Accounts time – we all dislike it right? I’m not even sure that accountants enjoy it really! Although I do get that little buzz when every single penny falls into place!

Our accounts for the last 7 years have been a trial of pain and suffering that lasts several months during which I irritate our accountant no end (I’m quite sure she despairs of me!).

The Past: Quickbooks

We did our first few years accounts in Microsoft Excel, that’s what it’s built for right? Eventually our accountant at the time came clean with us and said that if we continued to do it this way our accountants fees would rise astronomically each year… Not a good idea for a small business!

Their recommendation was Sage, 20 minutes playing with it and we were already sure it wasn’t for us! A few recommendations, a change of accountant and we had QuickBooks installed and running.

Automating QuickBooks

The QuickBooks IIF import format had to be one of the least documented things we’d ever seen at the time, it was painful! You’re probably already aware that we’re not one’s to input information by hand if it’s already in digital format, so hundreds of hours went into our system which grew and gradually got more powerful year by year!

It imported from our existing billing system, married up invoices and payments from PayPal and WorldPay and eventually left us to reconcile thousands of transactions. It being such a pain meant we put it off, and put it off, making it more of a pain, so we put it off some more… Year end would come round and we’d hang our heads in shame and tell the accountant it would “be there soon” as we fought to get the imports in, they worked fine – but we still had all the reconciling to do!

A breath of fresh air: KashFlow

As we recently changed company structure to become a limited company, we now have the luxury of looking at some of the things we’ve used in the past and changing them… When we say some of the things, we actually mean quite a lot of things!

We had a brief chat with Duane Jackson, CEO of KashFlow on Twitter the other night and signed up for their free-trial, in half an hour we’d got our bank statements all loaded in (yes, I did say half an hour!), and after tinkering with our billing system for one part of our business we had every customer and invoice loaded in under 5 minutes.

Simply put, we’re amazed by KashFlow

We were getting tempted already to move the other part of our company to the same billing system, now we’ve seen how it integrates to KashFlow (and can import our old billing system) we’re over the moon and this will probably only accelerate that change!!

Reservations

Nothing’s perfect in life and we’re all aware of that! We’d prefer to buy things outright, we’re not fans of Software as a Service generally, but for their monthly price if they’re going to take away six weeks worth of pain every single year and make our accounts a 20 minute job once a month – we’re sold.

They’ve got a 60 day free trial, and I can see why – just try to import your bank statement today and then decide if you want to use them!

Please note this post contains affiliate links to KashFlow, we think it’s a great service and hope you will too – we’ve spent some time writing this article and would appreciate you using our affiliate link when you signup, it won’t cost you anything extra but will reduce our costs with KashFlow!

As you’re already aware, we love ANYTHING that makes life easier! So when we spotted Zen Coding today we had to take a look!

If you code in HTML at all you should watch this!

We use Aptana here for most of our development, so a lot of coding is automatically done for us – but this adds a whole new dimension (and may remove the need for us remembering regular expressions!).

You can find out all about it and get all the documentation here:
http://code.google.com/p/zen-coding/

The Problem

Our client was receiving a large number of emails every day, his email was already spam filtered so he’d taken care of that (that’s one of the first things we would have advised on!). He’d already taken steps to build up a knowledgebase of articles relating to the most common queries (and some of the uncommon ones), but was tired of answering the same query time and time again.

The Office Automation Solution

We created a range of scripts which would scan his inbox on an hourly basis and taken action on as much of his email as possible (in a very Inbox Zero fashion), with actions such as:

• Delete
  Deleting anything that was blank, rude(!) or that he just wouldn’t want to read.
• Delegate
  Forward the email on to a colleague, friend or anyone else for that matter – along with a cover note.
• Respond
  Based on a series of keywords found in the email we were able to respond with links to appropriate articles or information on his site.
  
• Defer
  Place the item on an online ToDo list for him to action at a later date.
  

All these items were logged and placed into a report which was emailed to his own private blackberry address so he could see exactly what state his inbox and the business was in, leaving him to:

• Do
  Respond directly to queries that the script couldn’t resolve (or follow-up queries), work on deferred items, or do exactly what he wanted to!

All in all this took our clients inbox away from him, and he found himself answering 10 emails per day, with a little fine tuning and additions to both the script and his knowledgebase we got this down to 3-4 emails a day.

Have you ever wished you only had to answer 3-4 emails per day, and all the rest were taken care of for you?