My Accounting Workflow

By Sarah Sunday

As a very small business owner, it’s up to me to make sure my books are kept organized and accurate. Not only that, I am the one invoicing my clients and marking that payments are received. I do have an accountant that does my taxes and answers esoteric questions on how to do certain things in Quickbooks, but, asides from that, it’s on me to make sure my business runs smoothly from an accounting standpoint.

Which is made much easier by, well, the existence of the aforementioned Quickbooks and its integrations with two critical sources: Harvest, and my Bank Accounts.

Quickbooks

Quickbooks is its own world and I could write another post just on how I’ve been using it. I’ll just say that it is widely used for a reason.

Harvest

We use Harvest for time tracking and invoicing. Invoices are sent directly via Harvest. I use the Quickbooks Online sync functionality so that invoices and payments are copied to Quickbooks from Harvest.

Invoicing

At the beginning of the month, I go through each client and make an invoice for the previous month’s work. I double check the invoice and then send along to the correct people (Harvest does the emailing/PDF generation).

For clients that pay their invoices online, Harvest automatically marks it as paid. For those that pay by check, I need to manually mark it as paid.

Reporting

Although Quickbooks Online has robust reporting, Harvest is far more convenient for me. It’s also realtime: I can see what our MTD revenue projection is for the current month. Like how are we doing so far against the previous month, and so on.

Bank Accounts

You can connect your bank accounts & credit cards to Quickbooks so transactions are synced. This is what I do. It saves so much time. Our savings, checking, and company credit card transactions are all flowing into Quickbooks automatically. And with the Harvest integration, Quickbooks is sometimes smart enough to match the bank transaction of a payment with the particular invoice payment.

The transaction sync process isn’t entirely automated, though. You still have to go in and categorize the transactions and add any relevant attachments. I do this semi-regularly throughout the month so it doesn’t build up into a long list by the end of the month (i.e. reconciling time).

Reconciling

In the first week of the new month, I reconcile my accounts for the previous month, based on my bank and credit card statements. This is basically a double check that all the transactions are aligned with their source of truth (i.e. the bank).

Overall

It doesn’t take that much time for me to do all of my accounting tasks, as the Quickbooks integrations do most of the work. I don’t see any realistic avenue for me to automate further…the tasks that are still manual need to be manual as they are review steps or require Human verification. It was daunting at first, understanding how everything worked together, how Quickbooks worked, but now that I do, it is a breeze.