Hi there, it’s Sam Buckley from Wealth Safe and welcome to this week’s edition of wealth chat. This week, I’d like to talk to you about bookkeeping software.

The main bookkeeping software on the market

Now there are several things out there on the market these days, there are a lot of free versions that you can use online, most of you have probably heard of Quickbooks and Myob, they are the main two players in the game.

Now these guys used to be based on a CD. You buy the CD, you take it to work, and you would install it on the computer. If you needed to install it on several computers, it would generally cost you one licence per computer, so it can become really costly.

The other problem is that if your computer breaks down you’ve lost your goods, and if you don’t have a good backup in place, you’ve lost everything, all your data and all your information. Now that’s not fun, that would be pretty nightmarish in business. It has happened to me personally once before when I lost some data because the computer died, and it took hours to get it all back from scratch again for the tax office.

Now these two players, because they are the big players of the game, they have to keep up with technology and advances. As you know, loads of things to go on the cloud these days.

What that means is that instead of paying for the CD to be posted out to you from the shop every year at an exorbitant price (you looking at 5 to 6 hundred dollars and a lot of time to get a good business version of them), now all you need to do is subscribe to these online: so you have Myob Online, you have Quickbooks Online (I think they change the name to Intuit) and the one that we use is Xero.

3 immediate benefits of online bookkeeping software

Now, the benefits of online software are several, but the ones that I want to touch on today are these:

1. All your data is safely stored in the Cloud, available from multiple devices

You can’t lose your data if your computer dies, it’s stored in the cloud; If your computer dies, you can just buy a new one, log in and you are ready to rock’n’roll, everything is there.

2. Flexibility & openness to teamwork

The other one is if you have people who don’t work in the office, this is a very regular occurrence these days; people tend to want work flexibility, and a lot of people actually need that, like mothers with small children, who would like to stay in the workforce, but they would like also to be more involved with the kids.

So flexibility that’s around these days allows people to do that; if they are bookkeepers or work in the account department working from home with the cloud software enables them to log in from home with no need to be at the computer at work, and they can still access all the data, which is really fantastic.

3. Faster payments from clients

The other thing which is really great (we found it in Xero) is that it does things like e-mailing the invoices.

But the really beautiful thing about this is…

Say you want to encourage your customer to pay more instantly as soon as they get the email, they want to pay what’s hot, they grab the email and say “I’ve got a bill I have to pay, I should pay that now”.

What Xero can do is that if you have a Paypal account, you can actually connect that to your invoice, so when they receive that PDF copy in the email there’s a link in it that says “Pay Now” that will get you straight to PayPal for them to log on and pay it directly. That’s REALLY cool!

Last week we talk about the importance of having a bookkeeper, so they can do the job properly it’s really important to have great bookkeeping software. So, that’s my recommendation for today on bookkeeping software.

Store your receipts online using CamScanner

Another thing that I want to talk to you about quickly while at the top of the software is a freebee. This one is called CamScanner. I love this: if you have a smartphone (an Android or an IPhone) you can download this app called CamScanner.

What that does is when you get receipts for a meal, for accommodation, fuel… any number of things; what you can do is instead of squash up and fill your wallet, you can actually on the spot grab this piece of software and you take a photo like you would take a photo and what you can do then is to optimize the image so it looks very clear for your bookkeeper, give it a name.

The beauty of it is that you can either email it or you can place it on Dropbox from your phone; there are other options as well! So then you no longer need that piece of paper, you can throw it out and you don’t have to clog up your wallet.

So, that’s my extra tip for today, it’s Sam Buckley from Wealth Safe, thanks!