When I started my firm 6 years ago, I knew that I wanted to be able to serve the right clients with the right tools, and that meant simplifying our tech stack as much as possible. An early decision along that route was deciding to go all in on QuickBooks Online as our ledger of choice for managing accounting and tax work within the firm, which has been a game changer for creating consistency and efficiency across our team. In doing so, our ability to scale both internally as a team and externally in bringing on new clients has been more seamless and standardized in terms of onboarding and managing client work.
Role Based Access and Permissions
As our team has grown, so have the levels of permissions and approvals needed within the firm. We want to avoid any employees who should not have access having the ability to make changes to a client’s books or records without approval.
The implementation of role based access and permissions has allowed us to create boundaries around who is able to access specific information, while ensuring that team members can view the relevant information and details needed in the accounting system to perform their job responsibilities. Doing so by role helps us make changes faster as employees change positions or as access needs change within the firm, because we can manage permissions at an enterprise level rather than doing it manually on a person by person basis when things change. In this way, we are able to hire new staff and be confident that they have the appropriate access based on their position in the company. Which as a firm owner gives me confidence that we are minimizing the opportunities for employees to make errors with client data that they shouldn’t have access to.
Chart of Accounts
One of the most important ways to get efficient with managing bookkeeping work is to ensure chart of accounts are as consistent as possible. Whether grouping by type of business, level of complexity, or some combination of both, it makes for easier review and reporting when we ensure that the accounts being used are the same across the board wherever possible. QuickBooks Online has made that even easier with the introduction of templates, which we’ve used to more quickly onboard new clients who may have duplicate or unnecessary accounts. Being able to easily organize the old chart of accounts into new lines has helped to preserve historical accounting information from before we took over their accounting , while creating a clear delineation of the new categorization going forward. It also helps us to use integrations more effectively, which we’ll get to in a bit.
Reporting
Many entrepreneurs know that they need financial reports but are not necessarily sure what they are looking at in order to make decisions about their company. The built-in reports in QuickBooks Online allow us to easily pull details beyond the basic financials to help tell the story of how a company is doing. For example, in addition to pulling a profit and loss statement and balance sheet, we can also provide details on open and overdue invoices, and outstanding bills. This provides more context to clients around conversations like cash flow and forecasting, as well as using the actual v. budget functionality to give insight as to how the business is doing against the plan set for income and expenses. Since these are easy to retrieve and export, we are able to answer client questions quickly, even as we grow and take on more businesses. This is imperative as we want to ensure that scaling our roster doesn’t diminish the level of care and expertise that clients receive.
Integrations
In addition to information that we can gather directly out of QuickBooks, the many integrations available have allowed us to expand who we can serve and how. Many clients already have tech stacks that they know and love, and while we want to be able to provide guidance and best practices, we also want to be mindful of how much an accounting change will affect other areas of their business. For example, for companies in specialized industries who need to use specific software for tasks like invoicing or inventory management, we’ve been able to use integrations to ensure that the accounting system accurately reflects the information in those systems. While we still review reports from the source in order to confirm, it’s so helpful to be able to have those details automatically included without having to manually update each transaction or, even worse, make journal entries to make the systems tie. Integrations have also allowed us to get information for other needs, such as tax preparation and planning, in a way that gives us details displayed in a way that best serves those tasks.
As we build and scale our firms, an experience of excellence is at the heart of what we do. At Little Fish, we have a mission to be a company that is easy to work with and for, meaning we want clients to be able to interact with us and our technology with ease, and team members to be able to provide quality service using resources that support their roles.
Using QuickBooks Online as our accounting system of choice since the beginning has allowed us to scale our services, going beyond compliance to truly provide a concierge level partnership to all of our clients. By setting limits, using automations, and leveraging templates, we are able to ensure that we are spending time on the human component of what we do instead of getting stuck in the weeds of just getting the information we need. When you can truly focus on the relationships with your clients, everybody wins.
This blog post is part of a paid partnership with Intuit The content has been created collaboratively, and Intuit has compensated Keila for her time and effort in producing this content.
👋🏾 I’m Keila, a passionate advocate for growing businesses intentionally and achieving big results with small teams.
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