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Why do I need Receipt Bank, when I can take photos of my expenses through Xero?

My favourite Xero add on, which I pretty much always recommend to everyone, is Receipt Bank. Now here's my problem. If you ask me what Receipt Bank does, I'll tell you with great enthusiasm that it's fantastic; you take photos of your expenses and it pushes them into Xero, creating the purchase invoice and attaching a copy of your photo to it. But you can do that on Xero, you reply, bursting my bubble. Quite often, I am then shown how you can take a photo of your expense via the ...

Strategy - How to outfox your competitors

I'm sure we've all seen the statistics on how many businesses fail within the first five years of trading. For any new start up, it's a scarily high percentage to read as it ranges from 50 to 80% depending on who you trust. Of course there are many reasons why a business will fail. No market. No cash. Poor profit. Underfunded. The list goes on. However I often wonder how many businesses have a strategy. A proper strategy. Too often the plan seems to work along the lines of "if I buil...

"How to win an award" - by someone who ALMOST won an award

Let's start (self-indulgently) with a paragraph about me. In June 2015 I left the comfort of employment to do some freelance subcontracting work whilst l researched the cloud accounting software that was changing the face of accountancy. In Oct 2015 I decided to set up a bookkeeping practice which focused on this "new" technology. In July 2016, with the help of some glowing testimonials from my clients, I was shortlisted for the technology champion at the AccountingWeb Practice Excellence award...

Can I avoid getting a bookkeeper? - Embrace the cloud

Well, yes, no and maybe. Are you aware of the business growth graph? It's popped up in several business books that I've read over the years and it basically looks like this very crude version that I have created on Paint. ...

KPIs - Friend or Foe?

There's an old business saying which is "what you can measure, you can manage". This is completely true of course but it's kind of unhelpful as ultimately you can measure pretty much everything in your business. So once you get a good bookkeeping system in place giving you accurate information every month, or even week, the temptation is to want to monitor everything. KPIs are a lovely accountancy buzz word. It stands for Key Performance Indicator. A KPI is effectively anything within your...

Bookkeeping: Chances are you are doing it wrong

Bookkeeping has changed. I've had several meetings this month where I have been shown bookkeeping that was either very time consuming to do or a mammoth data entry task. Because bookkeeping is my job, my goal is to always make it as efficient a task as possible. To lots of you, bookkeeping is probably a boring, mundane and time absorbing task. Maybe you do your bookkeeping on an evening or a weekend. Maybe your VAT Return is always left to the last minute and always takes far longer than ...

Remove the barriers to purchasing – the $300 million button

The other night, my partner and I wanted to make a purchase from Laura Ashley's online store. We'd chosen the items that we wanted and then began the process of checking out. Up until that point the shopping process had been fine. But then we hit the barrier – our email address had already been used to set up an account and we wouldn't be allowed to continue until we'd entered our password. Needless to say, neither of us could remember the password so after several failed attempts we decided...

The Dangers of Discounting - Beware of the Sale

Weather aside, we are now fully into the summer and with that comes the end of summer Sales. Over the years we've become accustomed to more and more Sales during the year and along with that, greater and greater discounts. From a retail point of view, it can become brutal. How much to do discount your products by? How low do you ultimately go? ...

Why you really should use technology for your accounting (but never do so for efficiency)

Is efficiency a meaningless word? The trend in accountancy and bookkeeping at the moment is to move over to cloud based accounting software. This is generally because you can automate the data entry side of things and therefore, as the software providers tell us, become more efficient. But what is the point of running an efficient business if you have no need for that efficiency. In some cases, being what others may consider "inefficient" could be absolutely fine. In my world, efficiency ...

Budgeting - Is it worth your time?

If you went by all of the business articles out there, business gurus and coaches, posts on social media etc. then we all want to grow our businesses. We all want bigger and better businesses… I guess you want to be running at least three dental practices. Have a mini empire. The reality is however, that some of us are okay. Yes some new patients would be nice; maybe even some more private work or a new income stream but nothing that is going to rock the Dental industry. So when do we tend t...

Why numbers and logic are sometimes wrong: the power of framing

If there was a fight between someone in finance and someone in marketing, who would win? The answer is pretty much always the person from finance. This is because when it comes to your business, the financial element will nearly always dictate what you do. This is the department in your business that will set budgets and look at return of investment. That's not a bad thing. Ultimately you are in business to make money so you don't want to throw money at apparently great ideas that will achieve ...

Why you need bookkeeping to be successful

I'm really passionate about bookkeeping. I've been lucky to work for some very forward thinking accountancy firms and what this has taught me is that compliance is valueless. Yes you need to produce year end accounts, that's a given, but if you take a step back and think about it for a moment, what do you get from that? It's just your tax bill isn't it? Have you ever looked at your annual accounts, reviewed the figures and taken these as the starting point to push your Dental Practice forwa...

What information does your accountant need to prepare your accounts and tax return?

With the Tax Return deadline fast approaching, there are probably thousands of business owners frantically packing a year's worth of receipts into bags and boxes, ready to drop them into their accountant's office. Invariably, this unique filing system is flawed, so it is likely that a phone call from the accountant will follow. Possibly asking for additional bank statements, maybe even asking for paperwork that relates to the correct tax year.So if you are that business owner, here is a breakdow...

Success loves preparation: forecasting, budgets and rugby

I love numbers. I'm not someone who will spend several hours looking for a 10p rounding difference, or need everything explained to me to three decimal places, but I understand how important they are to a businesses success. I make no secret of the fact that I am a massive fan of cash flows, budgets and forecasts. Yawn you might say, but stay with me whilst I explain… Let's forget about numbers and dentistry and actually, let's forget about business as well. Instead let's imagine that you are...

What is the difference between accountancy and bookkeeping?

The line that divides accountancy and bookkeeping is very grey but this is mainly due to the occupants of these industries rather than the industries themselves. When you have a large number of accountants offering bookkeeping services and just as many bookkeepers offering to do your year end accounts, of course things are going to get confusing. So what is the difference? I'm sure you are aware of the saying "look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves". Well the bookkeep...

The top 5 bookkeeping mistakes that you could be making right now

Not everyone wants to outsource their bookkeeping. If you have a head for numbers and the capacity in your workload to take it on, keeping the bookkeeping in house may seem like the preferred option. However, great bookkeeping is more than entering figures into a spreadsheet, so I'm going to run through the most common mistakes I see being made on a regular basis and tell you how to rectify them. ...

Why a great bookkeeper could be bad for your Dental Practice - how to outsource your bookkeeping

Making the decision to outsource anything is always tough. If you're like me then you tend to outsource because there is a particular task that needs doing, but you don't have the expertise to undertake it yourself. The biggest thing that I've outsourced so far has been my website. Being the hub of my marketing I knew it was too important for it to be something that I just had a go at myself. However, even though web design is not a skill that I have, handing it over to someone else was still re...

Xero and Receipt Bank: unlocking the power of today

I've always been someone who loves manually typing up a big bank reconciliation onto excel. I enjoy getting a big box of records from a client and spending days having to work my way through it all. I was trained to do my bookkeeping using T accounts and large pieces of paper. I should be someone who hates all this modern automation. I should hate Xero with its blue blob and Receipt Bank with its mass of orange. But I don't. I love it. Having all of your business figures at your finger tips wh...

5 reasons why you need a dental specialist accountant and bookkeeper

Choosing your accountant or bookkeeper is never a fun task. I doubt it'll ever be on the top of any business owner's to do list. However, as with anything finance related, it is a very important decision. You will all have your own list of what ranks one accountant or bookkeeper over another and it is not my place to tell you whether qualifications should weigh more than experience or vice versa. That said, a nice balance of the two is a great start. If anyone seems too cheap then you'll probabl...

If smarties have the answers, who has the questions?

I've read several accountancy blogs recently where they interview business owners. When discussing figures the business owner is always quoted as saying that their accountant is "doing the numbers". It gives the impression that they have a checklist of jobs and once they've engaged the services of an accountant a big tick is put in the box next to the numbers. Ah great, they say, no need to deal with those pesky numbers again. Now having worked in accountancy firms for over ten years I can conf...

Be a pear in a world of apples - how to break the price barrier

I was talking to a business coach the other week and was trying to explain why it can be so hard to market a service. The first problem is a service isn't tangible; so a potential client can't pick it up or return it with a receipt if they decide they don't like it. The other problem is that potential clients will naturally focus on the A and B; the "I need to do a Tax Return" and "I can do Tax Returns" checklist. The thing is, with a service the journey between A and B will be different dependi...

Me, Myself and I: the three people who run your Dental Practice

Have you read the E-Myth? If not then I really recommend this book, or at least the first half as it does tend to get a little "woo" towards the end. You might like a bit of "woo" but I'm not bothered by it. To take the whole book and reduce it down to a sentence: in order to run a successful Dental Practice you need to be a Manager, a Technician and an Entrepreneur. It is important to be these three people although you cannot be them all at once. The myth that the book refers to is that it's ...