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!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Really pleased that you’re pleased!
Do you still work with IIF files? You’ll be able to import customer and supplier data from IIF files within a couple of weeks.
If you have IIF files containg sales/purchase data then send them to support FAO me and we’ll see if we can get it to support those too.
It certainly is. Settings -> Import Data
and you can save various mappings too. Contact the support team if you need any help with it.