I’m hoping for some advice about streamlining my bookkeeping for my small biz.
I have a small healthcare biz (sole prop) that also sells retail products. We charge people after their appointment (so no receivables) and have 2 part-time employees. We use Quickbooks Desktop for everything - invoices, payments and payroll, and it has basically been our hub of our business since 2003.
It’s a stable and highly repetitive business.
Our revenue is almost all credit card payments using Quickbooks, plus a few checks/cash deposited 2x a month. Except rent, virtually all our expenses are put on 2 credit cards from the same vendors, maybe 80-100 transactions per month. We write only about 10 checks a year and have no debt or depreciating assets either. Simple.
For the last 10 years, we’ve used a CPA. I send him the accountant's copy along with the bank & credit card statements. He has a bookkeeper enter the bank and credit card info manually and reconciles the books for $400 month, $4800/year. We do it quarterly now, but I’d like to do it even less often because it has no bearing on the day-to-day activities of the business.
Since the business is very stable and the accounting highly repetitive, it seems like an ideal business to use bank and credit card feeds or exported data to streamline the accounting function. It’s my understanding that feeds start classifying known vendors/expenses, leaving me with maybe 3-5 expenses a month that need classification and a simple reconciliation.
If implemented properly it seems to me that I could cut down on $4800 in bookkeeping expenses with feeds. My CPA has not been very helpful. He’s a solid CPA, but kind of old school, and I'm sure not excited at the prospect of feeds cutting down on his billable hours. Frankly, I don’t even need to use a CPA because the biz is a sole prop and might be fine with a good bookkeeper.
In addition to saving $, I just want to streamline the process. Like every other biz, the time I spend on accounting and bookkeeping is time I don’t spend on new services and promotion.
Appreciate any suggestions on how I should streamline things. Thank you!
