Computerising a Manual Office
Taking your business from a by-gone era into this one.
Working as bookkeepers for so many years we’ve seen business technologies advance so far that we believed gone were the times where businesses used a typewriter. An icon of an earlier era where Debtors were allocated a card system and Creditors placed in lovely neat piles on the floor to match the statements that came in at the end of a month. Debtor statements were then manually typed up at the end of a month and sent out by post, usually resulting in Debtors being 4 months behind.
Or so we thought…
We met with a client who was running her extremely high turnover business exactly like this. She knew nothing else, she wasn’t old, but this is how she started when she was 15 years old and had continued the process through to her late 30’s. Now for an office where the turnover of 100+ invoices a day is required, this process is simply impractical. She would spend 18 hours a day, working through lunch, working on weekends and having no family time. Her health had suffered on several occasions and the business almost failed, except she had continued to work whilst in hospital. Seems hard to believe but this is a true story.
During her initial consultation with Nifty Bookkeeping, she informed us that she was in recovery from a second stroke and didn’t think her body could survive a third. This had resulted in her reaching out to us for help relieving this massive workload. After only a couple of minutes, we’d informed our client that we could reduce her workday by more than half and that, in that workday, she could increase her productivity. She did not believe what we were saying initially and laughed, as well as swore a little before telling us we were dreaming.
We established a manual process for her and introduced her to a computer, a software package that was easy to learn, email and a printer/scanner. At first, she liked the idea of simply using MS Word for invoicing but once I set the software up and she saw just how simple it was to use, she started typing straight away. She asked about the Debtor cards and at what point she would commence entering the info onto them, so she could start typing up the statements. We then showed her the Accounts Receivable report and printed a couple of Debtor statements, which only took a few minutes and she was in shock at how easy it was.
At this point we asked if she believed we could reduce her workday by more than half and if she could see the potential for growth. She laughed with excitement and relief and couldn’t wait to get started. We assisted in getting the current manual information into the system and maintained the Creditors side of things for about a year.
It was at this point that she had more than tripled her turnover and had employed a number of staff.
I suggested she employ an accounts person as it would be more financially viable. We continued to lodge BAS returns and consult with the accountant, until the accounts person was trained enough to take it over.
Seeing the transition was phenomenal. Eighteen months after we set her up, she got married and had a baby, things she previously wouldn’t have had time to do.