Reviewing your processes every couple of years may be key to saving you time!

AUTHOR:

“Why am I doing it this way?” a client wondered when we met to review her business’s bookkeeping and accounting process.

Times have changed, but she had stayed with a tried-and-true bookkeeping method she had learned 13 years before when she had started her business. She was doing a Daily Sales Balancing entry in Excel from information printed out on her cash register tape. She thought “why fix what isn’t broken”?

Time – that’s one reason.

Updating Bookkeeping Saves Time and Money

Updating your office’s Bookkeeping/Accounting processes can save you a lot of time.  With the ever-changing automation in the accounting world, it’s important to be continuously reviewing your processes and seeing where tweaks can be made. 

Let’s walk through the rest of this client scenario.

We opened the Excel file that she uses to do this daily sales entry and examined the tasks and the time they took.

• She manually keys in 20 numbers onto the formulated chart;
•  She then goes into her accounting software, where she keys in the summary of the information – which is another 10 lines of data entry.  This data entry takes 5 minutes per day.

Let’s do the math: 

At five minutes a day for six days a week, the weekly cost in time is 30 minutes – for entering data.

Over 52 weeks, that equals 26 hours per year!

Add to this the time my client and her staff spend each day just using the cash register.

Make the time you spend to enter data count!

I suggested an online Point of Sale System that she and her team could use as their cash register.  A Point of Sale System that talked to her online accounting software would eliminate the need for her to ‘re-enter’ all the sales into her accounting software. Add yet more time to the savings, as we end duplication!

The timing of this suggestion couldn’t have been better for my client. Her cash register needed to be replaced – a capital cost – and she also wanted to track what her customers were ordering regularly so she could better manage her 500-item stock.

We recommended a point-of-sale (POS) system that integrates with QuickBooks Online – which eliminated the time-consuming process of entering daily sales into a cash register, then onto an Excel spreadsheet and then into desktop accounting software.

We set up the system to ensure the POS could communicate with the online accounting software and conducted staff training.

The bottom line?

We saved our client 30 minutes each week as we wiped out the need to enter and re-enter sales! The accounting process update gave the client real-time sales totals to analyze so she could meet goals and quotas, better manage her inventory and boost sales.

It was an investment that will save time and money, increase her ability to respond to customer demands and boost her bottom line! 

At Mason Miller, we stay on top of developments in bookkeeping, small business accounting and best practices in management. We help you get your finances organized and help you keep them organized so you can focus on satisfying your customers and growing your business in Barrie and area. Need help? Contact us today!