Last time I posted about being an expert and making sure we explain things in a way our clients understand. This week I had my opportunity to put this into practice when I ran my first “Bookkeeping for Startups” workshop. Hopefully my non-financial attendees went away with a good idea of what good accounting records look like, plus a few other things. What I really hope they went away with though was an idea of how their businesses could benefit from embracing the possibilities of a cloud based accounting system and how bags of receipts should be a thing of the past.
My audience included fitness professionals, nutritionists, flower growers and graphic designers, and I was only a little bit surprised to hear that some of them really did keep bags of receipts (I had joked about this with a “shock-horror” face, safe to say, I won’t joke about it again). In one case, somebody admitted to starting her business with good intentions of keeping receipts in a folder and eventually moving to just putting the receipts in the drawer where the folder was. At least she knew where she could lay her hands on her receipts I told her.
There's no getting away from it, small businesses are busy. If you’re running your startup in the evenings after you’ve finished a day at your full time job, putting your receipts in a drawer and forgetting about them is the only way you’ll free up time to spend on what really matters - running your business. Small businesses also have small bank balances (at least to begin with). They don't have massive budgets to invest in systems and infrastructure, and when it comes to keeping accounting records they want to make sure they meet the needs of HMRC whilst keeping things as cheap as possible. I can’t blame them for seeing a spreadsheet or notebook as the best option for their accounting system.
The thing is though, we use the cloud everyday. We already use it for emailing, keeping our calendars up to date and with us at all times, we listen to music on Spotify, even Granny D can stay up to date with the latest pictures of my daugher on our family cloud based photo app, so why aren't we using a Cloud for accounting?
I think when non-accountants think about accounting software they think of the cd-roms we spent hundreds of pounds on and used to install on our boxy PCs in the 90’s. They don’t realise that cloud based accounting systems can cost just a few pounds a month - for as little as our Spotify premium subscriptions. I also think they think of keeping accounting records as something they need to do to, but don’t see how their data could be really valuable for understanding their businesses if only they had the tools to analyse it. Wouldn’t it be great if a personal trainer could see at a glance that her weekly aerobics class in Clifton was generating a lot more profit than her class in the city centre, or that this summer she is spending more on room hire than last year despite teaching more of her sessions outside?
It doesn’t matter that she’s not an accountant, you don’t need to be an accountant to “get it”, everyone in the room on Tuesday would have no problem using an accounting system for their business, and one of the reasons I think this is that you can do so much of this stuff from your phone. Apps are built in such a way that we just know how they work and the desktop versions aren’t that different. As a bookkeeper of course, one of the best things for me is that I can log into clients’ accounting systems remotely throughout the year if they have questions or need me to look over something, so I’m not leaving my clients completely on their own to work it out. We don’t need to meet in person though, and ultimately clients save money because they’ve already done most of the work once tax return season comes.
In this time when we’re doing everything on our phones, being able to access your accounting system through an app isn’t a brilliant bonus, it’s what we should have come to expect. We should be able to raise invoices while we’re on the train, we should be able to reconcile our bank accounts while we’re waiting to board a flight, and we should be able to do this for an affordable monthly subscription with no upfront costs, of course we should. The thought that we do everything on our phones except for accounting just seems bizarre. I really think the “bag of receipts accounting system” will soon be a thing of the past, and I can’t wait, we just need to spread the message far and wide!
