If you’re a business owner, you’re rarely left twiddling your thumbs, even when business is slow. There’s always something you could do, whether that’s organizing inventory or processing invoices. But you didn’t start your business so you could get lost in spreadsheets all day (ok, well, maybe some of us did). Your time is best spent doing what you do best.
So, how can you reduce the time you spend on those less-than-riveting tasks? Here are some of our favorite solutions.
For your accounting tasks…
Coding expenses, reconciling and adjusting your books, creating invoices—these are just a few of the accounting tasks that can take up a lot of time. Intuit’s QuickBooks Online, or QBO, can often be an ideal automated solution.
After linking QBO with your bank account, you can easily keep your books up to date. You’re able to set up recurring automatic entries as well as recurring invoices and bills. Plus, you can quickly log in from any mobile device, allowing you to take care of these tasks from anywhere. You can even add on other third-party apps to customize the accounting system for your business.
For your accounts payable process…
The accounts payable process can be a cumbersome manual process. Often, vendors send invoices by mail or email, making the routing of invoices for approval complicated and inconsistent. And then there’s the hassle of cutting and mailing the checks!
Using Bill.com, a cloud-based system that integrates with QBO, can help you streamline your accounts payable process. All your vendor and expense account information from QBO syncs to Bill.com. Bill.com remembers past transactions to make coding vendor invoices quick and easy. Bills are automatically pushed out to designated approvers for approval and once the bills are approved it just takes a few clicks to schedule and send payment out to your vendors. Bill.com takes care of processing the online payment or mailing a check to your vendor.
The result: No more late payments to vendors—and no more pulling out your hair over accounts payable.
For your payroll processing…
Payroll can be a headache for any company, and especially for small business owners who are just getting up and running. Calculating withholdings, submitting taxes, and setting up benefit deductions and direct deposit can be overwhelming! Thankfully, there are lots of payroll providers that offer a great service.
QBO can be an efficient payroll processing solution for small businesses. This payroll service includes direct deposit, as well as an employee module that allows employees to log in to view paystubs or update their information. Best of all, it takes care of processing and filing your quarterly payroll tax returns and mailing Form W-2s to your employees.
QuickBooks Time is another system that is integrated with QBO and QBO Payroll, used for time tracking. If you have hourly employees or a need to have your employees record their time to specific clients or projects QuickBooks Time is a tool you can use. Using QuickBooks Time improves accuracy with time recording, reduces the risk of mistakes, which could increase your revenues.
For timely reporting…
Sure, you might have a feel for how things are going in your business, but you need to see the numbers to know for certain. Once again, QBO gives you an easy way to access this information in real time. You simply log in to QBO and pull up a report—you don’t have to wait for your accountant to provide it for you.
Build the right efficiencies into your business.
True, the solutions we mentioned here can save time, but they can also take time to set up. Plus, it’s important to make sure any solution will work well within your business. We’ve said a lot about QBO, but it is not ideal for everyone.
The good news is our advisors can work with you to determine your needs and then find and implement the right solution for you. There are numerous third-party apps that can work with QBO to meet different accounting needs; we can help you pick and choose ones that will work for you. (Most apps offer a two-week trial, so you can test drive it before committing to a monthly payment.)
If you’d like to explore how you could save time on (and stop putting off) certain tasks within your business, contact your Froehling representative or Morgan Jahn, CPA to get started.
Based on the August 2022 Froehling Anderson Coffee Break Webinar. Catch the full webinar here.
