5 Tech Tools to Automate your Business Finances
Many who come to me are super curious about all the new tech tools and different gadgets that are out there to help them with their business finances. And tech tools are really good because they can save you so much time, they simplify processes for you, and put a plan in place to help you really streamline things and get your business finances under control.
One of the number one reasons that I hear from different clients and potential clients is that there's just so much going on and it's so busy that you don't know where to start. And you hear things from all different places. You could do a Google search and who knows what you're going to come up with, and you're going to go down that rabbit hole and by the time you get there, you've wasted all this time and you never really even started.
So I have vetted many softwares and I've narrowed it down to my top five favorite tech tools that you can use to automate your business finances, and that's what I'm going to go over with you today so that we can get your systems and processes streamlined and save you some time. I'm not sure about your business, but in my business, time equals money. So the more time that I can save, the more time that I can spend doing other things that are revenue-producing.
I'm just going to jump in and tell you what exactly a tech tool is. A tech tool is any type of software, mobile apps, subscription services, and items are completely digital and are easily accessible to you to help you streamline your business processes. Again, I’ve narrowed those down to my top five. I use these five in my own business, and I recommend them to my bookkeeping clients as well.
1 - Quickbooks Online
So the very first one on the top five tech tools list, which will come to you as no surprise, is QuickBooks Online. And most of you may already know what QuickBooks Online is, but it is an online bookkeeping system. It is subscription-based, so it's a monthly subscription, and there are so many things that you can do within the QuickBooks Online system. For example:
You can track your income and expenses
Within QuickBooks, you are able to compile your deposits and all of your transactions through your bank account into QuickBooks so you can automate that to pull from your bank. Then, you're able to categorize these income items and these expense items so that you are able to get the profit and loss reports, cash flow reports, all those good things.
Create job estimates
If you're in a service business that requires you to provide your clients or customers an estimate on a job before the job is done, you can create those using QuickBooks and then convert those estimates into invoices later.
Handle your invoicing
You can put inventory items into QuickBooks service items into QuickBooks as well, so that you can quickly populate invoices for your clients. QuickBooks takes it a step further, and you're able to automate your invoicing system. So if you have a client, and you build them the same amount every month, on the same day of the month, it will automatically send the client an invoice on that particular day. You can also do recurring payments through QuickBooks. So if your contract states that the customer owes you a certain amount on the first of the month for example, and you have their permission to draft their bank account through ACH in your contract, you can set that up through QuickBooks so that you don't have the invoice every month. You do it one time, and you're done.
Generate reports
Any kind of report that you want to pull within QuickBooks is pretty much going to be there. So you have your basics, your profit and loss, cash flow, and balance sheet which are important to look at every single month. But you can also drill down into the reports and find all kinds of great information to help you find more calculated insights of your business finances.
Now, for each tech tool, I am going to give you the pricing. The pricing for QuickBooks Online is approximately $50 a month if you want to manage and pay your bills through there. It's not that expensive for everything that it does, but it is going to be a monthly recurring price.
2 - Spreadsheets
Number two is going to be spreadsheets and again I'm sure that's not a surprise to you as well. My favorite type of spreadsheet is going to be found within Google - I use Google Sheets a lot. You can also use Excel, if you prefer, but I find Google Sheets a little easier to use because it's always on my phone and I can pull it up at any time.
Spreadsheets can do a few things that QuickBooks Online cannot do, and QuickBooks can do things that spreadsheets cannot. For example, I recommend you keep your budget within a spreadsheet. I also recommend that for those of you who are freelancers and work from home, that you keep your home office expenses within a spreadsheet.
The purpose of that is for you to keep up with the expenses that you use in your home that can be deductible on your taxes. One of the main purposes and doing your books and keeping up with your income and expenses are for tax purposes or reporting purposes, and part of that is your home office expenses. Spreadsheets can also track your income and your expenses for reporting purposes and for you to get some calculated insights into your business finances.
For those of you who may not be ready for QuickBooks Online, or you're not ready for that subscription every month - maybe you only have about 10 transactions a month and a simple spreadsheet will help you. If that is you, I highly recommend that you check out my Calculated Tax Planner. You can track all of your income and expenses for the month, how much your estimated tax payments are supposed to be, which QuickBooks does not do by the way. You can look at your profit margins, your cash flow - there are so many things within this robust spreadsheet. It costs less than one month of QuickBooks, so it's less than 50 bucks, it's a one-time fee, and you can use it year after year. You can grab it right here.
3 - MileIQ
Number three is an app for your smartphone. Many of you do some traveling for work - maybe you do work from home, but you run errands, whether that's to the post office, or the bank, or an office supply store to buy ink for your printer - whatever it may be. You should be tracking your mileage. This is one thing that most clients who come to me do not do on a regular basis. There is a smartphone app called MileIQ, and this is an amazing app. It's super simple to use and will save you the trouble of keeping up with mileage by hand.
So after you download my IQ to your phone, it will detect when you are driving in your vehicle and it will capture the miles that you drive in your car from the moment you put your foot to the gas. And when you get to your destination, it will ask you if this trip was a personal expense or a business expense, and you just had which one it is.
For example, if I were to leave my home today and go to an office supply store that’s about 25 miles from my home, as soon as I get in my vehicle, MileIQ is going to start recording that I'm going somewhere. When I get to my destination it’s going to ask me: “Was this trip business or was it personal?” Well, as I'm going to the office supply store to buy things for my business, of course, I'm going to mark business. It’s the same scenario if I were to get into my vehicle to take my boys to archery practice. When I get to archery practice, it’s going to say “Was this business or personal?” Well, going to archery practice is likely not going to be a business expense, so I'm going to mark that as personal.
If you are one to itemize your deductions, and you can deduct your medical expenses, you need to be keeping up with your medical mileage and you can mark miles as medical miles within the MileIQ app as well. It saves so much time and you would not believe how quickly your mileage accumulates over the course of the year - that is a huge tax saving for you.
So with MileIQ, you get a free trial for the first 40 drives so you can check it out and see if you like it. Then, it is a yearly subscription for $50 a year. To me, that is dirt cheap for what does. You can also opt to pay monthly if you would like, and they also have a team plan if you have multiple people that work for you that are making these trips.
4 - Google Drive
Google Drive is a free app that is something that most of us probably use a lot in our business, but we don't realize how much it can actually do. I personally use Google Drive for many, many things. But in this particular blog, I'm going to talk about how we can use Google Drive for receipt management.
There are two ways that we typically receive a receipt. An actual manual receipt when we're at the store - so you go to the store you check out and they print a receipt. The other way is going to be an email receipt, which of course is going to be my favorite. For those who get manual receipts when you go to the store, what I want you to do is get on your smartphone, take a picture of it, and put it into your Google Drive.
If you haven’t set up your Google Drive folders for receipt management already, here’s how:
Open your Google account
Go to your Google Drive
Create a new folder called “Receipts”
Open that Receipt folder, and create another folder within the Receipts folder that’s titled whatever tax year you're wanting to use (so label it 2022 for this year)
Within the 2022 folder, make one folder per month. But instead of writing the name of the months out (January, February, March), make the folders as 01, 02, 03… The reason why is because your folders are going to go in alphabetical or numerical order, and if you write the month out, they're not going to be in the order that you and I would think they need to be in, but if you put them in numerical order with the zeroes, it will be laid out for you in a beautiful format.
After you get your Google Drive receipt folders all set up, snap a picture of that receipt, go to the bottom of your screen, and move it to Google Drive. You go through and select until you get to the particular month that you're in and save it there. If you get your receipt through email, again, super simple. Just move this receipt automatically into your Google Drive folder.
Now, some of you may be asking: ‘Do I even need to keep receipts?’ That's a great question, and the answer is yes. The IRS regulations say that if you spend $75 or more on an item, you are required to keep those receipts for audit purposes, and electronic or digital copies of those receipts are sufficient to meet this requirement.
I highly recommend that you keep up with your receipts in this form and fashion because let's face it, if you're anything like me, when you get a paper receipt, they end up on the car floor or in the car door all wadded up, and we lose track of them. Then when it comes to tracking expenses, we forget what we purchased at that particular store. But if we had the receipt to backup all of our transactions, it's really simple and easy for your bookkeeper as well. They can just go look at the receipt and they don't have to ask you any questions because it's all right there.
5 - Onboarding Software
Number five is not an accounting software, it's more of a streamlining software. I'm recommending that you have an onboarding software for your clients. And I recommend Dubsado.
You may be wondering why you need this when you have QuickBooks Online. And you're right, I get it. But Dubsado has some really cool features in it that could really help streamline your business and again, time is money. So streamline these processes and get all the work done in the beginning, so that you don't have to do these things over and over and over every time you sign a new client. It will save you so much time in the long run.
So with Dubsado, you're able to onboard with ease by creating workflows that contain contracts and invoicing that are repetitive. So once you have the processes in place, the next clients that sign on for your particular service, you just have to put their name on the contract and you're finished.
You're also able to collect payments through Dubsado, send reminders of these payments, whether you have a payment coming up in a couple of days, or they forget to make the payment and you have an email reminder as well. You also are able to integrate QuickBooks Online with Dubsado so all your payments that go through it are linked to your QuickBooks and there's no double entry. It’s just all linked together and that saves so much time as well.
Dubsado does have a free trial at the beginning where you can check out all of its services. And then after your free trial, it typically costs about $40 per month, but if you use this link when you sign up, you’ll save 20% on either the monthly or yearly plan. Again, I want to just reiterate to you that tech tools can save you so much time and headaches by simplifying and streamlining your business processes. This will help you to concentrate on the more important things in your business so you can grow your business, to reach more clients, and do the work that you have to do manually. Take the road of automation, it's going to cost you a little in the beginning to get everything set up, but it's going to save you so much over the course of your business.
To recap, here are the five tools we covered in this blog:
Quickbooks Online
Spreadsheets
MileIQ
Google Drive
Dubsado
I hope this helped! What tools are you going to implement? Connect with us on Instagram or join the Facebook Community to keep up with resources just like this and learn from fellow small business owners! And, as always, you can book a one-on-one chat with me right here.
