How To Use A Virtual Bookkeeper And Quickbooks To Automate Your Small Business

There are many benefits that come from automating manual processes, such as the bookkeeping needs of your small business. Making the switch to automation saves time, eliminates human error and reduces cost. In addition, outsourcing your bookkeeping processes to professionals like Remote Quality Bookkeeping will give you peace of mind and allow you to focus on driving business growth.

Here are five ways to automate your small business bookkeeping needs:

INTEGRATING ONLINE BANKING

Thanks to online banking services, you can connect your bank accounts with your accounting software to gain access to updated data, track your expenses for tax purposes and pay your vendors. If you are using QuickBooks Online (QBO), it will download the last 90 days of transactions when you first sync your bank account. Thereafter, the software will automatically run your financial transactions each night.

RELATED: QuickBooks Desktop or Online: Which is the Best Fit for Your Business?

However, weekly and monthly bank reconciliations are still required so that you can compare the transactions recorded in QBO with those processed through your bank. At Remote Quality Bookkeeping, our banking specialists will update all of your bank accounts and credit cards in QuickBooks once per week as part of our bookkeeping services. These weekly cash reconciliations ensure that all reports will be accurate and up-to-date. This will help you to make informed business decisions.

At the end of each month, our banking specialists will also reconcile all accounts and send you an email with any questions regarding income and expenditures from the past month.

INVOICING CUSTOMERS

Printing and mailing out physical invoices to your customers is a time-consuming process. And of course, the slower you invoice clients, the longer it will take for you to to get paid. QuickBooks allows you to automatically create and send invoices to your clients saving you time and helping you to improve your cash flow management. The software also provides the ability to keep track of outstanding invoices so you can have real-time visibility when it comes to your accounts receivable.

RELATED: Understanding Cash Flow Management

PAYING VENDORS

If you have a supplier or a vendor you need to pay on a regular basis, you can save time by creating an automatic recurring payment reminder in QuickBooks Desktop. The software allows you to schedule monthly, weekly or daily reminders for payments. Based on the alert option you selected, you will either receive a reminder to create the check or print it when the next billing cycle is due.

QuickBooks Desktop also allows you to set up an automatic payment by selecting “Autopayment” or “Epay”. The best part of this feature is that you will not need to print and mail physical checks to settle your accounts payables. Everything will be done seamlessly for you within the software.

REPORTING NEEDS

Most small business owners don’t have the time to pore over detailed financial reports. Furthermore, it can be very intimidating to sift through lots of data to find the key numbers you need in order to conduct financial analysis. Remote Quality Bookkeeping can help you by customizing a dashboard for Quickbooks that provides you with financial snapshots of the most vital aspects of your business. The best part is that we can automate delivery to your email or smartphone app at periodic intervals that you select.

DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT

If you have trouble finding documents once they have been filed away then you should consider using a document management software such as Laserfiche. This platform assists you in organizing, managing, sharing and searching for documents securely and cost effectively. Overall, you can increase the productivity of your business and thus your bottom line.

All you have to do is scan your documents into Laserfiche and the rest is easy. Once the documents are imported into the program they are OCRed, which means the document is converted into an image that is not only editable but also searchable.

This data is then securely stored in your Laserfiche repository and on Remote Quality Bookkeeping’s secure servers, ensuring that you never lose a document again. Our Laserfiche Document Management software has rigorous security measures preventing unauthorized access to your information. Furthermore, you can also create audit trails so you can maintain a close eye on who accesses any documentation.

Using Laserfiche along with our bookkeeping services provides a seamless solution to easily find documents crucial for daily bookkeeping tasks and day‐to‐day operations. This automated workflow helps to keep everyone on the same page reducing the need to ask too many questions back and forth.

NEXT STEP: FOCUS ON SCALING YOUR BUSINESS

As you can tell, there are many ways to automate your small business bookkeeping needs to improve efficiency and positively impact your bottom line. You can start to implement some of these on your own. However, as your business grows, the services of an outsourced bookkeeping company can prove to be beneficial to the overall efficiency and success of your organization.

You see, bookkeeping companies have access to state-of-the-art technology and likely have the more robust and efficient versions of the accounting software that you or your in-house bookkeeper currently use.

Furthermore, outsourcing your bookkeeping needs transfers critical back office tasks to a team of experts, freeing up your time to focus on value-added activities such as building better client relationships, exploring new partnerships and expanding your business.

Choosing an outsourced bookkeeper like Remote Quality Bookkeeping is also a cost-effective option because we allow you to easily customize the scope of work required and tailor solutions to fit your budget. Leveraging our scalability means you get to save the time, cost and hassle of adding in-house personnel. In turn, you can use the additional time and money to gain a competitive edge and scale your own business seamlessly.

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