Small business owners shouldn’t have to struggle to keep their cash flow organized. Many either struggle to manage their books themselves using software like Quick Books, or bring in a bookkeeper. Using various services, small business owners can easily automate a lot of the day to day bookkeeping hassle that comes with running a business. Let’s look at some of the hottest tools that are available to making your bookkeeping as quick and easy as possible.
Outright
Outright helps you keep track of your income and expenses. At face value, it’s quite simple. Type in every payment you receive and every expense you incur. It uses this information to help you prepare your tax paperwork, as well as generate you a wide variety of reports to show you where your company stands financially.
Outright can streamline the process of working with contractors, which many small business owners do. With the click of a button, you can request your contractor to complete an electronic version of a W9 for your records. When tax time comes, it will automatically prepare each contractor their own 1099. Additionally, if you would like to e-File your copy of the 1099’s, you can do so from Outright for just $5 each.
Taking advantage of the “bookkeeper access” feature will allow you to grant your accountant or bookkeeper access to your information. You remain in full control of who has access to what.
At the surface, these features seem very basic compared to QuickBooks. The huge benefit is that all your data is accessible from anywhere and can be easily shared. At the same time, you can rest assured that it’s secure on the Outright server.
Like what you see so far? It’s just the beginning. Most of the income and expense entries can be imported from other sources. These include:
- Online Credit Card Statements
- Online Banking Statements
- PayPal
- eBay
- Invoices (from FreshBooks)
- Receipts (from ShoeBoxed)
- Mobile Expenses (from Xpenser)
- Existing Data (from a CSV file)
The real power of Outright comes into play when you begin using some of the tools listed above to help you manage other facets of your bookkeeping, then import them into Outright. Check out the Outright Website and if you like what you see, sign up.Remember, it’s free so you have nothing to lose.
Let’s look at how some of these other components work.
Invoicing with Fresh Books
Pricing: Manage up to 3 clients for free, then pricing starts at $19.95 per month.
Fresh Books makes invoicing painless. Signing up with Fresh Books allows you to send and manage all of your invoices online. Let’s look at how easy a typical work flow is:
- A new client is interested in your service. They explain what they want done and request an estimate.
- You compile an estimate for them and send it to them with one click.
- Upon review, the client can accept the estimate, giving you the go ahead to start the job.
- Once completed, you simply locate the estimate and convert it to an invoice with another click. Of course, you are able to make adjustments if you need to.
- Your client is advised of your payment terms and as long as you have PayPal enabled, is able to pay you instantly.
The brilliance behind this is how fast and efficient the entire process is. When you send the invoices via email and accept payments via PayPal, the whole process can take a few seconds. Small business owners know that time is money.
A similar process is available in QuickBooks, but it requires elaborate configuration to run smoothly. Additionally, it is only accessible from the computer where QuickBooks is installed. Using Fresh Books lets you send and manage your invoices from any internet enabled computer or smart phone.
Fresh Books automatically updates itself when payments are made and generates the client an invoice marked “PAID” for their records. In the event that a client does not pay within the terms you set, they will be sent reminders automatically. If they still fail to pay, Fresh Books can automatically add a late fee based on your specifications.
While QuickBooks has the ability to manage these things, most need to be done by hand. Fresh Books will save you precious minutes with each payment that you don’t have to enter manually. While it may not seem like a lot, they do add up. Determine how long it takes you to input each payment. When you determine how many payments you manually input a month, you can clearly determine how much time this alone will save you. Chances are, if you spend a total of only 30 minutes a month entering payments by hand, Fresh Books has paid for itself, and then some.
There are some more benefits of Fresh Books that should not go overlooked. One is how easy it makes the process for your clients. Demonstrating a concern for your customers time by making it fast, and intuitive to pay you will not go unnoticed. Second, by managing all of your invoicing online, you are saving money on postage and envelopes as well as all of the time associated with paper billing. If you have a client that prefers to receive a paper invoice, you can send them one with one click from Fresh Books for a very reasonable cost. Finally, due to the tremendous amount of paper you save by not sending physical invoices, you are demonstrating concern for the environment. Let’s face it, every little bit counts 
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Visit the Fresh Books Website and look over what they have to offer. You can also, sign up very quickly. They offer a free plan which will let you manage your first 3 clients without paying a dime. After that, it’s only $19.95 per month to invoice up to 25 clients. If you need more than that, they offer a package for $29.95 that includes unlimited clients.
Once you have your work flow established in Fresh Books, it is only a matter of clicks to import your invoices into Outright.
Accept Instant Online Payments with PayPal
Don’t you hate waiting for checks to come from clients? Most small business owners would be able to dramatically increase their cash flow if they were able to receive payments faster. That’s where PayPal comes in. Singing up is quick, and you can be accepting payments in a matter of minutes. PayPal allows your clients to pay you from their credit card, bank account, or existing PayPal balance. When you integrate PayPal payments with your Fresh Books invoices, you give your clients the chance to pay you instantly with just a few clicks.
It’s completely free and easy to sign up. Once you do, you will pay a nominal fee on each transaction that they process. It’s often very worth it since it can really help your cashflow. Integration with Fresh Books is a cinch, and you can even import your transaction log into Outright.
No other payment solution is this easy to sign up for and use. If you are not already working with PayPal, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to get paid faster.
Additional information about how PayPal works is available on their site
Manage Receipts and Expenses with Shoeboxed
When you make a business related purchase, what do you do with the receipt? Many small business owners keep them in a pile (or a shoe box) to either enter later, or have their book keeper log. Once they’re entered, you’re still required to save the receipts in case anything comes into question with the IRS. This leads to a lot of paper being retained, and a lot of effort being wasted entering the expenses. Enter Shoeboxed.
Shoeboxed’s mantra is simple. They want to help you “focus on business, not paperwork.” They do this by letting you mail in all of your receipts for them to process. Here’s how it works:
- Sign up for a paid plan, starting at only $9.95 per month or for $99.95 a year.
- Each month, gather your receipts and send them through the mail to Shoeboxed. (You can also use your mobile phone to take a picture and submit the receipts via email.)
- Shoeboxed receives your receipts and scans images of them into your account for your records.
- They will also retrieve all of the data off the receipts and record all of the expenses in your account in an easy to manage format.
That’s it! Drop your receipts for the month in the mail and let them worry about the data entry. From your account, you can export the data in any format you need. It can generate expense reports in PDF, Excel, CSV, QuickBooks or Quicken formats. Even better, you can import your Shoeboxed expenses into Outright with just a couple clicks.
The benefits of Shoeboxed are outrageous. Since you have scanned copies of all the receipts, you don’t need to retain the paper copies. The IRS will accept an exact scan that Shoeboxed creates. At the same time, you never need to worry about the time consuming task of entering all of your expenses by hand. Shoeboxed will enter up to 50 receipts a month for just $9.95. Consider how long it would take you to enter 50 receipts by hand, or how much you would have to pay a book keeper to do it for you. If you save just two hours a month, that is two more hours that you are able to complete billable work for your clients. Get more information, or sign up on their site.
Record Your Expenses on the Go With Xpenser
Xpenser is a free, simple to use service that will help you keep track of your expenses in real time. What makes Xpenser so easy is that you can submit expenses form a wide variety of real time communication platforms such at email, instant message, twitter and an iPhone app. As soon as you incur an expense, shoot Xpenser a message with simple details about the transaction and it will be logged. It’s that easy. You can even attach a scan of the receipt. Check them out atXpenser.com
The Numbers
The savings here are unbelievable and really a no-brainer. Let’s look at what this whole automated setup will cost you:
Outright: Free
Fresh Books: $19.95 per month for a total of $239.40 per year.
Shoeboxed: $99.95 per year
PayPal: No monthly fee
Xpenser: Free
Fresh Books: $19.95 per month for a total of $239.40 per year.
Shoeboxed: $99.95 per year
PayPal: No monthly fee
Xpenser: Free
You can enjoy the benefits of all the aforementioned automation for just $339.35 per year. Just under $1 per day. Who WOULDN’T pay $1 a day to cut out all the stress, hassle and frustration that comes with bookkeeping? I would.
3 Comments »
3 Responses to “Replace Your Bookkeeper for Under $1 a Day”
Justin Winter says:
Love http://www.shoeboxed.com to handle all my receipts, invoices, and business cards. They also have an iphone app and a mobile platform that allows you to take pictures of receipts from any mobile phone and upload them to your account. You can send an expense report from the airport before you get back to the office while you are waiting at the airport!
