The data that your bookkeeper needs to enter in QuickBooks comes from different sources, including bank statements and other banking records. In this episode of MissionBusinessPodcast.com Bernard Roesch shares how to store that information and provide it to your bookkeeper in a secure and easy way.
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What Data Does Your Bookkeeper Need
Your bookkeeper needs a few different pieces of information in order to do your bookkeeping.
- The first thing they need is bank statements such as checking account statements, credit card statements, and other bank statements. Your bookkeeper will use this information to update QuickBooks with banking information from each transaction on a statement.
- Vendor bills are also needed by your bookkeeper in order to keep track of bills and to pay bills in QuickBooks.
- Estimates and invoice records also need to be provided to your bookkeeper if you’re not currently doing invoicing directly within QuickBooks.
This information is important for your bookkeeper to have so that they are able to centralize transactions from all of these sources into QuickBooks.
How to Organize Accounting Records
Since all of these pieces of information come from different sources, it’s important that you as a business organize this data efficiently.
The first step is gathering the information so that you can give it to the bookkeeper.
- For bank statements, you can provide read-only access to your online banking account or provide a PDF copy of the bank statements.
- For vendor bills, you can ask vendors to provide these bills electronically and provide them to your bookkeeper.
- For estimates and invoices, these will already be stored within QuickBooks if you generated them within QuickBooks. If you use an external estimating or invoice software, you should be able to get digital versions that you provide to your bookkeeper.
Once you have compiled your statements and other accounting records, you need to store it in a secure way and provide it to your bookkeeper. There are a number of ways to do this. But an easy and secure way is to use cloud storage.
- You can use a tool like www.hubdoc.com to securely store this data and provide it to your bookkeeper.
- Hubdoc also can be configured to automatically gather this information every month. This makes it easy for you to configure it one time and then be confident knowing that your bookkeeper has access to only the data they need.
If you don’t use a tool like Hubdoc, it’s important that you gather this information each week or each month, depending on your bookkeeping schedule. Also, make sure your cloud storage system is secure so that only the bookkeeper has access to it.
How to Keep Bookkeeping Secure
While the above information should help you keep your actual accounting data secured, it’s important that you consider how to work with an actual bookkeeper. It may not be realistic for you to separate accounts receivable and accounts payable as best practice in accounting recommends since you’re a small business with limited resources. However, there are a few things you can do to improve the security of your bookkeeping process.
- Don’t delegate writing checks or moving funds between bank accounts. This is something that should be done by you even if you have your bookkeeper managing other parts of the bookkeeping process.
- Make it clear that you review the bookkeeping data, reports, etc. If your bookkeeper understands that you are not hands-off with the bookkeeping work, then the odds of the bookkeeper committing fraudulent activity is much lower.
- Hire a bookkeeping team you can trust. It’s important that you vet potential bookkeepers based on their work history, customer references, and, ideally, a referral from someone you trust.
We Can Help You
By organizing the information that your bookkeeper needs and providing it in a secure way, you can make bookkeeping easier for your bookkeeper and easier for you as a business.
If you need help structuring your bookkeeping, contact Bernard today. You can also visit MissionBusinessPodcast.com for more insights that Bernard has been sharing with us in the previous episodes.
Need to find the right QuickBooks software for your business? MISSION Accounting can help.
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