Hardware Lessons, Software Solutions: Automation in Accounting

My dad owned and ran an independent Ace Hardware store for 43 years. Sometimes he'd bring me in on the weekends. Starting as early as 9 or 10 years old, I gained first-hand experience of the many responsibilities and tasks required of a small business owner.

Some of my earliest memories learning how to use a computer were on the 1990 desktop that sat in the back office. (Previously, I thought the computer was just for playing Frogger.) I specifically recall doing the weekly payroll process with him. We would head to the office when there was a lull between customers. He'd bring the stack of his employee's weekly time cards. He would instruct me to open his payroll Excel spreadsheet, which was a template he had built for himself. He would flip through each time card, quickly and manually add up in his head the hours for each shift. He'd then total up the shift hours, and write the total hours for the week at the bottom of each card, and circle it. He'd read the total hours to me. I would enter the number into his Excel template under each employee's name which calculated all of the deductions. 

Then we'd fire up Quicken, initiate a check to each employee, and I would manually enter the net pay and the summarized information from the payroll spreadsheet so the deductions would show on the check stub. He showed me how to arrange the paper checks in the printer, I would print the checks, he would sign them, and then walk out to the floor and hand them to the employees on shift that day. 

Some days I'd watch him open bills from vendors, write checks, and lick envelopes to mail back. He knew a good day and a bad day by the total on the Mastercard machine at the end of the day, and counting the cash in the register. My dad impressively created so many processes from scratch, juggled many different areas, and leveraged technology where he could to keep his business afloat. But there was a lot that didn't exist at the time, or that he didn't know about or have access to.

That feels like a long time ago. But how many small businesses are still relying heavily on manual, time-consuming processes and using outdated systems to run their daily operations? How many business owners are personally doing repetitive tasks, daily, weekly, and monthly, that we have automated solutions for? How many accounting firms are in this same category?

Technology has come a long way in the past couple decades. I wish I could help my dad with his accounting processes with the modern solutions we have available today, and with the experience I have now. I would have set him up with a QuickBooks Online subscription and put his small store with 6 or 7 employees on a full-service Gusto payroll plan with a Time Kiosk tablet. That way, his employees could tap to clock in, they would have mobile access to view their paycheck, and direct deposit to receive their weekly pay more expediently and directly into their account, rather than swinging by the shop or waiting until their next shift to receive their paper paycheck. Payroll would be prepared automatically and pushed to QBO rather than with mental calculation and manual keystroke data entry. And all of the state and local payroll filings he had to do would be automated through Gusto - a huge relief. 

Automation in accounting is crucial - both internally for accounting firms, and for our clients. The more we can implement in both areas, the more clients we can help to greater heights. It's a value-generating positive feedback loop. Accountants are at the crossroads of business and technology. We are uniquely positioned to help our small business clients identify systems and processes that are ripe for automation.

Whether you started in the industry pre-cloud or post-cloud, it's easy to overlook the automations we currently rely on - those automations we have become so accustomed to in our work that now it's just the normal way of doing things. For example, Bank feeds. Admittedly, I never worked in QBO before bank feeds so I can't even comprehend life before that. (It's like when older Audit partners talked about how they audited before computers…it truly makes no sense to me.) Bank feeds have become such an integral part of our workflow that it's hard to imagine accounting without this automated data import, much like how we can't fathom audits without computers.

At Dark Horse, we move fast and are constantly pushing the envelope. We embrace technology and automation as much as possible. We are constantly looking for ways to improve our internal and client-facing processes and strive for integration to automate and expedite data transfer across our systems. We utilize several Intuit products, including QBO Advanced Accountant for our firm's books, which is core to the many other integrations that make running our business easier:

• We heavily rely on Bank Feeds to bring in our multiple bank accounts and 40+ company credit card transactions.
• We leverage bank rules to help automate the categorization of the hundreds of transactions that come in each month. Bank Rules are table stakes - everyone should be using these as much as possible. This is one of the simplest lowest hanging fruits of automation in QBO. I am a big proponent of these and believe you should challenge yourself to set up as many rules as you possibly can - on clients with both low and high-volume transactions.
• RightTool has some incredibly powerful features to automate some of the steps to help you write those bank rules faster - my favorites being all of the "Improved [Bank] Rule Creation Workflow" features.
• QB Time brings in logged time for our employees, which pushes to our QBO to be invoiced for those non-fixed fee engagements.
• We utilize Gusto for our payroll, a highly complex calculation and process that is a heavy lift and would be a nightmare without automation.
• We leverage Ignition to automatically initiate monthly invoices for our fixed fee engagements, and automate reminders to trigger renewals for engagement letters at year end. Invoices generated and payments received from Ignition push to QBO.
• Ignition, Karbon, and our Intuit Suite (PTO and QBO) are synced so when we bring on a new client, the record is created across all systems, and kicks off a new Work Item that is linked to the PTO return.

As accountants and technologists, we have the knowledge, skills, and power to positively impact small businesses through smart automation. We often take for granted our natural and learned competencies, but these skills position us to make a significant impact. We are in a critical position in the eyes of our clients, of trust and competency to help them design better ways to work. We have exposure to a constantly renewing source of partner solutions that are trying to solve business problems, the accounting ecosystem is growing every day.

The beautiful thing about automation is that it gives you time back. What you do with that time is up to you - whether it's to grow and expand your client base to help more people, to generate more money in less time, or to simply take more time off. By helping clients to automate their accounting and business operations, you're giving them the gift of this choice too.

Automation goes beyond just outsourcing tasks to a computer or reducing errors; it lifts weight off people's shoulders, reclaims valuable time, and empowers businesses to scale to the next level. By embracing automation wherever possible, we enable both ourselves and our small business clients to achieve more with less input. It allows us to scale our services and value while helping our clients do the same. At the end of the day, it's about helping people – and that's what makes our work truly meaningful. 

I'm grateful for my childhood experiences at the hardware store. I saw how much time and energy went into running a small business, with my dad working 6-7 days a week as the sole source of income for our family so my mom could stay home and take care of us full time. I wish I'd been older so I could've done more to help him at the time, but ultimately that early exposure planted the seed and turned into a passion for process and technology, accuracy in numbers, and finding a better easier way to do things for the hard-working business owners out there - accountants included. It's why I am now entirely dedicated to finding the most optimized way for CPAs to work at Dark Horse.

Disclaimer: This blog was drafted and distributed as part of a paid partnership with Intuit.

About Dark Horse CPAs

Dark Horse CPAs offers a comprehensive range of services, including Tax Advisory, Tax Compliance, Bookkeeping, Outsourced Accounting, Fractional CFO Services, and Wealth Advisory, tailored to small and medium-sized businesses and their owners across the U.S. Founded with the mission to build strong advisory relationships, Dark Horse CPAs aims to rescue clients from inadequate accounting and tax services. Our philosophy of "No Surprises" ensures that every client knows exactly where they stand financially, in real time, each year. We champion the "Dark Horses"—small businesses competing against larger, more established rivals—by providing them with the tax strategies and accounting insights once exclusive to the top 1%.