Part 2: 12 steps to automated bookkeeping
If you want smart, efficient accounting without having to hire someone at a full salary to do it, then you need to consider what a team of modern bookkeepers can do for you. Automated bookkeeping saves you time, money while also streamlining out-of-date processes. Following on from part 1 of the series, we are going to clue you in to 6 more ways you can get the most out of automation. Let’s dive right in with the next feature on the list at number 7, direct debit integration…
7. Direct debit integration
Direct debit integration is convenient if people want to pay from a bank account rather than on credit card. This might arise when employees need to pay from a company bank account rather than with their credit card. GoCardless is a fabulous tool for automating this kind of direct debit. It works simply by sending an invoice in which there is a link that gives you the option of paying by bank account. From there, you simply put in your IBAN number and click yes, and it will be collected by direct debit.
The great thing about this is that now you are automatically set up with a direct debit facility for future invoices. This means that the customer doesn’t have to do transfers to you and you don’t have to set up reminders. On top of this, you are collecting on the due date so you can still give credit. It is made very easy in the GoCardless for Xero app, where it marks the invoices that have been paid and reconciles it with the bank account. This really is a great way to automate the collection of payments and it’s one of the best integrations we’ve seen with Xero.
8. Automated reminders
When customers or clients keep delaying the payment of their invoices, it can start to cause cash flow problems. Automated reminders nip this problem in the bud. Reminders provide the nudge some people need to get going and you can send more than one if they don’t get the hint the first time! For example, the first reminder sent to a client could be very simple, informative and friendly. However, the second and third reminder could be designed to be more persuasive. You can spread them out by the number of weeks you feel is appropriate and you can turn reminders on and off for certain clients. Automated reminders are great for simplifying a process that could be rather tricky to deal with if you have to manually write emails for each individual client every time they are late paying an invoice.
9. Bill entry via email
This neat little feature is going to save you time! It allows you to send bills directly to your accounting system via email. All you have to do is set up an accounts address and forward bills and their attached PDFs to this address, which your bookkeeper also has access to. The benefit of this is that data entry is not necessary! When you go into your accounting system, you’ll find the draft bill and pdf in there and the system has probably already pulled some key information from it. Having these PDFs in your accounting system is very helpful when you are drilling down into your transactions and you’d like to have easy access to the original documents. Now they’re all in the one place.
10. Suggest previous entries
Most cloud systems will remember how transactions were dealt with the last time and if you turn on “Suggest previous entries” you can automate elements of your bookkeeping. This is helpful for accurate inputting of data such as account codes and VAT rates. This feature is only going to improve over time as cloud accounting companies utilise artificial intelligence to build great databases exactly
for this kind of data entry. Eventually, the user won’t need to know nominal codes or VAT rates which makes sense because, after all, these are bookkeeping terms that not every user would or should need to know.
11. Find and recode
This is a term that is used in Xero specifically, but other cloud accounting systems will have something similar. Find and recode allows you to highlight a batch of transactions and apply a change to all of them in one go. This is a brilliant timesaving tool for bookkeepers. Why might this be needed? Let’s say a bookkeeper wants to move all their transactions out of “Travel and Entertainment” and instead put them against their trade show budget. Instead of having to go into each individual transaction to edit them, this automation tool gets rid of all that manual labour. With batch finding and recoding all you have to do choose a criteria to select multiple transactions at once and apply the change to the whole batch. Ultimately, it allows bookkeepers to produce a lot of output in a very short amount of time.
12. Integrated payroll
Most people use a separate payroll system for their accounting. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, not many of the cloud accounting systems available to Ireland integrate with payroll and secondly, many businesses don’t mind this kind of sensitive information being separate from the main accounting function. At Beancounters, we prefer the cloud payroll system, but this separated setup works fine for many businesses.
However, saying that, it is useful if you can enable necessary payroll information to be automatically sent to your accounting system. With this automated bookkeeping feature, it is possible to have details such as the cost of salaries for separate departments or information regarding payment liabilities automatically sent to your accounting system. SimplePay is a payroll integration that we like and during the initial setup, you can configure it so that the appropriate account codes are attributed. The result is that this will be processed every month automatically without any manual labour necessary. Happy days!
A week’s work completed in only a few hours
As you can see, technology is truly changing the face of bookkeeping. Now a week’s work can be condensed into 3 or 4 hours. Automation makes accounting far more efficient than it used to be, but doing it right relies on knowing the right systems, setting them up correctly to begin with and having the appropriate expertise. We are able to put a bookkeeper in touch with a client and they only need a half-day week to cover what a full-time bookkeeper previously would do. This trend is only going to continue, because why spend €30,000 or €40,000 on a bookkeeper when you can pay a fraction of the price?
Ready to level up your accounting by getting a Beancounter on your side? Get in contact with us today for a chat about what we can do for you.
