Reducing Stress in the Blue Collar Back Office

Your small business may not employ a team of experts in the back office, but you’ve certainly been performing the functions of a number of different roles. Wearing all those hats may start to get tiresome, especially when you have important work to do on the job site every day. And while you may be a pro on the job, chances are you’re not an expert bookkeeper or payroll administrator—and Quickbooks can only get you away from the computer screen for so long.

And that’s okay. You didn’t start this company with dreams of becoming an accountant.

So how can you be sure that your finances are in order and you’re making money on the job site instead of chasing pennies behind the scenes?

It’s time to establish a virtual back office and reduce the stress of running your company.

In a 2018 Gallup Poll, 40% of small business owners reported that their biggest challenges had to do with finances, taxes, or regulations. Another 17% found that finding and retaining reliable employees was most difficult, 12% reported their biggest challenge as finding new business, and 7% reported that working for themselves was their largest hurdle.

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Where Are You?
Running your own business is not easy. You’ve learned this the hard way, through one roadblock or another. But it doesn’t have to fall on your shoulders alone. Which of these responsibilities have you taken on since starting your business?

Some of these are the roles you fit well in, and love to do. But how many of these responsibilities are not your forte, or just not of interest to you? Chances are that you’re far more interested in the work itself and not the back-end tasks that you’ve taken on, but the list of other necessary responsibilities you’re managing may be quickly becoming the longer list.

• Mail/Shipping
• Legal
• Project Management
• Onsite Job Operations
• Office Management
• Estimating
• Human Resources
• Vendor Management
• Compliance
• Accounting
• Receivables
• Payroll
• Marketing
• Billing
• Purchasing
• Reception

How Compliant Are You?
Let’s take it a step further now. Below is a list of common regulations, taxes, and other items of interest that small business owners must comply with.

• Taxes
• Labor Laws
• Antitrust Regulations
• Advertising Regulations
• Environmental Regulations
• Privacy Laws
• State Regulations

There may be some words there that have already raised your blood pressure, or even some that you hadn’t yet considered. For those that are already managing all of these, you know how difficult it can be to balance these responsibilities with the workload of your business’s service offerings.

The good news is that you don’t have to manage these alone.

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Software Solutions

The first step towards freedom in your business is to implement and manage software that eases your bookkeeping burdens. You’ve likely already implemented Quickbooks by Intuit, so let’s explore the efficient solutions included in this massively useful tool. (link to Spoke 2)

Time is Money.
Invoicing without a software system can take days for a business with even a handful of customers. The hours spent creating invoices and sending them to recipients could better be spent working on new projects. Quickbooks makes invoicing a snap, producing invoices and sending them out in minutes, instead of hours. It also makes it easy to follow up with customers who haven’t paid and automate bills for repeating charges.

Quickbooks babysits your finances.
Having a hard time keeping up with the ups and downs of your finances? Quickbooks gives you the ability to stop wading through numbers trying to figure out if you’re in the red or in the black. Dashboards and reports give you an instant view of your profits and losses, giving you more time on the job and confidence in making new deals.

Let technology do the work.
Many small businesses still store finances on offline spreadsheets, logging information manually. This not only takes an excessive amount of time, but leaves your finances open to error—leading to more time and more money lost. Quickbooks can automate your system to save time and ensure accuracy.

Keep your information in one place.
For many of us, bookkeeping looks like this:

• Receive payments via paper mail
• Open spreadsheet or payment record
• Log into bank account
• Cross-reference information
• Fill out spreadsheet or payment record
• File payments in physical folder
• Drive to bank to deposit checks

This takes at least an hour, but likely more for most. Quickbooks can do all of this in minutes, saving you time and money (and gas!). Additionally, it helps cut down on user error. Imagine returning from the bank to learn the power went out and you forgot to save your spreadsheet!

Stop hating the IRS.
No one likes tax time, but small business owners tend to feel the hit more than anyone. Even with the help of an accountant, gathering information from the last twelve months is a hassle, especially when you’re stuck using spreadsheets or paper records. Quickbooks makes it easy to manage your business taxes, whether you’re doing your own or paying an accountant. Your accountant will thank you too, if you hand over a Quickbooks report instead of a stack of invoices and receipts.

Get money when you need it.
Most small businesses will need a loan at some point. Quickbooks makes it easy to gather the information that a bank might need to evaluate your eligibility for a loan quickly, saving you time and effort while giving a clear picture of the state of your finances.

Time is Money.

Invoicing without a software system can take days for a business with even a handful of customers. The hours spent creating invoices and sending them to recipients could better be spent working on new projects. Quickbooks makes invoicing a snap, producing invoices and sending them out in minutes, instead of hours. It also makes it easy to follow up with customers who haven’t paid and automate bills for repeating charges.

Quickbooks babysits your finances.

Having a hard time keeping up with the ups and downs of your finances? Quickbooks gives you the ability to stop wading through numbers trying to figure out if you’re in the red or in the black. Dashboards and reports give you an instant view of your profits and losses, giving you more time on the job and confidence in making new deals.

Let technology do the work.

Many small businesses still store finances on offline spreadsheets, logging information manually. This not only takes an excessive amount of time, but leaves your finances open to error—leading to more time and more money lost. Quickbooks can automate your system to save time and ensure accuracy.

Keep your information in one place.

For many of us, bookkeeping looks like this:

• Receive payments via paper mail
• Open spreadsheet or payment record
• Log into bank account
• Cross-reference information
• Fill out spreadsheet or payment record
• File payments in physical folder
• Drive to bank to deposit checks

This takes at least an hour, but likely more for most. Quickbooks can do all of this in minutes, saving you time and money (and gas!). Additionally, it helps cut down on user error. Imagine returning from the bank to learn the power went out and you forgot to save your spreadsheet!

Human Help

So you have Quickbooks, and you are ready to get your small business bookkeeping in order. But where do you start?

Software, unfortunately, doesn’t immediately run itself. It’s going to require a bit of legwork to get the numbers rolling.

In order to make sure that you’re using Quickbooks to its fullest extent, you’ll have to feed it some information, including:

1. Ensuring that your products, services, and other inventory items are entered into the system.
2. Connecting bank accounts and other financial information.
3. Importing or inputting all of your customer information.
4. Importing or inputting all of your vendor information
5. Importing or inputting all of your employee information.
6. Setting up taxes, deductions, expenses, etc. to fit with your business and your state.

From there, you’ll have a great starting place, but the software itself will still need some human help to keep it moving. Day-to-day management responsibilities include:

1. Entering transaction information.
2. Reviewing overdue accounts and making payments or requests for payment.
3. Invoicing.
4. Running payroll.
5. Updating and managing inventory.

These are just a few things you’ll have to keep up with. Though Quickbooks makes these responsibilities faster and more efficient, the software can’t do it all. If you want to spend more time working on projects, and less time working on your books, then outsourcing your accounting may be the answer.

The Benefits of Outsourced Accounting

Up until the dawn of internet tax services, most people didn’t do their own accounting work. Large corporations hire whole teams of accountants to keep their finances in order. Smaller businesses often hired their bookkeeping out to independent accountants and analysts, which led many to dread tax season.

As businesses like TurboTax became more popular and Quickbooks became more prevalent, many small business owners began trying to take their finances into their own hands. But as much as these innovations have promised convenience, they haven’t always helped. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20% of small businesses fail in the first year, 30% of small business fail in the second year, and 50% of small businesses fail in the fifth year.

The leading reasons for these failures tend to be:

• Tax and regulation compliance issues
• Cashflow hurdles
• Lack of financial planning
• Expanding too fast

These are all issues directly related to bookkeeping and financial awareness, and the greatest software on earth can’t necessarily help unless it’s managed by an expert.

“Everyone who achieves success in a great venture solves each problem as they came. They helped themselves and they were helped through powers known and unknown to them at the time they set out on their voyage. They keep going regardless of the obstacles they meet.” —W. Clement Stone, businessman, philanthropist, and author

How Free Do You Want to Be?

Hopefully by now you’re breathing a sigh of relief, because there are a number of solutions available to help you work smarter at the things you love to do. You are not relegated to the back office for all eternity, and you truly can spend more time on the job and less time at a desk.

Blue Collar Back Office offers answers to most of your daily needs as a small business owner, and is designed specifically for blue collar businesses. If you’re ready to get back onto the job site, then Blue Collar Back Office is ready for you. Our no-frills services are offered “as-needed,” and include:

• Business Support Services
  • Database management
  • Manual Keying
  • Data Processing
  • Data entry
  • Virtual Assistants
• Bookkeeping
  • Enter transactions / data entry
  • Ensure bank records are complete and accurate / bank reconciliation
  • A/R & A/P
  • Set up QuickBooks payroll do it yourself option or full-service payroll
  • Provide P&L and Balance Sheet Statements
  • Create professional proposals for your customers
  • Monthly billing to your customers
  • Easy customer payment from billed invoice
• Financial Reporting
  • Income Statements: (Profit & Loss)
  • Balance Sheets: Assets, liabilities, and capital
  • Accounts Receivable: Balances that are owed to your company by customers
  • Accounts Payable: Balances you owe to other companies for supplies, inventory and services your company receives
  • Budget vs. Actuals: Compares your budgeted income and expenses to the actual amounts

Our staff is comprised of Quickbooks Certified Proadvisors which means our team has passed multiple exams administered by Intuit (the creators of QuickBooks). These yearly exams show that the ProAdvisor is proficient the QuickBooks products, which means that we can help your business with most (if not all) of your accounting and bookkeeping needs.