When it comes to doing the bookkeeping for your business, are you still driving this manually? Is it time to change to something more automatic?
As mentioned in our introductory blog, one of the areas we see clients spend a lot more time then they may necessarily have to is regarding their ordinary, everyday bookkeeping. As with most things these days, manual is getting replaced with automatic. Personally being a bit of a car guy, some big news this past week was that from 2020 Chevrolet have dropped the manual from their flagship model, the Corvette, which will be the first time a Corvette model will be available only in automatic. Sad news for purists, but a sign of the times and how people appreciate an easier experience.
Back to the accounting world though and in recent years there has been huge developments in automating the bookkeeping function for businesses. Banklink has been around for quite a number of years and offered a partially automated experience but wasn’t widely used, mainly because it was a little cumbersome to use and generally only provided through accounting firms. Xero, which you may have heard of, was the first major company to really push into the ‘cloud’ and bring this kind of automated transaction coding to the masses, in a much more user-friendly experience. Banklink has since been bought by MYOB, so is now incorporated with their suite of products too.
So how do these software solutions save you time? Well basically, they connect up to a read only view of your bank account transactions, at which time you can then code it to the income or expense it is for or apply it to your invoices. Whilst having the program receive this data saves some time in not having to enter the basic details of a transaction, like the date, amount and statement reference, where the real time saving comes is when you have recurring transactions. When you do, it is possible to have the program recognise this, and automatically apply a pre-defined action to the transaction, which just requires your approval to be entered. The programs are also able to recognise and match deposits or payments to invoices that are entered where there are certain matching criteria. All of this can save you significant time in manually entering the data off your bank statements.
Another significant time saving that comes with what the cool accountants call ‘data fed’ software, is completing the dreaded bank reconciliation! (Apologies if that word triggers memories of hours wasted away trying to find that pesky error throwing it out of balance). As data fed software has essentially received a copy of your bank statement that you’ve coded, this step is practically already done for you. I say practically, because as with most technology, sometimes there can be glitches and it is still necessary to take some small steps to ensure things are travelling smoothly. If you’re reading this and already using one of these data fed solutions, you may have experienced a time where your accountant has told you your bank is out of balance. This is a point I plan to raise in a future blog where I give some tips on some bookkeeping housekeeping I suggest our clients do, so stay tuned.
To make sure you don’t miss any of our blogs be sure to follow our social media channels or sign up to our mailing list.
Comments