lots of specific recommendations for small to midsized firms.
by penny breslin
it’s not just the numbers
obtaining the source documents is the most difficult aspect of being a virtual back office support (bos). waiting for documents is the death knell for this type of work.
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luckily, technology has provided tools to take away this pain.
here are just five of the tools we use currently to collect information from our clients:
- ledgersync
- bill.com
- expensify
- meliopayments
- greenback
these are just a few examples of applications that work with cloud-based general ledgers that have excellent client-facing tools, decent ai and well-developed integrations. they are by no means the only ones on the market, and by the time you read this, there may be even more out there.
again, the key is to find one that does what you and your clients need and that has a great support channel. each app has its own unique features. whether you are pulling expenses or pushing payments, you will need to know the why of the transaction in order to provide actionable data for your client. the client owns the source but you need to have access and these apps provide that for you.
as an accountant user, you can easily create a system to promote doing ap management for clients with these applications. the workload is minor, which makes accounts payable management and expense tracking the easiest functions to take on when first starting out in bos. some of these same apps also provide accounts receivable management, so choosing one as your go-to can be leveraged into additional services. these can also assist in the push for your smaller business clients to separate personal expenses from business expenses.
ledgersync is a great aggregator of bank and credit card statements. intuit is still working on a native solution and is continually adding more institutions along with its bank and credit card feeds.
caveat: the world of feeds and fetching from financial institutions is one of many pitfalls. clients change passwords. banks make changes on their ends to urls and document locations because they want to keep their own relationships sticky. they prefer that their banking clients get the data by logging in to their own website, not via third parties. login tokens and authenticators are pretty much sop for anything to do with money.
bank feeds break constantly and unpredictably, so it’s best to assign the upkeep to your administrative people so that your bookkeeper or accountant aren’t constantly chasing information. make your admin people part of the team. have them onboard the client with the apps and manage support of those apps. your time is better spent with the clients on their goals, not obtaining the information that supports the goals.
to help accumulate source documents, send a notice to vendors that all invoicing must be sent via the assigned email. each of these apps provides dedicated emails for each client file so the source document arrives without you having to ask. your admin can get that part going for the client. add the step of notifying all the client’s vendors to the onboarding checklist you have for this service and assign it to the team admin to accomplish. your bookkeeping staff should have a task in front of them and the information they need to perform the tasks right at hand. pushing the bank feeds and pulling the source documents using the apps and integrations can make this seamless if you keep up.
case study 1: don’t neglect your bank feeds
in april, a small local client i had assisted with setting up his qbo called me for some help. he had changed his entity status and had opened a new bank account. he had forgotten how to connect them. as soon as he told me that, i knew his qbo file was most likely a mess. i assisted in reconnecting the account, but he had opened it a few months prior to contacting me. so, we had to download a few months of data and import it to his qbo. easy to do. he said he could take it from there once i gave him a quick lesson on the bank review steps.
he then called me a week later to say he was lost. turns out he did not reconcile his old bank account that was still active for the first six months of the prior year. now we had to deal with paper statements and data entry as the old bank account was already closed. we used autoentry to scan, rip and import the statements to his qbo.
broken feeds end up meaning extra work. so, keep those feeds connected. i know for a fact that they are let go, often for months at a time.
we got his work back to him on april 14th. he said his tax accountant was upset. i told him what i thought of that, as the tax accountant had been the one to tell him that a report that the business owner provided to the tax accountant on april 12th was not complete. i mentioned to the business owner that his tax accountant had access to his qbo, so she could easily go online herself and get the reports, instead of requesting that i send them to her.
because this was a local business and a surf buddy friend, i was doing this at a big discount. i told him to get a new tax accountant next year, preferably one who would be more amicable to the business owner’s use of cloud-based systems. he agreed so i referred him to a few other tax accountants for next year.
case study 2: managing receivables to avert disaster
a cpa client in oregon took on the bos function for a $2 million training company. his first two months were all about training the client on how they would communicate. his team was taking care of the numbers. they used intacct and bill.com. true to his sla (service level agreement), he reviewed the numbers and delivered managerial reports.
this company had a large number of receivables, all from one institution. the company put quite a bit of effort into supporting this institution’s training needs. the payments coming back from the institution were very slow and nothing was being done to collect those receivables. the previous ar clerk just let it all ride. the new bos/cpa presented his team’s findings to the board and showed how the daily delay in collecting receivables was costing them money. he told the board how much they were losing on the contract each month. he then went with the ceo to a meeting with the institution and negotiated a new payment schedule and a new fee schedule.
when the bos/cpa was relaying this story to me, she said it never occurred to her that she would be doing this. how did she feel? great! this $30,000-a-year client was saved from disaster by the new virtual bos and her team. oh, and the negotiation meeting was off the scope of the sla, so her time for the meeting was billable at her standard hourly rate.
choosing your little black dress of technology
when the rubber meets the road, debits are debits and credits are credits. however, nothing is great without context and support. find technology providers that have shown they understand accountants and have support personnel who are dedicated to accountants.
for example, when comparing managed service providers (msp), make sure they not only have the necessary security accreditations, but also look for “seals of approval” from the software vendors such as intuit and sage. many of the options you will look at have affiliate programs that focus on how you, the accountant, can make marketing fees through recommending or signing up your clients to use that software application. this also means that they want to support you! the more you use their software or apps with your clients, the more support you receive. the more feedback they receive from you, the more the system is improved each quarter or year.
today’s platforms are specific to functions. trying to find one application that does it all would be difficult at best. the perfect world we all want has not yet arrived. don’t let perfect get in the way of progress.
you will find some apps that appear to be direct competition but also have an api (application programming interface), which means they work in conjunction. these combinations of apps provide the missing pieces that often make up the 20 percent that an app just doesn’t do. by combining these apps, you can get to the 100 percent that you need. the training and support these collaborative products provide can take the onus off the need for a smaller accounting firm to hire a full-time technology person.
cloud-based platforms
bill.com is a well-known, well-supported product that can truly remove the need for your small clients to get into their bookkeeping software. bill.com plays very well with quickbooks, xero, intacct, sage, accountingsuite and netsuite, even though it duplicates part of the ap function and ar function of all these programs. bill.com advertises to the consumer, so has name recognition. they present at all the accounting technology conferences and have an accountant affiliate program. personal experience has shown they have a very solid, well-trained and dependable support staff. for small to medium-size businesses, this product hits all the marks of a useful tool to move into the bos realm with ap management.
for the small to midsize clients with online shopping carts, brick-and-mortar stores as well as inventory needs, a combination of xero, vend and shopify creates an almost seamless back-office management package. priced in the same range, pushed to the end consumer and supporters of the accounting industry, these three small programs fulfill specific needs, yet the point in which they collaborate creates one very useful tool. these web-based programs truly work well together.
apps like zapier work in the background as integrators of some of these products. liz scott is a great person to connect with online for the wonders of zapier and how you can use it internally and with clients and apps.
ai companies are popping up whose sole purpose is to build the integrations to the myriad of add-ons in the app market. this service is another one of those business/job types that did not exist 10 years ago.
hardware
scanner: network scanner for your office and desktop scanners for your team. the desktop scanners can easily go with the bkm on site when needed. fujitsu scansnap still is the best option in this area. as a plus, it works great with evernote, which is a handy tool for tracking procedures.
fax: yes, they are still being used, so we recommend you make the shift to an online fax service that allows you to receive faxes via email. don’t worry, you will still have a fax number. we recommend efax for its low cost and it does a great job. we find faxes are used less and less, and primarily with state government agencies. however, even the government is getting better and better at online access. it does tend to date you so have it but don’t put it on your website or in your signature.
ms office: make sure you keep current by at least two years. office 365 is a great way to work when mobility is a factor. openoffice is a nice option because of pricing. however, keep in mind that excel formulas do not carry between openoffice calc and excel. this means that unless all your clients use openoffice, ms office is a better choice. we utilize excel and onenote quite a bit in the ms office suite.
laptop and tablet for bos and bkm: these are also changing, and tablets are becoming more and more the focus. the key is to make sure you and your bkm(s) have the proper tools they need while on site at a client’s office. with the use of apps, managed servers and wireless, very little will ever be on the mobile hardware. showing up with paper brochures, folders and notepads does not project the concept of a virtual bos. use the mobile technology to send everything to your cloud server. remember to project the image of a virtual bos. most times i never even bring a laptop or tablet. when i’m at the client’s office, everything is accessible via our msp, so i can just use my mobile phone and access anything else i need from within the client’s hardware choices.
secure upload for document sharing: not exactly hardware but this is needed. a cpa office sent me an email asking me to email back a w9 for a client we manage. my reply was a rather curt, no! please provide a secure service to upload and share the w9 with you. sending confidential documents by email is an invitation for identity theft. but i continue to be amazed at the lack of knowledge among cpas who still let their clients send tax documents with full social security numbers or eins by email. and yes i did ask if their email was encrypted and i got a deer in the headlights response.