Here at Bickerstaff & Co, we want to help where we can to make sure you free up your time. As a business owner, you can get bogged down under the administration that comes with running a business. We can help take care of the bookkeeping and accounts, allowing you to free up your time.

Check out our top tips below!

 

Receipt Capture

This is such a great tool to use if you collect a lot of receipts for your business. You can install an app on your smartphone that allows you take take photos of your receipts/invoices. The app will automatically link to your accounting software. Quickbooks have their own version of receipt capture but you can use a third party app (third party apps may incur a fee).

Receipt capture can be useful if you have employees that collect receipts like fuel receipts. You can make sure your employees take pictures of their receipts as they go along. You then don’t have to wait for a pile of receipts to come your way…which will free up your time!

You can also set up an email so that any invoices/receipts coming through your email account can be directly sent on to the accounting software. You wouldn’t have to print them off or manually save them anywhere!

Automatic Bank Feed

We love this feature as it means you can automatically download transactions from your bank account directly into your accounting software.

In most accounting softwares you can set up rules sothat transactions you see regularly in your bank will automatically post to the right place in your software. For example, if you spend regularly on fuel, you can set up a rule to automatically post those transactions to fuel. 

The more rules you have, the more time you can save!

Invoices & Credit Control

If you prepare a lot of quotes for your business, using an accounting software like Quickbooks can help save you time. In Quickbooks, you can turn quotes into invoices and email it to your customer within seconds the them approving the quote.

You can track whether they’ve received and opened your invoice and match up payments received into your bank. You can send reminders and statements at the press of a button, meaning you’re in control of who owes you money.

You can also link up your invoices with direct debit software. This means you can automatically collect payment on recurring invoices with out any input from yourself. It can link up to Paypal to enable you to collect card payments too. All these little processes can help free up your time!

Additional charges do apply to these extra services but if they save you time and money and ensure you’re paid on time you may consider it to be worth it.

Processes/Procedures – Bookkeeping

 

There are many simple processes you can implement in your business that would save you hours worth of time but you might not have thought about it.

Any process which can be automated and reduce manual input will be less subject to errors and will be more efficient.

For instance, if you spend hours working out what materials you have bought that need to be billed to different customers, you can use accounting software like Quickbooks to keep track of your bookkeeping. You’ll be able to pull off a report which automatically tracks what you have spent and can give you a detailed breakdown of the invoices.

You might spend hours entering staff time sheets into spreadsheets. In Quickbooks you can get your staff to download an app which lets them enter their own timesheets. You then just need to review the timesheets.

You can also allocate those hours to the job they were working on so you can see how much staff time has been incurred per job. 

Payroll & HR

Many of the new payroll software options enable your staff payslips to be sent out directly from the software once you have approved them. This means you no longer have to spend time saving pdfs and emailing them to your staff.

Using your accounting software to run your own payroll will mean you can report to HMRC and post the wages reports into your accounts within minutes. This will ensure your accounting records are always up to date.

We use a system that enables us to do all of the above but in addition we can create an online dashboard for our payroll clients. This will enable them to approve and manage their staff holiday calendar and keep copies of staff contracts and staff handbooks for the staff to be able to view.

Many of our clients still manage their staff holiday using spreadsheets and rely on email or verbal approval to monitor leave.

This dashboard makes it possible to manage this more efficiently and professionally. By allowing staff to login and view how much holiday they have remaining it saves all the hassle of trying to work out how much holiday they are still able to take.

Time and overhead expenses are two of your biggest enemies as a business owner. So, it’s always worth seeking new innovative ways to save your business time and money anywhere you can. Ultimately, to free up your time and give you peace of mind that your business is running smoothly.

If you like these ideas but would prefer some help, we can help perform any of these functions on your behalf or we can help to implement them in your business.

Give us a call or send us an email and we can chat through the best way to get you started.