Tools for Business Management!

My target is to get our data entry from 3 days to under 3 hours

Let me show you how to import all your bank transactions and automate the process!

I am always on the lookout for ways to improve our business efficiency and as stated in a previous post there are 3 parts to every business!

• Sales / Marketing
• Finance & Admin
• Operations

Cashflow Automation

As business owners our job is to simplify and streamline processes and one process is to manage cash flow, the easiest way to do that is via cash flow software where we enter all bank transactions to a cashflow software,  and over a number of years we have used cashflow manager which is fast, simple and efficient. (spread sheet like entry)

This process also keeps track of our tax categorization but as the number of transactions grow this is a manual process.

I have been on the lookout for ways to speed up the process and minimize the manual part where its prone to have some mistakes.

I am looking for 2 things one is increased speed and the other is increased accuracy.

The right software

I have found an open source software that is easy to use and makes the job of importing transactions easy fast and efficient. The software is Kmymoney available from https://kmymoney.org/ and will operate on multiple platforms.

Its not in my opinion a full accounting software to run your business but its great as a cash book and credit card statement manager.

When you have all your data then we will add a journal of the combined transactions into our accounting software keep in mind its already balanced to the bank.

So at any time we can go back and report on individual transactions that relate to a monthly category total.

Nowadays with so many transactions on your credit cards my goal was to find something that allowed importation of transactions and auto or virtual automatically categorizing of each transaction without much manual intervention that then remembers the suppliers or vendors categories on each import, so over time the number of transactions that are new are less thus reducing data entry time or should I say categorization time.

I have other software that will do a similar job but nothing is as fast, with simple and editable reports.

Here is how it works, lets say we import the transactions and one of the vendors is ABC office supplies so we link that vendor to the office supplies category so on the next import its automatic and no data entry  or categorization is required.

So far after initial testing it looks like we will save from 50% to 70% of the time it was taking to do this task. As an example one of the recent credit card statement imports had approximately 7 pages of transactions on the statement, normally we would look at each one, mark up the category then add each category then do the data entry, the process took more than an hour.

After the import (no initial data entry) now just categorize each transaction and bonus the software will let you search a keyword and categorize multiple transactions at one time, so now the whole process  took under  15 minutes.

All banks we deal with have this information as an easy data export based on a date range. In the coming weeks I will share some videos on how to set up the software and how to complete the above task.

Note: I am writing this from a business owners perspective and not from an accountants perspective my focus is on time and accuracy.