This episode is sponsored by Swizznet. Learn more at https://www.swizznet.com/
Jason Richelson, CEO at bookkeep™, joins Dawn to discuss the importance of implementing automation in your accounting practice, and how bookkeep™ can streamline all of your bookkeeping across many platforms, even popular eCommerce applications. Listen now to learn how bookkeep™ can help your accounting firm!
Jason begins his conversation with Dawn by expressing the importance of implementing automation to execute your bookkeeping properly. He talks about all the payment and eCommerce apps on the market now, like Shopify, Amazon, Square, Sezzle, etc.., and says it’s impossible to keep track of all your deposits manually—with bookkeep™, you don’t have to. Jason also explains how automation is the future; more and more applications are going to implement payment processing features, and bookkeep™ is constantly improving their products to offer more integrations with new applications.
Dawn also expresses her concern with other apps on the market, and how many of them lack functionality to properly account for and manage sales tax, and how these can set business owners up for failure in the event of a sales tax audit. Jason agrees and says he didn’t even know about sales tax audits until he met Dawn. Jason discusses how difficult it is to keep track of all the different fees and rules that each payment product possesses, and how bookkeep™ will keep your balances in sync and ensure you are recording your sales taxes properly.
Jason also talks about bookkeep’s™’ plans to integrate apps like UberEats and DoorDash into their automation software, and how many of these apps make it difficult for bookkeepers and accountants to access their client’s data. Jason says he encourages other accountants and bookkeepers to reach out to these applications, and express the need to access these records. bookkeep™ is alwayways looking for new ways to integrate with new products, and strives to move forward with new technology so that you and your clients can run your businesses easily and efficiently.
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Transcript
Dawn Brolin
Hi, everyone, my name is Dawn Brolin. I’m a certified public accountant, Certified Fraud Examiner and president of Powerful Accounting Inc, and the author of the designated motivator for accounting professionals. And I’m here today to talk to you a little bit about a new application that I found. Actually, it’s a hosting solution called Swizznet. And what’s awesome about it is if you’re somebody who’s looking to continue working in a desktop environment, but you want to be able to work securely from anywhere, and have your clients also have access to that data file. Swizznet is a great resource for you. Now, one of the key things I always tell people is, when it comes to a hosting solution, the number one, well, the number one thing is that they’re extremely secure. So we have that solved with Swizznet. But not only that, but the support that they can give you as you go through your day or through your year, we need to be able to have that access to support. And the great thing about Sizznet, it’s 24/7. If you’re working on the weekends or checking in at night, and you have an issue for whatever reason, either logging in, or an application isn’t working properly within the hosting solutions site. They’re there to help support you. So if you have not figured out that having a hosting solution is absolutely critical to your success when it comes to your tech stack, now’s the time, check out Swizznet, Swizznet.com Thanks so much for listening. Keep your data secure.
All right. Hello, everybody. And welcome back to the DM Disruption. I’m here today with one of my favorite apps ever. And my favorite people ever. Jason Richelson with bookkeeping. And I’ll tell you what, we’re we’re here today to give you the message that this app is out there fighting for our lives, we as the county professionals, and I would take it even a step further to say that they are out there trying to service and fight for small business. Because small businesses are the ones who are using or need to be using apps like bookkeeper to automate their bookkeeping in a way number one, it’s accurate. And number two, that we get the books done, we get them done right so we can service more people. So Jason, thank you so much for coming today. Introduce yourself so people know who the heck you are. Because everyone needs to know you!
Jason Richelson
Yeah, yeah, my name is mine, I’m Jason. I started bookkeeping about four years ago, as a bookkeeping and accounting firm. And we actually still have 50 clients. So we have three full time bookkeepers on staff. But as part of that bookkeeping and accounting that we did, I started automating a lot of the work that didn’t need to be done manually. And through that effort, we ended up launching apps in the QuickBooks App Store, which helps you automate your sales reporting and your deposit reconciliation, which is something that is still done manually. And usually incorrectly by I would say, at least half the accounting teams out there, even in big companies.
Dawn Brolin
Yes, and I will tell you, I’ll give you a great example. Because today, I was working on a tax return. And I’m looking at the balance sheet. And I’m like, this isn’t right now like now I have been held up. Yeah, I have to stop. I have this and like you’re saying there are so many people who are still doing things manually, or what’s even worse, I think, is that they are trying to automate, but the solutions they’re choosing are not ideal. So the information isn’t coming in correctly. And that’s where they always say well why would Intuit put an app on their site that if their integration really isn’t that good? Well, I love I would love to know the answer that but I can tell you bookkeep™ has it nailed because I use them with clients. And it’s really about its year end and we’re trying to get books done so we can get tax returns done. So instead of just rushing through the process, stop for a minute and say hey, is there something out there that can help me? And bookkeepers one of them?
Jason Richelson
Yeah, we try. We do proper accrual accounting. If you’re in retail restaurant ecommerce, even, you know, donations is there’s a bunch of industries as well. Ticketing, you need to do proper proper accounting entries when payments are received. So leave ticketing aside because because that’s a little different, but but we post proper accrual daily sale summaries on the day they happen and help you reconcile the payment deposits. And when you think of why this is so important, if you’re just using Square, our app works very well, better than the QuickBooks one because our app takes the full summary and and puts it into QuickBooks and then we match the deposits when they come as well. That’s pretty simple. But when you think about something like a Shopify store, and where they’re also selling on Amazon seller, but also on Shopify, they’re taking Sezzle. And they’re taking Shopify installments, of course, because you have no option, they just it just happens, as well as a bunch of other payment types that are your opportunities that you can use on Shopify, you really need to have that full summary of the whole day posted. And then those payments deposits are going to come in. So you need to have that balance reconciled and synced to Shopify or whatever payment system is. So you want your Sezzle balanced in Shopify in QuickBooks to match what Sezzle is going to pay you, including the fees, or net of the fees so that when that deposit comes in, we can match it up and your balances stays in sync in QuickBooks to Sezzle. If you’re using Shopify installments, the same fusion Shopify payments, Amazon seller, you probably also have PayPal, you probably also have Stripe, you might also have Venmo. And all of these balances are money that you have like your bank account balance, like your credit card balance, you must keep those in sync. It’s part of your job as a bookkeeper. But there’s up until now not been any automation that lets you do that. So and as apps keep coming up with new ways to take payments, new ways to sell you can sell on Facebook, you can sell on Instagram you can sell on Tik Tok, it gets ready for the the what I call the voiceless bookkeeper and accountant who have no say in it your clients selling on Tik Tok. Great, that’s another deposit in the checking account that I have to figure out what are the fees? You know, so we don’t automate that yet. But we’ve we want to basically automate all of that just like your banking feed. So you can just connect all these apps, we will post the proper accounting entries, we will match it to the deposits and make sure that your books are accurate. So you can close those books days after the month is ended.
Dawn Brolin
Right. And so one of the things that I know that I get really frustrated with is people tend to accept the bank feeds and QuickBooks as the Bible. Right. So then like, Oh, we got bank fees we don’t have what do we need this app for? We get it all through the bank feeds. Well, you’re not getting the right numbers for the bank feeds. And, and of course, one of those big things is tax return. The sales tax returns are not being prepared correctly, because the reports coming out of QuickBooks are not..we don’t have gross sales. We have net sales. Yeah, that’s not okay. You’re setting yourself up for failure in the event of an audit.
Jason Richelson
Exactly. And and I until I met you, I didn’t even know that about that potential issue. I know that you’re not paying your sales tax, right. Yes, audit. There’s IRS audits, but there’s also sales tax audits. I do think I mean, I work with so many accounts and bookkeepers, I see so many books, and even, I’ve worked with companies that are doing millions and millions of dollars a year in sales. And it always I just can’t believe that so many accountants and bookkeepers still take that deposit and post it to income. That is completely wrong. You cannot, you could do that many years ago, when your credit card deposits were like the only thing you got, and they were gross, it was exactly totaled. And it didn’t have fees taken out. But those deposits include sales tax and tips. So still, you can’t look at the income unless you know what those are. Now those deposits include sales tax and tips. But they they then take out the fees. If you’re on Square, right, taking out your loans. If you’re on Square, they’re also potentially taking out a savings amount that you might have, as well as any debit card transactions from that balance. So the world has changed. And if people start using these debit cards on their payment balance, like Square, you know, PayPal has had that we know and a lot of bookkeepers are like I won’t touch PayPal. But now squares going to become the same thing. Shopify is going to become the same thing with their debit card. It. So anyway, our system will help you automate that so that your balances stay in sync and you don’t really you know, you don’t have to worry about it.
Dawn Brolin
Right. And so I think, you know, part of the part of our conversation today the I think the biggest message to the accountants are, hey, listen, we’ve, you’ve had businesses in the past, I think that that makes a big difference to you’ve had this doesn’t mean you have businesses still but I’m saying, you know, you’ve had retail, retail, I’ve had to deal with retail, and you’re dealing with the this whole process of the bookkeeping, when you were looking likely to an accountant to solve the problem, and they couldn’t solve the problem. So if they could, it was expensive. You’ve created a tool that we the accountants can use to help our small businesses. And I think that that’s one of the pieces sometimes we as accountants have to understand. Like, yes, it’s about us, right?We want everything to be about us, right? Yeah. But really, at the end of the day, it’s you properly, being a trusted adviser and using tools that ensure that the books are correct. And we talked about that a little bit before I started the session today, but come on, man do the books, right? I mean, I don’t do bookkeeping anymore because I’m not good at it. Right? So just focus enough to do it. So, you know, we want to be able to have these tools. And this is what you guys are you’re providing like yours, let’s talk about how, you know that advocating with with company saying, Hey, listen, we need this done this way because of this, and they don’t care most. Right, right.
Jason Richelson
Yeah, that’s where, you know, we built we have about 25, maybe a few more connectors. So you know, Sezzle, Shopify, Square, Stripe, PayPal, Amazon seller, we got a bunch of them. And then some cannabis point of sales and bunch of a bunch of different apps. The ones that we want are like an Uber Eats, or DoorDash. We do have a GrubHub connector, but it doesn’t work as well as we want. But the reason that we don’t is because those those apps, those sales apps don’t provide access to the data in an automated fashion. So and and as a bookkeeper, I mean, I know why do you book those deposits? Say you get a deposit from UberEATS? Why do you just book it to income? What cuz I don’t know what it is, and that my owner hasn’t given me a login. I’ve asked him 20 times, and I still don’t get the login. So what am I supposed to do? Right? And honestly, if you had, if you had to tell that owner to provision an Uber Eats login, so you could log in, you wouldn’t be able to explain it. And it’s really hard, actually, I’ve done it for my own business. So UberEATS needs to make it easy to make they UberEATS is just an example of all a lot of these apps, they need to think about the downstream implications of the data that they’re creating for accounting purposes. And so I want to help advocate for the whole accounting community, like, you know, I want to we’ll figure out ways, but we’re gonna, we’re gonna probably start a nonprofit to just sort of advocate for accountants and bookkeepers that hey, UberEATS, we need to talk to you about making this data available, it could just be a spreadsheet attachment, you know, Uber Eats, they, what they do is they send out an email with a link that you have to log back in to download the report. Well, if you don’t have a login, that doesn’t work anyway. So there’s different ways that it can be done. It doesn’t always have to be through API’s, but we want to help advocate for that make the problem known to cause some of them, they just don’t know where UberEats is probably like, I, we’ve never talked to accountants, they never talked to us, they don’t buy our software. So we need to make it known that, hey, there’s other people involved. There’s other stakeholders involved.
Dawn Brolin
Absolutely. And so, you know, as we’re, as we’re having this conversation, if, you know, we’ve just gone through 2021, we’re all done, you know, we’re getting these file we’re getting, we’re in contact with the business owners again, of course, some of them are those, we just see him once a year, you know, and I don’t prefer that I would like to see them throughout the year. But one of the things that I was excited about as these one once a year people are coming in, we’re able to set them up with this connection between their QBO file and and their whatever it is maybe Square a lot of people have come in this year, we’ve got to get new Square accounts. Now how do you determine if you square or not? Well, here’s the secret look at their bank statement, the bank is gonna say or even your bank fee that you’ve been, you know, committed to for, you know, like you’re married to it. So you see that there are some square transactions. Now, it’s immediately time to have a conversation. Because what’s great is bookkeep™ can actually go historically and pull in historical data. I think that’s a game changer. Honestly, the fact that you can pull that historic data.
Jason Richelson
Yeah we can pull…we ran a bunch of stuff in January, we did a bunch of history, as people are trying to catch up on on multiple years. And we do and remember, we don’t post transactions, we post accrual summaries on those days. That is how proper accounting is done. Going back 20 years before Silicon Valley thought that transactions and data and more data. If you’re a bookkeeper, you would like a perfect little summary of what that day entailed that’s going to match to your payment deposit well or somewhat match. It doesn’t really match anymore. Exactly. But but we do proper summaries and we can run all the way back, yeah, as far in history as you need to go for for Square, Shopify, and the others.
Dawn Brolin
And so what a lot what that does is you do that one time connection. And now it’s set it and forget it, which we did a webinar last week about that. So set it and forget to set it up once you’re done. And what’s great is if you think about it, let’s talk about making money. All right, I’m pretty sure that everyone listening enjoys making money. Okay? That’s we’re not in business to break even just as much as our clients are. If you have people and a lot of people do value pricing on bookkeeping, so they’re gonna say it’s going to be 1000 bucks a month 1000, whatever it may be, and the price may be high, because you have had to manually post all this stuff. Right? So one of a couple things can happen. One, you can start servicing more clients because you’re not spending all your time hunting and pecking. That’s what I call it, with your fingers entering data. So instead you set and forget it, you now can service more clients. And guess what no one said you had to lower your price because you’re not necessarily doing that manually anymore. So you’re gonna make more money, the same money doing less work, and you’ll make more money because you’re gonna be able to bring on instead of 50 or 100 clients, you’re gonna have 500 client. I mean, maybe that’s crazy. But I’m just somebody who has three employees, we are cranking, cranking on revenue, because we’re automating, right? That’s the answer.
Jason Richelson
And yet, right, and you need good automation. I mean, you can, you can have one app in the App Store that does Square, there’s another app that will do Amazon seller. And but then you’re still managing all these different apps. I mean, what we’re trying to do with bookkeeping is in a single location in our app and a single app, you can do all the settings for all the apps that your clients use, we post proper accrual accounting entries, we post proper entries for the deposits, and you don’t have to go to different places. The other thing that saves you time, is that as everyone knows, who’s done any bookkeeping ever, you know, hey, owner, you change the password, I need the new password, or, Hey, I need you to create a password for me, what do you mean create a password for me? How do I do that? What and then they never do it. I mean, even my I’m the same. My bookkeeper is the last person that I respond to, I just don’t care about what happened in the past. Like, I just don’t care. You know, I only think about the future. So I know how difficult it is for accountants and bookkeepers to get to deal with those things that I really I think takes up 20 or 30% of their time, just like I need access to this data that I just lost access to, or you still haven’t given me access to. So we we speed that up, we allow you to then have more clients, we hope our pricing is based off of your time savings. It’s not based off of what the clients doing, the client is doing $10 million a year in sales, or a million dollars, our pricing is the same. It’s one summary entry. You know, we charge based on how many summaries and how many different apps you connect. So it’s not based on the underlying revenue. So that helps you save money, as well, or you can pass it through your client. But, but yes, we we. The other thing that I see about the industry in general is there’s a lot of very sharp accountant/bookkeepers who know what they’re doing. But there’s not enough for all the businesses out there. And there’s probably even more unsophisticated bookkeepers and accountants who don’t know what they’re doing out there. And I mean, every business is looking for that sharp accountant. And there’s a lot of them out there, but they can’t handle all the business. So they those are the ones that we want to help with the automation. And by the way, if you don’t know how to do accounting, our automation is going to show you how to do it properly, because we do it properly. So, you know, a lot of when I started my first wine store, I had no idea how you ring up sales or keep track of anything. So I bought the Microsoft point of sale system, and I bought QuickBooks. And that’s what I learned how I learned how to do accounting and bookkeeping, you know and point of sale. And, and the buyer. They all had proper accounting system set up paparazzi reports, so so you can learn from the software and how to do it. And we hope that you can build a big, much bigger business office automation. I mean, we’re just getting started. We want to do more over time, but but this is a huge time sink in the stuff that we’re solving right now.
Dawn Brolin
Absolutely, absolutely. So Jason, any last thoughts that you want to leave with the listeners today?
Jason Richelson
I just wanted to, you know, say you don’t, I guess I think the big thing is that don’t be afraid of E commerce. There’s automation tools that can help you do it. And don’t be afraid of E commerce because then you’re gonna be out of work. Everything is ecommerce. Everything is ecommerce. It doesn’t matter if it’s a restaurant, or a retail store, if brick and mortar. They’re using online payment systems and they’re probably also selling online and restaurants, half their business is online sales systems. So you have to learn how to do proper accrual sales summaries for all these systems match the deposits there’s really no way around it. If you want to do a write for your clients and but our tool can help you do it and and you know, it’s not that hard to learn it’s pretty simple keeping track of balances and and I recommend you you don’t don’t worry about it and just dive into it.
Dawn Brolin
Absolutely, yeah, it’s a set it and forget it system, you guys and tell you right now, it may it’s made a big difference for us and what we can provide for services to our clients. So let’s just, you know, keep the conversation going. We do webinars, often you’ll see it on the website, we’ve got, you know, all kinds of stuff coming up here in the next few months. Some great opportunities at some events like accounting, web, counting web, live and scaling new heights and engage and all these other places. So keep your minds open. That would be my last thought is keep your minds open to doing it better. Doing it accurately get better. And being the best trusted adviser you can to your clients, which means getting the right tools in place and utilizing them so that the accounting is, is automated and done so you can have bigger conversations with them. And I think that those are just a couple things in my thoughts. But thank you so much for coming to the DM Disruption and listening to us today. We look forward to seeing you on some future webinars and some future podcasts. So Jason, thank you so much for coming bookkeep by the way, really nice jersey with Pittsburgh, so thanks again and talk to you all next time.
Jason Richelson
Thank you.
