bookkeeping automation solves this. By using middleware applications we are able to make sure that your contacts, expenses, and employees are automatically added from one system to another.

For example: You use Microsoft Dynamics for your sales and production. You also do your job costing in Dynamics.

By adding all new jobs from dynamics to quickbooks, and then tying in quickbooks to a receipt collection technology, and then setting up an automation to move all quickbooks expenses back in to the right job in dynamics, you can have single instance data entry across your organization. This will save you tremendous amount of time.

Streamline Your HR / Payroll Processes

So you find a new employee or sub - awesome! Now what happens

They fill out some paperwork (there is that P word again), and you go to put their info in:

• You can't read their handwriting
• They put in the wrong bank account information
• You now have to scan and upload their onbaording documents that are inaccurate to a homespun filing system (or - god help me - a filing cabinet!)
• If they are a 1099, you have to just rememebr to do that
• Then at year end you ahve to send out W2 and 1099 forms, via snail mail, to their home address
• They do not get back to you with updated payment info
• This ends up having them miss payroll
• New employee is disgruntled
• You feel bad but what are you gonna do that isi the way you have it set up!

With Bookkeeping Automation, we solve this problem. By implementing the employee / subcontractor-led onboarding they are now the one to put in their data. This means less of a liability for you, and incentive for them to get things set up

What Happens Once I Do This

Here are some quantifiable results of implementing bookkeeping automation from our previous clients

• Double the work capacity of your production staff without hiring a single new administrator
• Save $50K per year on Admin Costs
• Grow from 6 million to 10 million in revenue and only hire 1 extra person to help with keeping track of it all
• Go from 50K in debt to debt free and profitable within 18 months
  

The written version of what happens is that you can now scale your sales and production without a comparable increase in administrative workload.

This leads to 1 - More Sales, but more importantly #2 - More Profit. Here's a visual.

Just an example, not promising everyone 80% profit margins as that may not be possible with your specific business. Most folks see around 15-35% in a services business.

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