Curtis Voisin, Head of Cloud Accounting, Kraft Berger LLP CPA’s

Let’s face it, you didn’t get into business to do bookkeeping and payroll but yet, if you want to scale your success, you need to get the numbers right! Whether you are managing the books yourself or have outsourced the bookkeeping and payroll to an accounting professional, it’s important to reflect on what your accounting technology and workflow to determine if it is helping or hindering you.

Selecting the right technology will save you time, delight your clients and employees while providing you with visibility into the overall financial health of your business. Here are a few apps that we know, use, and find to be effective.

Business Problem: Tracking Receipts & Bills

It can be challenging to keep track of all your paper receipts and bills. The costs of losing this information can be substantial, ranging from accounting errors, leaving money on the table with the CRA or worse, putting you at risk in the event of an audit.

Solution: Dext (Formerly ReceiptBank)

This app enables you to digitally track every expense using 3 easy expense capture methods so you don’t miss a thing. Once the expense is captured, Dext uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to extract every detail from the date down to your payment method so you can avoid the manual effort.

Mobile Receipt Capture – Simply snap a photo of that meal receipt and capture any notes in seconds.

Dedicated Expense Inbox – Many of your suppliers now email receipts or bills, simply forward to your very own dedicated expense inbox IE expenses.yourbusinessname@dext.cc and you’re done!

Bill Fetch – If you have logins for Bell, Rogers, Amazon or any of the 2000+ vendor connections, simply authorize once and any time you make a purchase or a new bill becomes available, Dext will fetch the bill automatically!

Pricing: Starting at $10/mo

Business Problem: Tracking Your Financial Success

You need to get paid on time and report on your business’ financial performance on a timely basis to identify strategies to improve your cash flow and better manage your expenses. Too often, this exercise is rushed when it’s due or left to year-end.

Solution: QuickBooks Online

QuickBooks provides a suite of tools with the goal of simplifying the process of staying on top of your invoicing, bookkeeping and financial reporting.

Invoicing: Generate professional invoices, track when your customer has opened, and get paid faster with integrated credit card payment options.

Automated bank and credit card feeds – Eliminate data entry by connecting QuickBooks using your online banking credentials for an automatic download of all your transaction data so that you can categorize and reconcile with ease.

Management Reports – Generate a professional set of management reports so that you know and can share your business’ numbers with your stakeholders in a few clicks.

Pricing: Starting at $20/mo

Business Problem: Payroll Management

You need to pay your employees and the CRA on time and get it right. You can lose valuable time, experience errors, or negatively impact your overall employee experience through manual payroll calculations and paying employees by e-transfers or cheques.

Solution: Wagepoint

Provides an integrated payroll experience with QuickBooks to simplify payments via direct deposit, an employee portal for paystubs and automates your CRA source remittances. Add on Track for managing and approving hourly employee time sheets. Add on Luna to give your employees the opportunity to request vacation/sick time and manage approvals.

Pricing: $20 + $2/employee per payrun

In closing, it’s important to note that these 3 apps are integrated and form what is commonly known as your “Tech Stack”. There are 100’s of apps available to solve a wide variety of business problems and it can be intimidating to know how to choose the apps for your stack. We recommend starting your search by talking to your accounting partner who knows your business well and may even be able to offer preferred pricing on the technology you need. We find that a small investment of time to implement these apps can pay huge dividends in terms of time savings and your overall peace of mind so that you can invest that energy back into doing what you do best.

For a free consultation to see how we can put technology to work for your business, schedule a callback with one of our product experts today!