Becoming Ximplified – Steps to Smoother Accounting

Time and Talent.

The two T’s every property manager always needs more of.

• Time:  Stakeholders such as property owners, investors, financial institutions, and more, expect reporting faster than ever.
• Talent: There is an ever-growing shortage of top rate talent within the accounting industry, and an even smaller portion of the professionals out there have experience in trust accounting for vacation rentals.

Luckily, implementing integrated accounting and finance tools for your business is not the multi-million-dollar investment it used to be.

How to Become Ximplified

Start floating….in the Cloud

Say goodbye to costly servers, outdated and slow software, regular costly updates, and expensive IT consulting or personnel fees.  Instead, choose the right cloud-based software based on your needs and make the move. (See Essential Cloud Applications to determine which cloud based accounting software is best for you)

There are many reasons to move to the cloud for your accounting software, but at the top of the list are:

• Lower costs, from hardware, hosting to IT
• Access to hundreds of awesome time-saving cloud-based applications
• Work from anywhere and give easy access to external advisors

Identify your pain points…and alleviate

You may already know the painful parts of your monthly processes, but if you don’t here are some tips to identify them:

• Make sure you have a list of every task necessary in both your close process and your daily transaction processes
• Start tracking the time spent on each task by you and your team
• Identify those painful tasks that are sucking up your time
• Look for applications that address your pain points, tackling the most painful first

My Essential Cloud Applications article identifies many popular applications that address the most common time-sucking pain points, such as tracking and paying bills, getting paid, tracking employee time and processing payroll, expense reports and more.

Become paperless

When I became the CFO of a small company, I was amazed at the jungle of paper I walked into the first day:  stacks and stacks of bills, reconciliations, invoices, checks and receipts. Many small companies are not aware of the tools available to become paperless and streamline their processes.

Here’s a few tips:

• Use mobile applications as virtual shoe boxes to capture all those little receipts with the snap of your phone.
• Manage and keep copies of your bills paperlessly through your cloud-based accounting software or applications such as Hubdoc and Bill.com
• Pay your bills using online bill pay with your bank or even better, Bill.com
• Send all invoices and quotes via email with the ability to click and pay via ACH or by credit card
• Manage expense reports and credit card transactions with Expensify

The freeing feeling of going paperless will reduce your stress and give you back time and money. I promise!

Determine where/if you should outsource

Time spent on accounting can be very costly to your bottom line.  The cost of hiring a clerk at $15-$25 per hour can cost between $1,500 – $4,000 each month. A small business owner spending 20-40 hours a month on accounting instead of generating revenue can cost much more.

Below are a few steps to determine if outsourcing is right for you:

• Determine your costs:  How many hours are you or someone else spending on accounting tasks and what is the cost to your company per hour (your cost per hour is the value per hour you add when not performing accounting tasks)
• Consult with a forward-thinking accounting practice that can help you determine how to automate and streamline processes
• Determine the costs to outsource time-sucking tasks, such as payroll, A/R, A/P, etc. Fees should be fixed or variable based on transaction level
• If the cost of outsourcing is less than the cost to hire someone (or do the work yourself), outsource!

If you have any questions about automating or outsourcing your accounting processes with Ximplifi, send us a message!

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