Category: Bookkeeping Tips

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Five Ways to Streamline Data Entry

Are you manually entering data into your accounting system? If so, there may be a way to enter that data that’s faster, cheaper, and better. Data entry automation has come a long way. Here are five common ways to automate data entry so that it no longer has to be manually entered.

1.  Bank feeds or online banking

    If you’re still entering your bank transactions, the good news is you have an opportunity to save a significant amount of time and money on your accounting. Almost all banks and many credit unions provide interfaces with your accounting system so that checking account, savings account, and credit card transactions can be automatically entered directly into your accounting system. There are two ways to do this:

      a. The older way is through online banking which can be started by working with both your accounting system and the bank. The fee is usually $25 per month, with additional fees for bill pay.

      b. The brand new, more modern and completely free way is through bank feeds, which are available when you move to a cloud accounting system such as QuickBooks Online or Xero. Bank feeds are not available in desktop accounting systems.

2.  A smart scanner

    If a lot of paper flows across your desk, you can scan it in using a smart scanner that can parse the document and enter it straight into your accounting system. You will usually have a chance to edit and accept the data, which is far better than entering it from scratch.

3.  Import and export functions

    If you need to get data from one place to another, such as from a point of sale system to an accounting system, then using the export and import features of the software may be the most efficient method. There are also software apps that help you scrub the data and get it ready for the receiving system.

    If you ever convert from an old accounting system to a new accounting system, this method will come in handy to get you historical data moved.

4.  Interfaces and programmers

    If you have a high volume of transactions that need to move from one place to another on an ongoing basis, it may make the most sense to employ programmers who can build an interface. Alternately, some systems can talk to each other already; they just need to be plugged into each other correctly.

5.  Smartphones, tablets, and field service hardware and software

    If your sale occurs out in the field, don’t wait to get the data into your system when you get back to the office. You may be able to complete the sale right out in the field, so that when you get back to the office, you can call it a day instead of keying in the day’s work.

    Mobile accounting apps are where to look for this form of data entry automation.

No more manual data entry

In 2015, consider taking on the goal of no more manual data entry. If we can help, let us know.


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Navigating Nanny Taxes and Household Payroll Compliance

Time is precious for most of us these days, and often, we need help at home so we can have more time to run our businesses or careers.  That may mean hiring help for personal tasks such as caregiving for the young, elderly, or special needs family member.  When you first hire a household worker, there’s a whole different set of rules to follow compared to hiring for business.

Underground Payroll

There is a whole industry of “underground” payments made to domestic workers.  Individuals such as housekeepers, regardless if they live with you full time or work once a month, are wrongly paid as contractors, and often in cash, most of the time.  According to the IRS, in court case after court case, these workers should be paid as household employees, even if they are part-time.

Cracking Down

One of the focus areas for the IRS is this area of household payroll.  The current and strong drive to bring this underground payment system to the light is caused by several new pieces of legislation.  A few states have recently passed a domestic workers bill of rights.  Changes in minimum wage and overtime requirements are going into effect in 2015.  And the health care act requires workers to document their wages before they can qualify for a subsidy, so this can bring more workers asking you to get them fully documented on your books.

Getting It Right

The need to hire household workers is rising due to the silver tsunami – a term describing the aging of the populous Baby Boomer generation and their growing need for health care, which will truly stretch our system based on their numbers.

Expert Guidance

When your family makes the decision to hire household workers, seek expert guidance so that you can get through the maze of compliance in this area.  You’ll want to be sure you learn about the risks and compliance issues in this area so that you can properly protect your personal wealth as well as your peace of mind.  And if we can help, please reach out and let us know.

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Is It Time for Spring Cleaning Your Business Files?

How much time do you spend each day looking for information about orders, customers, vendors, or employees?  If it’s a lot, a little spring cleaning might pay off.  Here are five quick tips to assess and improve your information access.

Your Librarian

Large companies often have a librarian on staff that is in charge of stored documents, both physical and virtual.  It’s not a bad idea to have this function in your small business, although you certainly don’t want to devote an entire headcount to it.

Today, a company librarian might be in charge of the company’s document portal, which is a very secure area where company documents can be stored.  It might be on the company server or in a secure area of the cloud.  There are companies that offer secure file storage, accessible through document portals.

The librarian will also be in charge of creating recordkeeping policies and procedures.

What’s in a Name

One such procedure that brings order to chaos is setting naming conventions for client files and folders.  Set consistency by using a naming standard such as having a client file name always start with the last name of the client followed by a birth date, or something else unique.

It will save time each time you look up a file because you’ll always know where to look.  Even if it’s only seconds saved per lookup, that time will add up to minutes and hours saved over a year.  That will save you labor costs.  A naming standard will also look professional in front of the client.

Permanent vs. Transactional

Get uber-organized by separating your important long-term legal papers from your transactional documents.  Long-term papers such as your corporate by-laws and tax returns should have a special place away from your day-to-day invoices and receipts.  Also keep major purchases such as settlement documents from real estate transactions in a special file that you’ll keep for many years.

Your daily transactional files should be batched up by month or year and stored accordingly.  You’ll be able to delete these files after their retention period is up, while you’ll want to keep your long-term legal papers almost forever.  You still won’t be able to throw away your annual documents too soon – some agencies require you to keep transactional documents for as long as 11 years.

Paper or Paperless

What percentage of your business documents is scanned and stored online?  If you’d like to increase this percentage, then make a plan to convert your paper into scanned documents you can access online.  So that it’s not such an overwhelming task, break it down into smaller chunks:   start with one area of your business at a time or one vendor at a time.

Purchase a scanner for everyone in your office, and you’ll soon find your office getting more and more paperless by the week.  You can also have fun taking pictures of receipts on your cell phone and uploading the documents to your document portal.

A Backup Plan

So that you don’t lose your documents to a catastrophe, theft or any other disaster, make sure you have a backup of all of your documents so you are able to recover them.

This is where paperless shines over paper, because there is always risk of fire with the latter.  It’s also where a secure document portal beats your company server anytime because of the elaborate layers of security that are required for secure commercial data centers.

After you implement these five tips, you may not even need to do a spring cleaning.  You’ll be organized and efficient, and that’s good for business.

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Optimize Your Revenue Mix for More Profits in 2014

Many small business owners focus on generating more revenue every year, and that’s a great objective.  But not all revenue is created equally.  If you sell more than one product or service in your business, then you can benefit from looking at your revenue mix.

Although it’s fun to watch our revenues grow, it’s the profit number that really matters.  If your expenses grow faster than your profits, then you have a lot of activity going on, but you don’t get to keep as much of what you make, which is what really matters.

An insightful exercise to try is to take a look at your revenue mix.  Then you can ask “what if?” to optimize your profits.

Your Revenue Mix

Let’s say you offer three different services: Services X, Y, and Z. Your revenue pie looks like this:

X:  $1.4 million or 70% of the total

Y:  $0.3 million or 15% of the total

Z:  $0.3 million or 15% of the total

Total:  $2.0 million

In this example, Service X is clearly the service making you the most revenue in your business.  But is it making you the most profits?

The profit you receive from each of these service lines is as follows:

X:  $160K

Y: $20K loss

Z:  $60K

Total:  $200K

While Service X is generating the most profit volume for your business, it’s actually Service Z that’s the most profitable.  Earning $160K on $1.4 million yields 11.4% return on Service X, but earning $60K on $300K yields nearly double the return at 20%.  Service Z generates the most return.   And if possible, Service Y may need to be discontinued or turned around.

Optimizing Profits

Your strategy for a more optimum revenue mix might be to sell as much of Service Z as possible, while eliminating or fixing the problem around Service Y.

It’s fun to experiment with different revenue mixes.  And of course, there are many more variables besides profit, such as:

  • Which service do you prefer to work on?
  • Are you able to sell more of the most profitable service or are there marketing limitations?
  • Is one service a loss leader for the others?
  • Are you able to adjust price on the lower margin services to increase your profits?

There are many more questions to ask and strategies to consider to make you more money, which is why we love our job!

A New Year, A New Mix

We hope you’ll spend some time analyzing your revenue mix and having fun asking yourself “what if?”   If we can help you expedite the process or add our perspective, please reach out anytime.

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Five Tips to Get Ready for a Pain-Free Tax Time

With the holiday season just around the corner, it’s a perfect time to get your financial records in order.  Tax moves you make now can mean finding more “green” to spend on family gifts and festivities.  Here are five quick tips for you to feel more prepared about your financial status as you go into year-end.

Avoid Penalties

This time of year is ideal to double-check your tax payments to make sure enough has been paid in, and even more important, to avoid overpaying so your money is not tied up unnecessarily. If you’re not sure of your 2013 tax liability, check with your tax preparer.

Balanced Books

Rather than wait until the busiest time of year for accountants and bookkeepers, you can get a head start now on catching up your books  You’ll have more of their attention and you may even avoid a rate increase if you get your books done early.  Completed bank reconciliations are a very important part of catching up.

Forms

It’s not too early to get your orders in for the forms you need at year-end like your W-2s, W-3s, 1099s, and 1096s.  That way, your forms will be onsite when you’re ready.

Records

Information that’s missing at the last minute can take up extra time and be costly.  It’s a great idea to do an audit now of W-9s to grab missing addresses and tax ID numbers of your contractors.  Also do a scrub of your employee payroll records so that your W-2s will be complete and accurate.

New Tax Changes

Be sure to check with your advisors on new laws affecting individuals and businesses next year.  One of the biggest ones making news is avoiding the fine involved regarding the new health care requirements for individuals.  And there are many more you’ll want to get up to speed on so that you’ll know how they affect your situation.

We know it’s early to be talking about taxes, but we’re also all about saving you money and time.  Try these five tips so you’ll have better peace of mind and be more prepared for year-end.

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Five Best-Practice Accounts Payable Tips for a Smoother Cash Flow

Watching the cash balance is one of the most frequent activities of a small business owner.  Besides making sure you have enough cash for payroll and bills, there is another huge opportunity you can benefit from: lowering the cost of processing your bills.  It can be expensive and time-consuming to process bills and handle the paperwork involved.  We’ll take a look at a couple of the many ways you can streamline your accounts payable processing costs in this article.

Opportunity #1:  Go Digital

The Intuit Payment Network (IPN) is a best-kept secret when it comes to sending and receiving money.  It’s free to set up your account, and it’s also free for your receiver to set up an account.  All you do is add your bank account, and you can easily transfer funds between the two accounts just by knowing the receiver’s email address.

The receiver of money only pays 50 cents per transaction, so when you have a large transfer of funds, it’s totally worth it.  It saves you postage, check stock, envelopes and the related mailing labor.  You could even increase your payment by 50 cents so that your receiver receives exactly what you owe them.

Another way to go digital is via PayPal.  Fees vary, and are usually paid by the receiver.

Opportunity #2:  Get Control

When it comes to finances, it’s never a good idea to mix business and personal, especially when it’s coming out of the same bank account.  Keep separate accounts for business and personal, and your bookkeeping costs will go way down.  Do the same thing for credit cards as well.

If you’re comfortable with credit cards and you can maintain control of your spending, it saves accounts-payable time when you can charge everything you spend on business to your credit card as long as you pay it off every month.  Using your card is faster at checkout than writing a check these days, so you’ll save time on errands as well.

Opportunity #3:  Automate

Put recurring expenses such as utilities, rent, accounting, and other monthly bills on bank draft or autopay if the vendor has that option.  This will save you a huge amount of time, supplies, and postage.  You can also be more accurate with the timing of the payment which will allow you to keep your money for as long as possible until the due date arrives.

Opportunity #4:  Verify

We hope you never pay bills that aren’t yours, but it can happen.  To avoid it as much as possible, implement a three-way matching process on all your payables, especially those related to inventory.  The three-way part refers to the three documents involved in accounts payable:

  • The purchase order
  • The packing slip
  • The invoice

Before any invoice is paid, these three documents should be matched line by line – for quantity, price, and description — to ensure you ordered and received what you paid for.  Only then should your bill be approved.  This will ensure that you don’t pay a fraudulent bill, you don’t pay for out-of-stock that didn’t ship and that you paid the correct price you agreed to in the first place.

Please feel free to reach out and ask us about this if you’d like to know more.

Opportunity #5:  Tell Yourself a Little White Lie

There’s an old saying:  “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”  If you’re always moving money around form one checking account to another to cover bills and payroll, you’re not the only small business owner who juggles funds.  It takes up valuable time to make all these transactions, and then it costs to record them and track them.

Reduce all that by telling yourself a little white lie about your bank balance.  If your bank balance is $10,000, tell yourself it’s only $5,000 (or whatever amount makes sense for you).  That way, you’ll always have a cushion in your account that will help you reduce transfers.  There are several ways to set this “little white lie” up in your books.

More A/P Ideas

These are only five of many ways you can reduce your processing costs and save time on accounts payable processing.  Give these five accounts payable ideas a try, and if you’d like to know more, please reach out and let us know.

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Do You Know Your Small Business Vitals?

On a doctor’s visit, the first thing the nurse does is take your vitals:  your temperature, blood pressure, pulse rate, and respiration rate.  These basic measurements are the first place doctors look to see if something is wrong with our health.

Knowing your vital signs, and especially when they are out of whack, is good for your health.  In the same way, knowing your business’s vital signs, and especially when they are out of whack, is good for the financial health of your business.

Vital Measures

If you’ve been in business a while, you might already know the “vitals” you like to track.  Here are some common ones for a small or new business:

  • Checking account balance(s)
  • Amounts owed (bills, payroll, and loans)
  • Revenue for the month and year-to-date
  • Sales by customer so you can see the top five to ten largest customers

As time goes on and your business grows, you may want to add some of the following:

  • Revenue for the month and year-to-date compared to last year
  • Net income for the month and year-to-date compared to last year
  • Days Sales Outstanding which is a measure of how long it take to collect on an invoice from a client
  • Revenue by service or product line in a pie chart

These are just a handful of the many options there are when it comes to measuring the results of your business, and it would be difficult for us to list all of them here.  The point is to decide proactively what you’d like to track on a monthly basis.  Then you can set up the process it takes to get those numbers delivered to you in the format you prefer.

Once you decide on the numbers you need to run your business, you’ll be able to take your “vitals” whenever you want.  But you can take this to the next level with one more idea:  exception reporting.

Being Exceptional

It’s great to glance at your numbers periodically, but there can be a lot of data to wade through.  How about getting a report that tells you only when the numbers go out of range?  This is called exception reporting, and requires that you set ranges for each measure you want to follow.  If the measure stays within range, you do not have to be alerted.  However, if it falls out of range, then you can get a report to tell you what’s going on so you can take the right business action.

Exception reporting is not all that common in small business, but can save a busy owner a lot of time.

A Clean Bill of Health

By determining the vitals you want to watch for your business and putting a process in place to monitor that information, you will be helping your business stay healthy.  If we can help, please reach out and let us know.  The doctor is IN.

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What Does Popeye Have to Do with Accounting?

You might have heard the terms “cash basis accounting” or “accrual accounting.”  Your net income number can change depending on which method your books are set up for.  Here’s a simple explanation of the difference, with a little help from one of the most famous cartoon characters in history.

Popeye and Wimpy

You might recognize Popeye the Sailor Man from the television cartoons or other media.  His sidekick, Wimpy, was the one who was always hungry and always out of cash.  One of his favorite sayings was, “I’ll gladly pay your Tuesday for a hamburger today.”

It’s All in the Timing

Let’s make today Thursday.  If Wimpy wants to pay us Tuesday for a hamburger today, here’s how it would be done for a restaurant on cash basis:

Cash basis recording Wimpy’s hamburger purchase

Both the sale and the receipt of cash would be recorded on Tuesday.  Companies on cash basis only record the transaction when the cash is received.

But, if the restaurant’s books were on the accrual basis, it would be a different story:

Accrual basis recording Wimpy’s hamburger purchase

Wimpy’s hamburger sale would be recorded on Thursday, the day he ate the hamburger.  The receipt would then be recorded on Tuesday, assuming Wimpy made good on his promise to pay.

You might be asking why a few days is such a big deal.  Outside of cartoon life, a couple of extra twists can happen.  It can be far more than a few days from the time you do the work to the time you get paid for it.  And often, these dates span different months and even years, affecting the amount you have to pay in taxes to various agencies.  Manipulating these dates (legally, of course) is one of many tax planning strategies that we can help you with.

Choosing for Your Business

In many cases, the government has chosen which method you must use when it comes to sales tax, payroll taxes, and income tax.  That’s part of the reason we make the required adjustments to your books at year end.

To help you run your business in a forward-thinking way, the accrual method is best.  You can record invoices for work you’ve done even though you haven’t received payment yet.  You can enter bills you need to pay before you pay them to forecast cash requirements.  Using accrual accounting, you can budget for cash flow needs as well as see more accurately what your revenue and income is looking like.

For clients who remain behind in their bookkeeping and just want to catch everything up once a year, the cash basis is adequate.  However they lose out on all the good information they could have had throughout the year to run their business better.

For other businesses, a hybrid approach between cash and accrual accounting can be the most cost effective.

A Little Help from Popeye the Sailor

What would Popeye say about all this accounting talk?

“That’s all I can stands, cuz I can’t stands n’more!”

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Mobile Accounting

If you are the type of person who loves mobile apps, texting, and getting your email on your phone, then you’re in for a treat: accounting has finally come around to your smartphone.  Here are a couple of great developments you can try so you can stay on top of your numbers.

Accounting Apps

For users of QuickBooks desktop and QuickBooks Online, an app is available to help you stay on top of your accounts receivables.  You can send invoices, view and update customer information, mark an invoice paid, and check up on customers’ balances.

If you are on the Xero cloud accounting system, the Xero Touch app is comprehensive, showing a dashboard of all of your major cash account balances and allowing you to perform numerous accounting functions on your phone.   On the accounts receivable side, you can view and re-send invoices, check customer information, and view account balances.

In the Xero app, you can snap a picture of a receipt and upload it right on the spot.  This helps avoid lost receipts and decreases paper handling, plus the cool factor is high!

These apps work on the iPhone, iPad, and Android.  With QuickBooks, there is a small monthly charge after a free trial, and with Xero, the app is free with your Xero subscription.

Bank Apps

If you’re banking with a major bank, chances are “there’s an app for that.”  Downloading your banking mobile app will allow you to stay on top of balances, receive alerts, and manage your cash flow more effectively.

Payment Apps

More and more businesses are collecting customer payments via their smartphones.  You don’t even need a merchant account for some of these payment apps, like Square, PayPal, or Intuit Mobile GoPayment, but it is cheaper if you do.  If you’re not already taking credit cards, it’s an effective way to get started; your customers can pay via Visa, American Express, MasterCard, and Discover.

With many of these payment apps, you download the app, receive a reader in the mail, and are then able to swipe or key in a client’s credit card information.  You are charged by the transaction, or monthly, if you sign up for a merchant account.  Plus, you can often customize the receipts the client receives with your logo to make them look professional.

Add-on Apps

There are many other mobile apps that can increase your accounting capabilities.  Both ADP and Paychex have payroll apps for their clients.  There are numerous apps to extend many of your accounting functions, such as expense management, document management, invoicing, time-tracking, bill payment, and even work order management.

Accounting to Go

Now you have a choice with your accounting:  you can “eat here” or take it “to go.”  If we can help get you equipped as an accounting road warrior, give us a shout.

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Budgeting Breakthrough

When you hear the word “budget,” what do you think about?  Most people would say something similar to “Ugghh!” If you would rather do just about anything besides create a budget, you’re not alone.  The word “budget” brings up connotations of endless numbers, constraints, the opposite of freedom and creativity, and hard work, none of which are very desirable.

Yet, the benefits of a budget are huge.  Budgets can help you with cash flow improvements, keep you on track for higher profits, and alert you to items that need further action.

From “Budget” to “Profit Plan”

To be successful with budgeting, we need to get rid of all of the connotations that go with the word.  Perhaps it might work if we rename “budgeting” to “profit planning.” And then, rather than focus on how little we should spend, let’s start with how much revenue we’re going to make.

Revenue Clarity

It’s simple to create a revenue plan if you go backwards.  What revenue goal would you like to hit this year?  Just like we would never get in a car without a final destination, a revenue plan gives us a number to aim for in our businesses.

Once you know your number, then we can use averages to come up how many sales or clients we need to generate in order to meet our revenue goal.  Here’s a quick example:  Let’s say you want to reach $5 million in revenue this year.  If you average order is $10,000, then you need 500 sales.  If you have multiple products and services, then you’ll need to sum the product of the average sale times the needed number of sales for each line.

From there, you can make marketing and production plans based on the number of sales or clients you need.

Protecting Your Profit

Think of the expense side of your “profit plan” as protecting your profit margins so that you can ensure financial gain from all the hard work you do.  Setting budget limits on spending will allow you to control overhead and other items so you can keep more of what you make.

Exceptional Reporting

A great “profit plan” report will provide several things.  You can compare budget to actual, or better yet, just be alerted to the accounts showing exceptions.  You can also get an income statement that compares the current period with the prior year period so you can see how far you’ve come.  One last option is a benchmark report which provides industry averages so you can measure how you fare compared to other companies in your industry.

A “profit plan” is a great tool for your business.  If we can help you with the process or provide you with custom reporting, please give us a call.