Tag: small business performance

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You Spent What?! Keeping Tabs on Travel Expenses

You Spent What?! Keeping Tabs on Travel Expenses

In the world of business, it sometimes becomes necessary to travel. Whether it’s sending an employee to your client’s business in the next town or across the globe to make a deal, travel incurs expenses. How do you track those? Usually by painstakingly collecting receipts and keeping a copy of any travel itinerary. That’s an awful lot of paper.

Think about it. You get a receipt every time you make any kind of transaction. Let’s say you stop for gas on the way. You get a receipt. Take your client out for lunch? Receipt. Fly across the country? Another receipt, and an itinerary. It almost becomes necessary to get a folio just for receipts, you get so many. As a matter of fact, many do. Folios, folders, organizers. I’ve seen them all. Not one of them makes compiling the expense report easier. It still requires sorting and entering the data by hand. Such a waste of time. Time better spent on what you really need done. Making money and growing your business. Getting a report on what was spent, where it was spent, and how much to bill or reimburse should be as easy as clicking a couple of buttons. It’s not, but it should be.

Look at it from the other side of things. Let’s say I’m an employee and you’re sending me to Nashville to attend a conference. I’m also supposed to have a “meet n’ greet” with some clients, just to ensure that they’re happy and content. I’m stressed because I have to remember to keep every piece of paper I get on this trip. Plane tickets, rental car, hotel, food for myself, food for the clients. Everything. Not only do I have to keep track of it all but I don’t get compensated until after I get back, and only if I manage to keep all of those receipts.

Making the process easier is the next logical step when it comes to tracking expenses. Finding a way to cut down on the time it takes to compile the report, cut down on the number of receipts kept, or even getting rid of the need to keep the receipts at all. Everything under the sun is online these days. Online and paperless. It’s just easier than keeping a pound of receipt paper in your carry-on. With all of the technology that is readily available on today’s market, shouldn’t it be easier than that? One click should be all it takes. Okay, maybe two. My point is that it shouldn’t be pulling teeth just to keep everything in line and under control.

Which is why Concur is such a good thing. Concur.com has taken the headache out of the entire process. Snap a photo of your receipt with your smartphone and send it using Concur. It filters all of the data and attaches it directly to an expense report. It even integrates with Tripit, which allows you to maintain an up-to-date itinerary and travel management capabilities. Concur even tailors travel options based on company policy and individual preferences. Paperless and painless. Just what the doctor ordered.

Make Sense?

See Concur’s innovative and incredibly useful travel and expense management solutions at Cloud Summit 2012.

Get Cloud Summit information here.

Summit Sponsors include:

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Arrest for Sales Tax Evasion in Tennessee | TaxRates.com

Business owners and CFOs are experiencing a crackdown on tax liability nonpayments. Cash is tight everywhere, and agencies will only increase collection and enforcement efforts – especially when it involves a public trust. Whether it is sales tax or payroll tax, noncompliance can mean a whole lot more than just fines and penalties.

http://wp.me/p2hGOJ-ft

via Arrest for Sales Tax Evasion in Tennessee | TaxRates.com.

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Cash flow troubles can get you in more than just debt: CFOs can be liable for Payroll Tax liability, potentially criminal

Cash flow troubles can get you in more than just debt:

CFOs can be liable for Payroll Tax liability, potentially criminal

With the economy being sluggish and, in some regions, stalled and even worse, a lot of businesses both large and small are feeling the crunch.  Cash isn’t coming easily for anyone, and the cost of running the business and employing workers just keeps going up even if revenues don’t.  Managing cash flow is important when there is cash to manage, but keeping it all going when there isn’t much coming in takes real skill and planning.   Knowing where to cut or limit expenses is essential, but knowing what NOT to forgo when paying the bills can be just as critical if not more so.  You don’t pay the light bill, maybe the lights to out.  You don’t pay payroll taxes, maybe you go to jail.

A recent article on CFO.com discusses the findings where, in cases where payroll taxes were unpaid by the business, specific individuals were held directly and personally responsible for the liability.  And the liability is not contained solely within the walls of the C-level; it may extend to any and all individuals considered to be responsible.   Those who control the purse strings, making the daily decisions on what to and what not to pay, are the folks being identified as responsible for the failure to pay whether they were able to come up with the funds or not.

Responsible individuals, according to the penalty, may include corporate officers, directors, shareholders, bookkeepers and even third parties, such as CPAs, or corporate counsel. In exceptional cases, responsible individuals can have criminal tax liability for failure to pay payroll taxes.
CFO.com (http://s.tt/1p9wf)

To be fair, insufficient funds may seem like a logical reason for not paying payroll taxes. But the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in another case, United States v. Easterday, 564 F.3d 1004 (9th Cir. 2009), determined that Easterday could be convicted of a crime even though he may have been able to prove that his company didn’t have enough funds to pay the payroll taxes.
CFO.com (http://s.tt/1p9wf)

Accounting professionals working with businesses and acting as the Trusted Advisor can help their clients avoid facing this type of decision and risk by helping them to monitor and actively manage their businesses more closely – at an operational as well as financial level. Rather than relying upon a current bank account balance or after-the-fact financial reporting to provide the information for making decisions each day, business owners need continuous, real time, actionable data to help them keep the business going forward, and to help keep them out of trouble.

With better information, trend analysis and a little forecasting, accounting services and consultative advice from a trusted accounting professional does not simply help the business stay in business, it could help prevent the business owner, CFO or controller from having to wear an unfashionable orange jumpsuit and shackles.

Make Sense?

J

  • Read more about how accountants need business intelligence, too
  • Read more about how there’s no fear and loathing in accounting
  • Read more about the pressure on accountants to deliver more value and intelligence to their clients
  • Read more about Data Warriors: accounting in the cloud
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Road Trip! Guidance You Can Count On

Road Trip!

Guidance You Can Count On

Keeping up on where you’re going is vital to any business, small or large. Watching trends, tracking expenses and monitoring cash flow are all basics of good business. You wouldn’t keep driving straight if the road veers to the left, would you? You might, if you don’t notice the curve. That’s the type of problem any business can run into, if you just don’t watch where you’re going.

Metrics are the lifeblood of any industry; from Information technology to accounting, manufacturing, and retail. Acting like a guidance system, or GPS, your company’s metrics will tell you where and when you need to make a change to keep up with your industry and the needs of your clients. Look at your business the way you look at a road trip across the country. Would you leave home without a map or directions to your destination? Probably not. You could, but getting where you want to be would become an almost insurmountable task. Without directions you end up taking wrong turns, getting lost, and just have a difficult time making forward progress.

The possibility of breaking down in the middle of nowhere grows as well. Like on a road trip, it’s probable that anything that goes wrong will do so at the worst time imaginable. Unlike your car, however, your business doesn’t have AAA. No one to call to bring you gas or give you a tow, so knowing you have what you need to get where you’re going is the best bet. The only way to do that is with metrics; gathered, compiled, and triple checked. Your business needs maintenance just like your car does. Oil changes, alignments, tune-ups, new tires when the weather changes or the old ones have worn out. It’s all part of being prepared; which is a good thing to be, in business or on a road trip.

Watching how your business is performing in the market should be a simple thing, but it’s not. Not usually anyway. It requires poring over spreadsheets, running the numbers a dozen times, and re-evaluating the information you gather again and again. It takes hours of your time. It takes hours of your clients’ time. Just pulling up all of the information you need is time-consuming, and often daunting, but compiling it into a usable form is a hefty task in and of itself.

In any business, using your time efficiently is a priority and usually easier said than done. More often than not the process of seeing where you’re heading takes hours. Literally, hours. Of course your financial software has reports and statistical data monitors built into it, but the information is usually presented in a way that is less than helpful when it comes to seeing trends or where you’re heading in any given aspect. One would think that in today’s society, where easier is always better, someone somewhere would come up with a solution to this problem.

Well, someone did. The Corelytics Financial Dashboard, from Corelytics.com, integrates directly with your accounting software of choice and pulls all of the data you need into one place. What used to take hours only takes minutes. The dashboard even gives you the ability to compare your business with industry standards and set customizable goals.  You’ve got the green light, so check your dashboard, get direction, and get your business moving forward.

Make Sense?

See the dynamics of your business come alive through the award-winning Corelytics dashboard at Cloud Summit 2012.

Get Cloud Summit information here.

Summit Sponsors include:

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Everybody Clicks: Keeping in touch with your business online

Everybody Clicks

Keeping in touch with your business online

In today’s technology focused market, it’s hard to find a way to stand out from the crowd. Making that effort to communicate with clients is more than just sending them a quarterly newsletter or email. It’s about evolving your business to meet their needs. Everyone wants everything online these days. It’s not just convenient anymore, it’s expected.

If your business doesn’t provide your clients with the level of online service they have come to expect, they probably won’t stay your clients for very long. If you want to make sure these new expectations are being met it means building and maintaining a presence on the web. That’s right; your website is the new face of your business. It’s often the first thing new clients see so it has to make a good impression. As the old saying goes, “you only get one first impression.” This adage is just as true for your website as it is for you. Old, outdated websites just aren’t good enough anymore. People want somewhere they can go to get the latest updates on the services your business provides, and they want it to be easy to find that information. Maintaining your website, keeping it up to date and full of useful information is important. It can also be time-consuming or expensive.

As a business professional, probably a bookkeeper or accountant, you probably spend as little time as possible managing your website and composing newsletters. Now, imagine that you just got back to the office after lunch and you want to do some work on the company website, maybe check on the traffic statistics while you’re at it. Normally you’d go and log in to three or four different places, one or two to do the work on the site and the other one or two to look at your statistics. This is a waste of time and energy, but not one you can avoid. Now let’s say you have some time left before you go home for the night and you realize you haven’t sent out this month’s newsletter. That’s another site to go log into. Site after site, a new interface or dashboard each time. Not to mention the hassle of entering your new contacts into your CRM or selecting the right recipients for the newsletter from your contacts lists. Everywhere you go there is another step to the process of staying in touch with your clients, to keeping the website updated and accurate. Login after login and dashboard after dashboard. What if there was something that could streamline everything? Keep your company’s blog in the same place as your site traffic statistics or web-based CRM solution? (Wouldn’t that be neat?) One login to get to everything. Keeping your clients informed, organized, and satisfied. Everything you want at the click of a mouse.

Your time is your money, so saving time is saving money. Having all of your online tools in one place would do just that. No wasted time, no need to repeatedly log in. Just getting everything taken care of, from one place. Not to mention your clients’ needs. Every business has a website nowadays; online payment options, blogs, forms to request information, the list goes on and the need for them is not confined to accounting and bookkeeping firms.

Let’s say you’re a small hobby shop, selling model trains and cars with all the odds and ends needed to build or maintain them. Do you rely solely on word of mouth or paper ads to bring you the business you need? Of course not. You get a website. The problem is you don’t know where to start. So, you hire someone to build it for you and to make changes when needed. That gets expensive. Ok, so you build it yourself using one of the many solutions available on the web today. Now you control everything, from the colors and graphics to the content but how do you track the traffic your site gets? Or what information your customers look at the most? Analytics of course! Unfortunately that means another thing to buy and another page to log into. The same goes for CRM solutions or email domains. Each aspect of your business is locked away in its own little corner. Frustrating, isn’t it?

Wouldn’t it be grand if you could change your homepage, send a newsletter, and track today’s site visits all from one place? Well, that’s where Nakea.net comes in. Nakea.net is a solution that is perfect for any business. It has web design, analytics, email marketing, contact management, and much more all in one place. That’s right.  One login and you have your world at your fingertips.  Just click to log in, and it’s all right there, with easy to use features and templates that allow you to gear your website, and your communications, to your clients and customers.

Make Sense?

Nakea.net, delivering the smartest social website your business can build, is a sponsor of Cloud Summit 2012.

Get Cloud Summit information here.

Summit Sponsors include:

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Smarter Online Document Vaults: Document Management for QuickBooks, Microsoft Office and more

Smarter Online Document Vaults

Document Management for QuickBooks, Microsoft Office and more

Document management used to be just about storing and retrieving files.  Being able to easily store document images and other files, and then quickly finding them when you need them, is an important aspect of business record keeping.  If you are an accounting or bookkeeping professional offering outsourced services to clients, having a secure way to store and manage client document files from a variety of sources is key to developing workflows and standardizing service delivery.   Invoices, bills, bank statements, and all the other paperwork which is generated by various business processes must be captured, accounted for, and retained for future reference and documentation support.  With all of this going on, having a secure and easy way to handle all that paper and computer-generated reporting is really important.

Using an electronic document management system isn’t really that much different from dealing with paper filing systems, at least in terms of the process.  You obtain the document, you translate it into a journal entry or transaction, and then you file the document away for later use.  The difference is simply that the document becomes digital image data and is stored electronically, instead of keeping the paper file around.   And, the earlier in the process where you can turn paper documents into digital images, the better, because it reduces the need for “paper-based” processes which take more time and resources, and which may introduce risk of information loss or damage.

In an outsourced bookkeeping arrangement, for example, allowing the client to convert paper to image files is highly desirable as it prevents the outsourcer from having to travel to client offices to obtain paperwork, and reduces the time involved either with traveling to and from client locations or time spent waiting for mailed information to arrive.  For the client to handle this process willingly, or with any frequency, tools which are simple to understand and use must be supplied.   Scanning a document, saving it to the hard drive, and then trying to find the file to upload later to an accountant “portal” is not a simple process and it is not efficient.  If the user is somewhat nontechnical (most business owners?), or if there is a lot of paperwork to scan and upload, that multi-step process just won’t work for the client.

SmartVault, a solution for QuickBooks-connected and general purpose document management, has an elegant solution to the problem, and it’s called the “InBox”.   Just like the inbox on your desk, the SmartVault InBox is where new documents arrive to be processed. The ingenious part is that the InBox is a little applet that gets installed on the client workstation, and provides them with a very simple way to scan files directly to SmartVault.  The accountant or bookkeeper then accesses the client files from the inbox and processes and/or attaches them to QuickBooks transactions as required.  The client has only to perform the simple task of telling the SmartVault InBox app to obtain documents fed into the scanner.  No local file saving and retrieval required.  For the accountant or bookkeeper, the inbox is the first stop in the workflow, and is the place they go to obtain whatever information the client has provided.  The SmartVault InBox can also be used to return files easily and securely to clients, bypassing the need to have the client access and log in to a website in order to get the files (but a website portal is also part of the system, just in case the client prefers this method).  If providing seamless service and easy to follow procedures describes how you work with your clients, then SmartVault could become a key element in your service delivery.

Affordability and ease of use are important factors to consider when looking for document management solutions for small businesses.  In addition, having the ability to store documents from popular small business applications allows users to centrally store and manage all their business documents and files, not just those related to accounting.  When users wear many “hats” in the business, and need access to a variety of document types, a centralized filing system is an absolute necessity.  SmartVault addresses this by providing direct integration with Microsoft Outlook, Results CRM, and a variety of other popular small business solutions.

Oriented for use by small businesses and the accountants and bookkeepers who serve them, SmartVault delivers a surprisingly powerful solution which addresses the variety of document storage, attachment and retrieval requirements of most businesses, coupled with the workflow tools and a unique QuickBooks integration capability to specifically address the needs of accounting and finance department users.  You know you need to work smarter and not harder, so your document vault should be smarter, too.

Make Sense?

J