Services

We are Quickbooks Online Pro Advisors, and we partner with Intuit to bring the service to our customers at competitive pricing with a few added extras. If you are thinking about signing up to a cloud accounting software then we would recommend Quickbooks Online, as desktop software it was one of the most user friendly for non accountants, they have delivered this into their cloud offering Quickbooks Online, there are several levels that you can subscribe too, we tend to sign everyone up to Plus version of the software as we can tailor the software for anyone then, and if you grow in the future or need extra customisation it is already available to you.

The first thing that you are able to do within Quickbooks is send Sales Invoices to your customers via email from within the program, it is also possible to link your online bank account to Quickbooks Online which saves a great deal of time entering bank transactions and reconciling the bank. Quickbooks is intelligent, it looks at your downloaded data and compares it to information you already have in the system, if it sees a payment received that matches an outstanding invoice it asks you to confirm that is the case and enters the payment. Now just consider this on all income and payments, that’s how many seconds saved per transaction compared to your current routine? Add those seconds up and you will soon find you have more time to concentrate on other things.

We will sign every customer up to Receipt Bank the cost is included in all subscription levels, we may have to adjust the Bookkeeping and Start Up pricing depending on the number of uploads and scans required.

You do not have to use Receipt Bank but we think when you start you will wonder how you ever lived without it or apps like it. There are three ways you can get Purchase Invoices into Receipt Bank, scan, picture from smartphone or email to a specific address. Once received into Receipt Bank the system plucks various parts of the data from the Invoice like Supplier Name, Date, Net Amount, VAT and Invoice Number. About the only thing it doesn’t do is predict the code where you want to post the invoice, but once you have allocated a supplier to a Account code it will continue to allocate to the same place the next time an Invoice arrives from that supplier. Then when you really start to trust the system you will choose to auto publish from suppliers which the bills are always the same categories and VAT codes (Accountants, Telephone, Electricity etc), once turned on the bills will automatically sync to your accounting application with no intervention.

It is at times very surprising, we even scan hand written invoices and are amazed at how well the information is picked out by the software.

It may have already become clear but we are big fans of cloud apps and their ability to make life easier for all. That’s why with all our packages Management Accounts are thrown in, we tailor the accounts for your purposes having consulted you on setup and understood your historic data and company trading circumstances. Basic Management Accounts are sent to you once a month from the information recorded on QBO, made an error, forgot to include a transaction, no problem just let us know when you have corrected and we will run the figures for you again.

On top of basic Management Accounts we recommend you take use of the ability to split transactions by Class or Location, giving far more information into the Management Accounts as you can assess the profitability of various parts of your business, for example we split our Income and Costs between various types of work “Compliance” (Year ends etc), “Cloud Accounting”, “On Site Consultancy” etc. If you run a retail operation with five shops you can easily run reports of the Profit and Loss by each Location. Never before have businesses had the ability to have so much good data at your fingertips without the need to employ a Financial Controller or maintaining vast Excel Spreadsheets.

When was the last time you sat down and reviewed your business against the business plan? Do you even have a Business Plan? We use an app called Live Plan, again we get preferential pricing so we can pass that saving on to you. The app allows you to write a very specific business plan whilst guiding you through the written sections with helpful prompts.

Once the written part is out of the way it is on to the numbers, this is where we come in. Once we have transferred your historic data into QBO we can pull that information in to Live Plan and use it to produce forecasts for years ahead based on what you have written in your plan.

When complete the Business Plan can be distributed to relevant parties, like the banks or potential investors into your business. We recommend doing one even if you are not looking for finance as it allows you to set a solid platform on which to base future business decisions.

The system continually looks at your QBO data and pulls in updates so that you can always go in and see how you are doing against forecasts.

Another third party app that gives generous discount prices to Accountants is Fathom, their app is very much focussed on KPI’s, mainly financial ones but there is also the ability to add in a variety of non financial KPI’s like performance targets for staff, or conversion rates for sales etc etc. If you can collate the numbers Fathom can provide a very good looking summary of your data.

It is also possible to put your budgets and forecasts into Fathom so that it can produce very comprehensive and graphical financial reports. In addition to that it has a very user friendly interface which allows you to perform goal seeking scenarios, play with your breakeven points, and many more.

Every step of the way Fathom tells you what you are looking at and why it is good or bad that you are in your current position. We find it to be a very good visual tool for non accountants to use to understand their business, it also provides great motivation when you can see that a 2% increase in sales will deliver £x increase to your bottom line.

In our time working within the QBO environment we have used many different apps, need more comprehensive Stock control, Dear Inventory could be the tool you are looking for, require a scheduling app for a service business such as plumbing, cleaning or electricians, then have a look at Jobber or perhaps ServiceM8.

Building company looking to have a all in one solution for estimating, quoting and project management, BuilderTrend could be the solution you are looking for.

The apps available are plentiful, and come with a variety of options for pricing and integration, find an app you like, link it to QBO and you are connected, we are keen to work with new apps and your sign up gives us an excuse to investigate them further.

We work with a variety of clients and they all have very different systems and levels of complexities. We know that not all businesses can be accounted for using straight forward Sales Invoices and Purchase Invoices, perhaps you run a retail business with a back office system that exports data normally for import to Sage, well that doesn’t mean you have to avoid moving to the cloud. We have recently worked with SAASAnt an app that allows uploading transactions from Excel to QBO, there is a template for every type of transaction in QBO, if you have data exported from your back office, we can find a way to import it into the cloud.

Think there is no way to work with your business in the cloud, talk to us you may be pleasantly surprised.