7 Streamlined Bookkeeping Tools We Can't Live Without

whether you love bookkeeping or hate it you will love these seven bookkeeping tools because they will help you accomplish more in less time stay tuned for our top list of bookkeeping tools and apps we can't live without [Music] i'm kristy van pay with prosperity bookkeeping helping you take the guesswork out of small business bookkeeping before we even get into today's topic i want to let you know that i have supplemented this video with my free downloadable bookkeeping workflow schedule which you can use to maximize the effectiveness of the tools we're going to talk about today plus if you hang with me to the end i will reveal the bonus tool that helps me manage my business rather than my business managing me bookkeeping has come a long way since some of the first accounts of ancient tax records were found on clay tablets dating as far back as 3300 to 2000 bc even looking back to my childhood computers were barely making their way into small businesses and many records were still kept on paper ledgers if you have done any bookkeeping at all you can imagine how time consuming and tedious this process must have been even since my first experience with bookkeeping automation has made the process so much more enjoyable and efficient a word of caution though a blog post from comparethecloud.net said it best speeding up a beneficial process delivers value faster but automating a bad process only makes it spiral out of control if you do not currently have a solid bookkeeping process in place do not attempt to implement any of these tools without the help of a professional with that being said let's dive into the tools tool number one is a bank feed in your accounting software so the one that i'm demonstrating today is going to be quickbooks online and their bank feed but i know that there are other apps out there for accounting purposes that have um bank feeds as well xero i know is one of them and i'm sure there probably are a few more so um what what we're going to be talking about today is specifically the quickbooks online bank feed and the reason that i love this so much is it connects right to your bank account so you will link the account by clicking this button sign in with your online banking credentials and then it will connect your account and then you can choose how far back you wanted to bring in transactions depending on when the last time was that you reconciled your bank account or the last time that you did some data entry and got your bank transactions in there once connected then it will go out to your bank on a regular basis i believe it's actually every night but it'll go out and it will retrieve the transactions that have occurred in your bank accounts and it will bring them into quickbooks now when it brings them in here i want you to understand that this does not mean that they are on your financial statements currently this is just bringing them in to show you what has happened in your bank accounts you still need to do some activity here and i'm not really going to get into all of that today but just wanting to show you how much easier it is than manually entering every little expense in by putting in the vendor name and putting in the amount and putting in the date and assigning it to an account and even better than that is well you may still have to do that for a few of your transactions like for instance here i see um let me pick one so this mahoney mugs like maybe that's a new vendor that you haven't used before and right now it's saying it's going to uncategorized expense well you don't want it going to on categorized expense so in that case you would need to click this and you would need to assign it to the proper place okay so once we open it up we can see that we can change the vendor or customer name if we need to and we can change the category and if you're using classes and locations and things like that you can change those as well but those aren't in the sample company right now so we don't have to worry about that but mahoney mugs for me would be maybe a promotional expense maybe i got some mugs with my logo on there so i want to change this to advertising and i'll go ahead and do that really quickly and then i would just simply click the add button and that will add the transaction so once i hit add it will add the transaction to my books and it will show up as an expense on my financial reports so we'll add that one the other nice thing about using the bank feed is if you've already entered some transactions into your books like maybe you entered a bill and then you paid it to the vendor when that check clears the bank it's gonna come in and it's going to search for any existing transactions that are already in your books that match that particular check that you've written and it will show that there's a match found so here we have a match to an expense for tonya's nursery and all we would have to do in this case as long as we confirm that you know we do believe this is the right transaction the date is the same the amount is the same the vendor is the same we can just simply click match so that's all we have to do and then we're done then um you can also set up rules in the bank feed which saves us tons of time because a lot of our clients are buying purchases with their debit cards or their credit cards and so then we're just getting the receipts for those and they automatically hit or maybe they have subscription fees that are automatically hitting every month we can set up a rule for those so that every time those transactions in quickbooks automatically knows how to classify those so here's an example of one that has a rule applied and it'll show you that it's applying a rule and the rule that we set up says that when a transaction comes through and chin's gas is in the description of that particular transaction that we want to classify that to automobile expense or to fuel expense and then we can even decide what we want the vendor name to be so i like to keep things simple and instead of having 25 gas stations listed in my vendor list i like to just put all of my gas under one vendor called fuel so i've set up a vendor in my books called fuel and i set the rules so that every time chin's gas comes through it gets put into the automobile expense account and it gets assigned to the vendor fuel so all i have to do when i see that rule applied is simply click add and you can even take it one step further and you can set it up so that those transactions will automatically add so that you don't even need to touch them in the bank feed there's a little button that you're going to push to do that but i talked more about that in my video about setting up bank feed rules which i will link in the description below for you so i would just go ahead and add that then we have a few more here that are matching um different things and i like i said earlier in when i gave you the warning of this video if you are not an expert at this or i wouldn't say an expert but if you're not really comfortable with your process and how things are happening this is where you might want to bring an expert in at least to get started um just so that they can guide you in the right direction because you have to be careful especially when things are matching up to sales receipts or invoices that have been paid by your customers you want to make sure that you're correctly matching them to the right things so just a little word of caution there and the other thing that i wanted to show you in here um oh i just had one other one that was a rule so when a rental comes through in the description of the bank feed it should assign it to the rent or lease category and to the vendor tony rondon new or something not sure what that name is how to pronounce that um so then we would just go ahead and and add those you can even sort so let's say we wanted to sort by category or match column so that we can kind of look down all of these matches all of these rules look correct so now to get these transactions recorded on my books i'm simply going to just check everything off here i've deselected anything that isn't already matching to a rule or a match so that all i have selected right now or anything that is a match or anything that has a rule and i'm going to go ahead and accept those so that i can just bulk accept them all at once and i don't have to go through one by one now the other way that the bank feed saves time is when transactions are added through the bank feed and you go to do your bank reconciliation get into the bank reconciliation window here by going into my gear wheel and clicking reconcile and if you are not familiar with reconciliations or why they're important or how to do them in quickbooks i also have a video on that that i will link in the description below as well okay so i'm in the bank reconciliation window here and you can see there are a bunch of transactions here that are just there's they're not checked off um they don't have this green little symbol or anything here those are transactions that were manually entered into the system but if a transaction was entered through the bank feed because it came directly from the bank quickbooks knows that it's already a cleared transaction that it has cleared your bank so it will automatically market checked off it will show you here that it has been that it has been matched to a transaction from the bank feed that's what this little symbol means and it's even going to give you the date that it cleared which can be very helpful if your reconciliation isn't coming out to see when something cleared or when you're done with your reconciliations if you're looking through to see why there are items that didn't hit your bank statement you might say that okay there was this transaction a check i wrote on 9 30 but it didn't clear until october so that makes sense that it wasn't on the september statement so that is a really key way that the bank feed can save you time as far as reconciliations are concerned so that pretty much ends my spiel on tool number one the bank feed feature in accounting software tool number two is hub dock and i actually have a playlist on hub docs so i will link that in the description below and you can watch um some pretty extensive videos on how hub doc works but just to give you a brief overview for the purpose of this video basically i'm on hub doc's website right now and they tell you exactly how it works so you receive a lot of financial documents in the form of receipts bills and statements and sometimes those things are even emailed to you you simply send those to hub doc using either a scanner an app on your phone where you can just snap the receipt you can link some of your accounts so that the invoices and statements go directly into hub doc i don't personally recommend that method but it is available for people who want that convenience and you can forward invoices from your inbox into the hub doc portal once you do that then we're going to take the information right into quickbooks online and here's how we do that so when an invoice comes in to hub doc you can see the image of the invoice which makes it really nice for data entry so it's electronic you can easily see all the details and you're simply going to fill in a couple of things hub doc does a really good job of trying to extract as much data as it can using artificial intelligence to kind of read the document so they're pulling out the supplier the invoice number the date and the amount of the invoice so you don't even really need to do any data entry there other than double checking to make sure that it didn't make any mistakes or misread the document you'd want to choose what document type it is so in this case it's a receipt we've already paid for it this is important because if it's a bill that you're going to want to pay later then you would enter it as an invoice in this case we're just entering it as a receipt um and then once you hit publish what this section does here is it basically is just a filing system when you're filling in this information you're basically telling hubduck how you want to file this particular invoice so you're giving it the folder name which is going to be the name of the vendor and then it's also going to name the invoice by the rest of these details and you'll find out why that's important in a minute so this is the folder information your folders are located over here on the left and i don't go into that in this video because i have a whole playlist on hub doc videos that you can watch and then you'll see what i'm talking about but then down here the thing that makes this such a convenience is that you can sync your transactions to quickbooks and i believe there's also integrations for other accounting software like xero and maybe some other ones i'm not sure but for the purposes of this video we're using quickbooks so we would integrate this to quickbooks after you do a couple of them it starts to remember where things go so it'll automatically fill in or you can actually set it up by vendor in the settings section so that it'll automatically know what to do with it every time so this information is already filled in you don't even have to worry about it including even the account um but if it's a new vendor or somebody you haven't set up rules for then you may have to manually enter this information but once you do that you just click publish and it'll send the data over to quickbooks along with a copy image of the invoice itself or the receipt itself and it'll attach it to the transaction in quickbooks for easy reference later so that's really nice because then you'll have the receipts available for you in quickbooks or you'll have them in hub deck so if you need to search for something there's two different places that you could find them in addition to that if that's not enough redundancy for you you can even have it sync to google drive so it can go into a google drive folder and it will file it the same way in google drive if you check the button to do so it'll file it the same way in google drive as it does in hub doc so that you can search it in google drive by vendor name by amount or by date which makes it really nice and convenient so you'll see down here a whole bunch of other integrations that there are that you can sync it with you can sync it with dropbox you can sync it with xero bill.com and i talked in bill.com a little bit about how you would want to set up your sync if you were going to use hub doc and maybe quickbooks and bill.com so there are a couple of other options here tool number three is meleo payments and i absolutely love this app this one has come out somewhat recently and the reason that i love it is it's already built into quickbooks online so if you are using quickbooks online you already have this app available to you for free within quickbooks online but basically this is a way to pay your bills directly from quickbooks or you can use it as a standalone so if you're not using quickbooks you can actually just get um you can go to emiliopayments.com and you can use the app directly by itself as a standalone which is totally fine if you're using it through quickbooks you still can log in to the melio app to get additional details on things like when checks cleared and whether you know i there's lots of different details and i don't want to get into all of that today but you can use it simultaneously with quickbooks or you can use it as a standalone is my point so long story short so if you're in quickbooks online and i'm in a sample company right now and you go to the pay bills module you will see this feature when you click on an invoice then you have the option to schedule payments online and if you click that it's going to be a real simple process and i'm sure if i do it now in a sample company it's probably not going to take me anywhere basically it's just going to have you verify the vendor name and the address it's going to ask you if you want to pay from your bank account or if you want to pay using a credit card if you pay with a credit card you're going to pay a fee to pay that vendor but if you pay with your checking account then there is no fee and the best part is they will just go ahead and take care of sending your vendor a payment and you can either pay your vendor via ach so that it gets direct deposited into their bank account so if you have their information you can do it that way if you if their banking information if you don't have their banking information you can request it from them or i think you can even send an invite for them to enter their own details and then you could pay them electronically otherwise emilio takes care of printing out the checks and sending them to your vendors on your behalf so there's nothing you need to do there no printing checks no stuffing envelopes no putting stamps on it no going to the post office or bringing it out to the mailbox it's all handled for you tool number four is bill.com now we don't use this one as much anymore but this might be appropriate if your organization has a little more complex accounts payable process so with melio it's pretty straightforward you get a bill you put it into quickbooks you use melio to pay the bill there are really no approvers i know that that might be something that's in the works with them but i don't think as of yet they've incorporated that feature so you can't really have approvers um and there's a few other features that are kind of missing bill.com is a more robust solution that has a lot more features and can accommodate if you have to have multiple people approve a bill before it can get paid maybe there's somebody in the purchasing department and then maybe there's somebody in the actual department that made the purchase that both need to approve it or review it or match it up to a purchase order or whatever the case may be then bill.com would be a good solution for that you can also use bill.com in conjunction with hub docs so what we were doing when we used to use bill.com is we would have all of the receipts and everything come into hub dock we would enter the information there it would sync a copy over to quickbooks and then we would also sync it to bill.com so that it would be sitting there waiting for either the approvers to approve the bills or for us to go in and actually make the payments it works again the same way you can pay your vendors electronically or bill.com would take care of printing and mailing checks on your behalf um at least that's how it was when we were using it and i'm sure it's still that way today you can even do foreign transactions i believe and multi-currency possibly even if i remember correctly so definitely a more robust solution and um the problem that we were having is rather than having everything come right into bill.com which we could instead of having hub doc we could have had all of the receipts and everything come into bill.com and enter everything but when we were doing that then when we would sync it to quickbooks it would send the data over but it wouldn't send an image of the invoice or receipt along with it also it was a little clumsy for processing things like receipts so things that are already paid for it wasn't as easy as easy of a process to do those types of things you can do it but it's it's a clumsier process than using hub doc so we kind of incorporated the two together so that we could do the document management in hub doc and then just have everything synced to quickbooks and bill.com so that we could do all of our bill pay from bill.com so if you go to bill.com's website they actually have a nice little recap here of exactly how things work in there that just plays for you so i'm not going to go into too much more detail here but just letting you know that the tool exists and it really does make life easier tool number five is a merchant services account that's built into your accounting software so the one i'm talking about today is intuit merchant services but there may be some other forms of accounting software that also have their own merchant service platform built into the app itself but the one i'm familiar with is intuit merchant services now before i get even too far into this i'm probably going to get some slack on this because i have so many people say to me oh it seems like their processing fees are so expensive well their processing fees really aren't that much more expensive than like square or paypal or any of those other um merchant processors that are kind of like a convenience processing app um and let me tell you labor is not cheap and though i may pay a little bit extra for the processing fees to use intuit merchant services for the size of invoices that i process and the size of payments that i process it is well worth it to me to pay the little bit extra for the automation and convenience that comes with it than for me to have to pay a person to do all of the manual work that is happening behind the scenes because i'm using an integrated merchant service with my accounting software so nothing against if you're using an outside merchant card processor they are great there's some wonderful people i have one who happens to be a client of mine who i absolutely love and i adore her but you know if you're processing large invoices and there are really extravagant fees associated with that well then you might want not want to use something like intuit merchant services but if your invoices are you know of smaller value and it's you know not it's probably going to be cheaper for you to pay the little bit extra fee on processing than it would be to hire a person to do all of the manual matching up and let me tell you what i'm talking about so when you create an invoice in quickbooks and you're using merchant card services you can select a little radio button that allows your customer when you email the invoice to them to pay you either via via bank ach which is a much lower fee or buy a credit card which is a little bit higher fee obviously they can choose which one they want to do they just click the link they go enter their payment information they pay you at that point because they use the link to pay the invoice quickbooks already knows what invoice it's supposed to pay so quickbooks takes the payment it applies it to the proper invoice it records the deposit on your books to match up with the batch deposit that goes in from the merchant services so when you process save three credit cards in a day they're not gonna all individually get deposited into your bank account as three separate transactions they're gonna go in as one batch deposit for those three different payments so you've saved yourself the time of having to open an envelope and take out somebody's payment you're saving yourself the time of logging into quickbooks and finding that invoice receiving the payment then you have to go record the deposit if you're going to put multiple checks in and you're not having it go directly into your bank account which i don't recommend you have it directly go into your bank account but that's another story for another day um so you have to go record the deposit you have to probably either mobile deposit that into your bank or take those checks and bring them to the bank like that all costs time and money and when you add that all up for every single transaction you're probably saving money by paying a little bit extra and using the intuit merchant services so not something that you necessarily have to do but we love it because it saves us a lot of time and it really does automate the process and it reduces the possibility of error as well because when they use the link it's already associated with the specific invoice that that payment belongs to which means no misapplied payments or questions later on down the road tool number six is a little bit more advanced tool and this is more for forecasting and modeling but it is also a great tool for managing your accounts receivable and honestly we use it probably a little bit more for that than anything else but managing your accounts receivable also goes along with forecasting cash flow so they they do still ultimately tie together but the name of the app that we use is dry run and dry run is a great tool and you know it depends on how savvy you are if you or your bookkeeping or accounting team is pretty savvy then this might be something you'd want to consider if this is something that you know you're just doing your own bookkeeping and you're not that comfortable with it to begin with this is probably not an app that you would be implementing into your business at this point unless it's something that you feel you really need and then i would advise just finding a professional or somebody who is a certified dry run provider and have them help you with this so basically what you can see here if we just kind of move down here is there are ways for you to model different scenarios so you can say hey if we made this big purchase how is that going to affect our cash flow or if we increased sales by 3 what does that look like over the course of you know of the future how many months in advance how does that help our cash flow or how do making purchases hurt our cash flow and and those types of things also helps you manage the sales pipeline um so here it'll give you like an action list each week of things that you should be paying attention to so if that's following up on past due invoices from customers it gives you the list of all the ones it helps you you can sort them and categorize them by you know largest amount due or the most like the most past due and different things so you can get this list out of here every week which is like an action list to stay on top of things which is very helpful and then you can even get this cash flow forecast scorecard which is giving you an idea of okay what's in your bank accounts today what recurring expenses are coming up how many days before you run out of cash that's your runway and that's showing seven days here um how much do you have in open invoices how much do you have in open bills hopefully the hopefully you have more in open invoices which is money coming in than you have in open bills but if not you can see that here and you know that you are going to need to take some action so that you have enough cash to be able to cover those bills so dry run is a really great tool for going a little bit more deep into the bookkeeping process or accounting process and really being able to manage your business in a forward-looking manner rather than always in a historical looking manner tool number seven is a payroll benefits and hr management software called gusto now gusto prior to being called gusto they were called zen payroll and their tag line at that time was payroll made delightful or delightful payroll or something like that and before i found them i didn't even offer payroll services because payroll is frankly a pain in the you-know-what and i didn't want to deal with it but then i found zen payroll which is now gusto and it is truly delightful so the nice thing about gusto is that everything is done basically electronically it's an automated payroll process so your employee when you hire somebody you enter in just a few key details they receive an invitation they put all of their onboarding information in there they fill out their employment forms like their w-4 their i9 they put in their direct deposit information all of their personal information that's necessary their social security number all that stuff they're putting that in themselves through an online portal that they set up and they'll they can use that portal from that point on to get onboarding letters to get their pay stubs their w-2s they can log in and change their withholdings at any time all of that stuff and basically you do need to have some payroll knowledge in order to use it because you need to understand the rules and the laws because at the end of the day the burden is on the employer to understand and know what the rules are for payroll and what the laws are regarding payroll so you do need to kind of have a background in payroll processing or you know even if you just as a small business owner take a course through a you know community college or something like that to get the basics down that would be a good idea but other than that gusto pretty much takes care of everything so all you have to really do is go in and if you have hourly employees you would need to go in and enter their hours and it's just a simple you know box that you fill in their hours and then you hit submit payroll and gusto takes it from there they direct deposit everybody's money they um they pay all your payroll taxes they file all your payroll tax returns they process your w2 is at the end of the year and depending on which package you have now that's the basic package but there are more um robust packages that also include services like benefits and even some hr stuff so you know human resources giving you advice and information that you need in order to manage your employees to take care of your employees and make sure that you're following the law and all of that kind of a thing so it's a really great platform i wish i could demonstrate for you how easy it is to run a payroll but unfortunately payroll is pretty sensitive information so i'm not going to be able to do that in this video but if you go and check it out you may be able to just talk to a sales representative have them show you a demo or maybe you can even search around on youtube maybe somebody figured out a way to do it with some sample data or something like that so um highly recommended if you have payroll in your organization and finally the bonus app that brings all of this together and helps me to manage my business so that my business isn't managing me and that is a workflow system the one that i use in particular is called aero workflow and but there are many other ones out there now arrow workflow was written specifically for the accounting industry but that doesn't mean that it can't be used by somebody in any other industry so i definitely wouldn't um knock it for that it's just that if you are in the accounting industry it has a lot of canned procedures um and different things already built into it that really help us just make it that much faster to implement the app into our business but there are many out there there's monday.com there's um asana there's i don't know there's a million of them i could sit here and name a whole bunch but if you just look for task management software or workflow software you'll probably find some very good options out there but the one that we use i really like it so it helps me to manage my entire business and know what's going on at any given point in time i have the tasks of every single person in this organization in this system i have i can group them by user so that i can see exactly what everybody's working on at a glance at any given moment in time i can sort them by due dates start dates gosh only knows by by the client however i want to sort it i can look at any kind of data i want at any point in time on the work that we currently have happening in our organization to make it even better than that it's not just a simple checklist which i could use you know google task list or something like that if i just was looking for a to-do list but it also allows me to create templates of standard operating procedures for every single task we do in the company so that at any given time if somebody is sick or can't be in the office that all i have to do is reassign that task to someone else and all of the instructions are right there in the standard operating procedure it's a checklist they can go right down there's videos that they link to so that they can get further information so every template is saved in here and anytime that i need to create a new template or edit a template i can go in here and make the updates so that everybody has the most up-to-date procedures they're not stuck in a binder somewhere that's been sitting on a shelf for five years and nobody has updated anything i can go in here at any time anytime a change happens which literally is practically weekly and i can go update the procedures so that everybody is always on the same page and it really helps with communication so once they're inside of it of a task then they we can have you know all of the pertinent information that's needed here um the other nice thing about this workflow software is it integrates with quickbooks so if they're working on a task it's actually tracking their time as they're working on that task and then when the task is complete it syncs the time over to quickbooks so that we have all of our timesheets completed just by using this app um we can tell it here you know what are the apps this person needs to use in order to do this particular task and what what area what department is this you know so this is a marketing and sales task so the marketing and sales department has it the data entry department has it the production department has it the finance department they all have access to this system so we're all using the same system with the same information which makes it really nice and easy you can put in there the estimated duration or amount of time that the tasks should take so that you can run reports to see okay they should have this done in an hour why did it take them three doesn't mean that they're necessarily doing something wrong maybe it means that you're not estimating very accurately and you need to adjust your estimating so there are so many benefits to using a software like this in your organization so in addition to um all of that information up there then we have down here the steps that are associated and within those steps we can include action links so if they need to go to a specific app we can put the link in there that will bring them right to the app so that they don't have to go searching for it if there's additional information like maybe another document that gives more specific details we can link to that document if there's a google drive folder that they need to save something to we can link to the google drive folder we can put all that in here and everything is there at the touch of a button and it doesn't show it here but when you're in a specific task doing a specific task so for instance if i just go into the task i'm in right now and scroll to the bottom um then there's additional information down here so you can put notes about the company in here so that no matter what task they're in as long as it's assigned to that company those company notes are going to show up on every single task you'll be able to see any other arrows that uh well they're called arrows in here but an arrow is a task you'll be able to see any other tasks that are associated with this particular company you'll be able to find the company contacts so who are the people that we need to get in touch with if we have a problem you can assign team members to specific companies so that you know you know which team members are assigned to this particular account so that if i have questions i know where to direct the customer so all of that stuff including um time records so let's say i'm working on a task and i don't get a chance to finish it today i can defer the task until the next time i can work on it and it will keep a log of all of the time that was spent on this particular task until i've finally finished it and save and complete the task so i'm not necessarily touting arrow although i do think it's really good and i've tried other task management software and none of them have all of the features that arrow has um they all have bits and pieces but if i could combine them all then i would have arrow so just um that that would be something to consider but if you don't go with arrow i would say any type of a workflow software is a must if you are an entrepreneur who is trying to scale your business you have to have oversight and control of the entire organization and this is a great way to do that i have shared with you my seven favorite bookkeeping tools all my favorite tips including the bonus app that helps me stay in control of my business but if you want to make sure your bookkeeping stays on task with or without these tools download my free bookkeeping schedule linked in the description below if you found this video helpful please don't forget to give it a thumbs up and if you haven't already done so subscribe to the channel comment below which of these tools are you already using or which are you excited to try there is a fly thanks for watching and see you next time

Channel: Prosperity Bookkeeping

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Id: YZe8o4YbOn4

Length: 36min 6sec (2166 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 03 2021