In House / Remote Bookkeeping
Remote
bookkeeping is an
increasingly popular option due to the convenience it provides. This means you
don’t have to worry about providing extra space for us because we access your
computer and QuickBooks file remotely. We can set up our Gotomypc
account on your computer allowing us access to your QuickBooks file. This way,
it’s there all the time for you to access and review, and we can access it any
time as well. You can give us read only access to your online banking and
online credit card accounts so we can download and reconcile your accounts. Our
bookkeeper will then upload a copy of your QuickBooks file for me to review. We
can also update your cash flow projections with minimal intervention on your
part. We simply e-mail you monthly
reports and if/when necessary, we set an appointment to review your QuickBooks
file and cash flow projection, which
is an Excel document that includes your balance sheet, profit & loss, and a
simplified version of a statement of cash flows. We’ll use this to reconcile your books from
net income to cash. The cash flow projection is modeled on your
QuickBooks chart of accounts and makes it very easy to update and analyze. Each
month when we update the projection, we adjust for any changes to your chart of
accounts before dropping your updated Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet into
the Excel template. Then it’s ready to be analyzed for any changes needed to
the financial projections going forward.
If you are a smaller
business, we can maintain your QuickBooks company file entirely in house. This means that every month or every
week (whichever works best for you), just mail or e-mail us your bank
statements, credit card statements and other paperwork, and we’ll enter your
transactions into QuickBooks and provide you with reporting as needed or requested,
or based on a pre-defined system we discuss in advance. We can prepare your
checks and then send them back to you for you to sign and send out.
The next level of service
is business management. This is where
we handle everything, from receiving your mail and entering your transactions
into QuickBooks to actually paying your bills for you. This requires you to
either give us signed checks in advance or to make me a signer on your account
so I can write the checks for you. Beyond that we would once again set up a
system of monthly reports ahead of time that we would provide and review with
you.
This is a great option for
those who really want to focus on running and growing their business while
leaving the QuickBooks work completely outsourced to someone who knows their
business well. This is also a great choice because when the time comes, you can
easily transition to take over your own QuickBooks file with one of our
bookkeepers managing it for you remotely. As you grow, we can get you from
where you are now to hiring your own full time bookkeeper. Even then, you can
still take advantage of the bookkeeping support services we offer.
It’s important that your
bookkeeper has knowledge of both QuickBooks & Accounting. Many people know
how to record a check, enter a bill, or create an invoice and a payment on that
invoice. These are the basics. The trick is in understanding the choices
available in terms of how to account for these transactions in QuickBooks in a
way which enables you and the end user of your financial statements to
understand these transactions. It is critical as a business owner that you are
able to understand what the financial statements describe about the results of
operations of your business such that you can make important decisions based on
this information. As an example I can book a payroll transaction at the net
amount, and book the entire tax payment as payroll tax expense. This nets out the same, but does not
represent the proper classification of expenses. Gross payroll is understated because payroll
expense was not shown at the proper gross amount with taxes & withholdings
deducted. Payroll taxes are overstated because that tax payment includes
essentially 2 components; 1) your employer taxes and 2) the remittance of what
was withheld from the employees’ paychecks – hardly an expense at all. I have found this mistake on almost every set
of books I have ever taken over from a previous bookkeeper. Check your books or call us to have us check
them for you. The other issue here is that when we run a profit and loss
statement in QuickBooks you will not see the “real” picture in terms of what
your payroll expense is. Our bookkeepers know how to post these transactions
correctly so that when we analyze your financial information we are able to
make informed decisions about the financial position of your company based on
accurate information. Finally having this booked correctly from the beginning
will also save you money because when you turn your books over to your CPA or
tax preparer, they will (or should) want to see the W3 information and they are
looking to tie the total payroll per the books to the total per the reports. If
this does not tie you will be paying them for extra time to make the necessary
entries to correct this. They will only
post those entries as of Dec 31 in the aggregate, which means that your books
will be correct when you look at the entire year, but if I run reports in
QuickBooks designed to look at any interim period the books will still not show
accurate information, and you will have paid more for that!
Our
bookkeeping service will save you money
because things will be done correctly the first time. When your CPA gets a set
of books or a QuickBooks file that was prepared by us, they will need to post
the usual depreciation and amortization entries and perhaps some other simple
re-classifications based on how they want to report things for tax purposes.
This way you are only paying them for tax prep work and not bookkeeping.