What is Rescue Work?
We all know the demands bookkeeping can make on our time, our patience and even our knowledge. But let it slide, put it in the too hard basket, go into denial and it can all too easily slip into such a state that you, the business owner, simply don’t have the time or energy to deal with it alone. One of the challenges of being a successful business owner is deciding when to delegate work to people who specialize in that area.
Rescue work is the bookwork that needs to be sorted as a priority. This work often becomes a priority because the business owner has got behind with their compliance obligations. Their accountant and/or the Tax Office are likely to be a bit of a catalyst for getting things back up to date. They will also be concerned about the integrity of the information recorded in the accounts.
Similarly, it can become apparent to business owners and their professional advisers that there are problems within the accounts that are not readily solved without specialist knowledge and experience. The online accounting packages are easy to use but not quite so easy to get right without a sound understanding of the bookkeeping process.
Typical problems around the integrity of the accounts include:
• The bank balances don’t match the actual bank statements even though all the bank transactions have been accounted for or marked off.
• There are several unreconciled items even though all the bank transactions have been accounted for or marked off.
• The inventory expected from the figures in the accounting package might not match the actual inventory on hand.
• Invoices that have been paid may still be showing as unpaid.
• Leave taken by staff may not have been recorded at the time.
• Leave may not have been accrued properly for staff.
• The Balance Sheet might show liabilities such as Wages or Super Payable when everything is really paid up.
Rescue work is promptly tackling bookkeeping and record-keeping issues with efficient, professional solutions that also provide clarity and peace of mind. An experienced bookkeeper can remove the confusion and uncertainty that surrounds such matters and provide the business owner with a satisfying sense of control and confidence.
If any of these scenarios are ringing alarm bells for you, please feel free to contact us at SWAG Bookkeeping for business solutions tailored to your needs.
Go Back to Recent News
While searching for information we felt you would find useful, I ran across a PC Magazine article that tested online survey companies. Checking over their findings, I decided to share with you SurveyMonkey because it is a good natural product for all company levels.
Surveys are used to support almost any aspect of a business that intersects with an audience. It can gather findings for digital marketing campaigns, customer service, helpdesk, employee satisfaction and event feedback. There is a free level for you to start off with and see if it is something your company can use, later changing to a plan that will work best.
You can create a survey from scratch or use their one of their many templates, then send off via email, text or social media. It allows you to filter, compare and analyse the survey results as they arrive in real-time. The data is then displayed in charts and tables to help you better understand and what it means for your company.
You can find out more about them by clicking here.
Teamwork Projects enables you to stay on track of your projects and deliver them on time. Its workflows are intelligently streamlined to be effective for your processes. Key features include instant comprehensive reports, Gantt charts, milestones, time tracking, and task management. The best part is you can perform task coordination, documentation, and communication in one place to make your team’s work more productive.
Teamwork Desk empowers you to effortlessly manage all your tickets and inbound communication. It is a support hub for help doc creation and inbound communication that allows your team to work 24/7. You can measure traffic channels, tam productivity, and customer satisfaction. This module is seamlessly integrates with Teamwork Projects and the other tools you use.
Teamwork also offers a Chat tool for free as an alternative to Slack. You can attach files, search conversations and mobile chant with this free app.
Why did Sheree choose Teamwork over Asana? The software provides systems that come with basic and advanced tools that are not as confusing as the other well-known platforms. We can organize our projects, teams, resources, schedules and more with ease and speed. It will allow us to collaborate effectively with members of our team as well as our clients. Another feature she liked is we can go mobile because it is compatible with iPhone, iPad, Android, Google Chrome and the Web.
Overview of Teamwork Features
We hope this helps you with your business. Remember we are always here for you. For more on Teamwork click below.
Do your own bookkeeping but avoid these MISTAKES
Cloud-based technology and the advent of Xero have been game-changers in the world of bookkeeping. Historically, bookkeeping was tied to a computer and a location and involved paper records. Today desktops are being replaced by internet browsers.
With cloud accounting, records are able to be managed in digital form and accessed from pretty much any device, from any location as long as the user has access to the internet, although it should be noted that this is not entirely true for the very popular MYOB AccountRight Online. This is a hybrid package for which you still need downloaded software on your device to access your file online.
The technology provides for automatic bank feeds which allow transactions to be imported into your file directly from the bank pretty much in real time, although a delay of a day is not uncommon.
The software is intuitive and easy to use and empowers business owners to take control of their bookkeeping. Unfortunately, this can encourage over-confidence in the software packages.
It is not always apparent what is happening in the background of the accounting package, and our bookkeeping service finds itself being called upon more and more often to identify and rectify issues that make it apparent that the bookkeeping records are not quite right.
Irrespective of which accounting package is chosen, we see the same mistakes being made and these are readily avoided with a bit more understanding of what is happening behind the scenes.
The bookkeeping file commences on a certain date, often the first day of a new financial year. If the business has already been operating before adopting Xero, there will have been transactions on the account. The bank accounts and credit cards will have balances – opening balances. Unless you tell Xero what these balances are, Xero assumes they are zero.
Automatic bank feeds are a major benefit of online accounting packages, but they start on a particular day. If the bank feed commences a week after the conversion date, any transactions that occurred before this date will not have been downloaded to your file. These need to be either recorded or imported manually –
The online packages record the wage/salary expense through their payroll function. The actual payment of the net wage, super and PAYG withholding tax is then meeting the liability that has been accrued as a result of the wage being recorded. The payment out of the bank account should be recognized as the payment of this liability and recorded against the liability accounts ie. wages payable or super payable. If the bank transaction is posted as an expense item, the payroll expense is incorrectly duplicated.
Automatic bank feeds make bookkeeping easier and more
For businesses using Paypal where the Paypal expense is debited from their main operating account, the Paypal debit from the operating account is often recorded as an expense instead of a transfer. The expense will be recorded in the Paypal account. The debit out of the operating account is only a transfer of money and should be recorded as such, otherwise, the expense is recorded twice.