You Do Most of the Bookkeeping Yourself
Staying in touch with your books is good for business.
At Nifty Bookkeeping our bookkeepers have expertise in scaling our services to meet the needs of our clients. We have clients who aren’t interested in data entry but are happy to do other aspects of financial reporting. While others want to do all the data entry, but not the reconciliation of the bank accounts or payroll.
These days many new business owners are tech savvy and understand the software packages enough to enter data by themselves. Unfortunately, the downside to this is most of them have no idea what they are entering or where it needs to be allocated.
A prospective client called us at Nifty Bookkeeping and informed us they had followed the Xero software prompts and had set up a chart of accounts which they’d been entering for nearly 3 months.
We were really impressed that our client had the ingenuity to figure out how to use the software for themselves. Therefore, leaving us with the more simplified task of auditing the file and lodge the BAS each quarter.
Not so…
The software had done an efficient job of setting up the data file and chart of accounts, but due to my client’s complete lack of understanding of bookkeeping there were errors everywhere. While the client knew how to enter data, they didn’t understand the right accounts and fields in which to enter the data.
We removed all the errors and explained where the data needed to be entered, what each screen was used for and how the errors affected the reports. One of our bookkeepers gave them a clear understanding of the transactions which involved their business and how these should be handled with data entry.
The client then told us they were ready to employ someone and needed help to set up the staff member in the system. Realising the Xero software package asked some tricky questions, they made the smart decision this time to get some help, rather than end up with further errors that could affect their business.
We were glad they spoke to us this time before trying to complete the task without adequate training.
Our bookkeepers showed them how to add staff, but they felt it was too important a task to do themselves and preferred us to complete the required tasks. They also felt that paying the staff each fortnight would best be completed by us so we started to regularly process their payroll.
After several months of paying wages for them and lodging BAS returns, they informed me they were having a baby and would feel much better if we were happy to take over the data entry for the time being. Which we were, and so we did.