Save time and $$$ - Record your financial affairs effectively!

The size of your business is not the only factor determining how much time your Accountant or Bookkeeper will spend on your taxation and bookkeeping affairs. There are a few simple things that you could do to save time and costs.

Bank Feeds

• Get bank feeds straight into your bookkeeping software. After spending time to set it up correctly, your future bookkeeping processes will be faster. 
• Create reconciliation rules in your software so common transactions can be reconciled with one click of the mouse. It might take a minute to create a rule, but it will save many minutes in the future. 

Automate 

• Snap a photo of your dockets and bills and upload them directly into your software. Applications such as Receipt Bank, Hubdoc, Auto-Entry and others will even read the uploaded bills and fill in the data fields in your bookkeeping software for you. If you have more than an hour of accountants payable data entry per week this is worth setting up. 

Reconcile 

• Reconcile the clearing accounts in your software at 30 June to find problems. Wages payable, undeposited funds, electronic clearing accounts, payroll deductions and reimbursement accounts should all clear out to zero at 30 June. Identify any transactions that have not cleared and trace them back to find out why. If you don't, your Bookkeeper or Accountant will need to. 
• Reconcile bank accounts, loans and credit cards to their statement balance at 30 June. Have a look into any transactions that remain unreconciled and find out why. They might be sitting in the wrong account or might have been entered twice. 
• Reconcile your payroll reports to your general ledger reports (Balance Sheet and Profit & Loss). The gross wages amount needs to be the same in all reports. This should also match the gross wages declared on Activity Statements and the Payment Summaries or Single Touch Payroll final report. 

Review debtors and creditors 

• Make sure Accounts Payable (bills to pay) and Accounts Receivable (outstanding invoices) are listed accurately in your bookkeeping software. Create and apply credit notes if needed. 

File at first touch 

• Let separation do the job for you. Put documents straight into separate folders\piles\envelopes the first time you touch them, to be clearly labelled and filed away when the month or project is complete. Ten minutes of tidying and filing everything away each week can save your bookkeeper or accountants hours. 
• File your emails too! Keep separate email folders for bank statements, insurance, superannuation and anything else that your accountant will need. 

Teamwork 

• Everyone needs to be clear about what needs to be done, by when and by whom. Accurate bookkeeping depends on consistency, so if there are multiple bookkeepers, they will need to follow the same procedures and leave clear trails of what has been done. Use colour, stamps, dates and initials if possible.
• Jobs and schedules can be hard to manage. We've heard good things about shared calendar apps such as Monday.com or Trello.

Deadlines 

• Bookkeepers and accountants work with deadlines in systems that are not flexible, so if information is received late we sometimes need to re-do the whole job. 
• This is especially important for superannuation payments. If employee super is not paid before the 28th day after the quarter, both bookkeepers and accountants have extra work to do. 
• This is also important wth the ATO payments plans. Making a scheduled payment even just one day late requires a whole new payment plan to be negotiated. 

Leave the past alone 

• Changing transactions after a tax return or a BAS lodgement can cause a lot of problems and the whole return may need to be recalculated and lodged again. If you find a mistake or something missed in a prior period, ask your bookkeeper or accountant how and when to fix it. 

Less emails, more information

• Answer all your accountant's queries at the same time if you can. When accountants received fragmented information it takes longer to compile that information, file it and use it. 
• Read the queries thoroughly to make sure you're providing the right documents. 
• If a two-way conversation is needed, it might be quicker to pick up the phone instead.

Accountants and Bookkeepers really enjoy working with tidy files and this can help you to feel good about your bookkeeper systems too! Call the team at The Money Edge if you would like customised advice. 

The Money Edge | Bundaberg