As a marketing agency, your primary focus is on creating exciting and engaging campaigns for your clients. Unfortunately, along with this comes the task of managing all your financial data and keeping your books up-to-date. By ensuring that you always have access to current financial information, you can run your business more efficiently and make more informed business-related decisions.
By following these seven tips, you can improve your marketing agency's bookkeeping processes, freeing up more of your time, money, and valuable resources for more critical tasks.
1. Keep your personal and business expenses separate
This may seem like an obvious tip, but so many small businesses make the mistake of combining personal and business expenses. When this occurs, not only is it more challenging to manage your bookkeeping, it also lacks professionalism. As your business grows, investors and lenders will expect your finances to be separate and kept properly.
2. Move to the cloud
There has been a significant transformation in accounting technology over the past few years. Previously, many small businesses chose to use Excel for their accounting tasks, but things have come a long way since then. While Excel can be an excellent program for many jobs, bookkeeping isn't one of them. Desktop accounting software also fails to provide businesses with the flexibility they need for remote working environments.
Cloud-based accounting software provides the solution that your agency needs. Software like QuickBooks Online or Xero offer you the ability to manage your expenses, track the amount of time and money spent on a project, organize your billing, create custom reports, and much more. You can also store financial data in the cloud and create daily backups, eliminating the worry of losing data. Plus, you can collaborate with external bookkeepers and accountants when you need to.
3. Use an expense management tool to track your expenses
Expense management used to mean manually entering invoices and receipt data into your accounting system. As a result, accounting staff would spend hours entering the data, while others would spend half a day filling out expense reports and waiting weeks to get reimbursed.
Tools like Dext Prepare and Expensify were created to help you track your agency's expenses.
Dext Prepare can connect with your accounting software via the cloud and export all of your expense transactions to it with just the click of a button. This program allows you to take a photo of your invoices or receipts, giving you the ability to record expenses while you're on the go and eliminating the need to hold on to the physical copies.
Expensify is an employee expense and reimbursement tool that is excellent for agencies that require employees to travel or entertain clients. Employees can easily submit expense reports, and approvers can approve them on their phones while on the go, simplifying the entire expense process.
Both these tools can help your agency save time on manual data entry while your employees focus on billable tasks.
4. Set aside time to keep your books up to date
Scheduling time regularly to handle all your bookkeeping activities is imperative to the overall success of your business.
You need to ensure that you set aside sufficient time to send out invoices and follow up on receivables, pay all of your bills and expenses on time, and reconcile your accounts every month. You should also run regular reports and review your financial statements to get a handle on your cash flow situation.
5. Outsource your bookkeeping
If bookkeeping isn't your cup of tea, or you lack time to do it, consider outsourcing.
Outsourcing is an excellent way to improve your bookkeeping processes. It gives you access to trained professionals who can keep your financial data current and accurate. Plus, outsourcing can save you a significant amount of time and money.
6. Automate your payables
Automating your payables can save you a significant amount of time, and Plooto can help you do this.
If you use QuickBooks Online or Xero, you can connect Plooto to your accounting software and automatically have your payables uploaded into their system. You can then choose which invoices you wish to pay and do so directly online through Plooto. Once the payment is complete, Plooto will reconcile your record on the accounting software. Plus, you can also arrange batch payments and completely customize your payment approvals.
By automating your payables, you can control your cash outflow while ensuring that your vendors are paid on time.
7. Use pre-authorized debit for payment collection
Rotessa can help you schedule pre-authorized debit payments from your clients. Using pre-authorized debits can improve your cash flow and ensure that you are always getting paid for all of your work on time. It also helps to save you time as you never need to deal with late or inaccurate payments again.
The benefits you can gain by using these best practices to help improve your marketing agency's bookkeeping process are endless. Not only can you save a considerable amount of time and money, but you can also ensure accuracy and timeliness with your agency's financial numbers. This will give you the financial visibility that you require to make important business decisions.
At Enkel, we have years of experience helping marketing agencies in Canada manage their bookkeeping. Get in touch with us today to learn how we can keep your marketing agency’s bookkeeping and accounting current.
How We Select and Evaluate Our Recommended Software
We thoroughly research and test the apps we include in our regular workflow for Client bookkeeping services. After deciding on criteria for evaluating the software and then researching the app itself, we tested the app, noting its strengths and weaknesses. We then work with the app for at least a few weeks before deciding whether to recommend it to our readers. We use the software as it was designed for its intended tasks. For a detailed walk-through of how we select and evaluate software, please see the details of our process.
