Do away with the remote-bookkeeper-anxiety with 3 easy steps
Bookkeeping has to be one of the most important aspects of keeping a business organized and afloat. However, as business owners, we don’t exactly have the time and energy to be able to do this ourselves.
Something as repetitive as keeping track of all the financial transactions should be given as a sole job to someone else (also to avoid errors which could cost us in the future).
And this is why we hire bookkeepers! The bookkeeper’s sole job is to keep track of every single financial transaction your business makes. This helps keep everything organized and it becomes easier to figure out how you’ve been spending your money.
This article is for those who are considering hiring a remote bookkeeper or who have taken the first steps to work with one.
There are a ton of different reasons why your employee may be situated far from you: they could have recently relocated with their family and you had an agreement to keep them working for you or you could have decided it didn’t matter where your new bookkeeper lived due to their amazing credentials.
Here are 3 ways to make this remote bookkeeper setup run smoothly:
1. Have clearly-defined agreements
As with any employee, you need to have clear standards and expectations laid out before the job begins. Let them know if you have a specific time you want them to be available for you or if they can work at their own time as long as they get the job done.
This is basically just setting the ground rules which is important to follow, especially since you won’t be seeing them like you would your other employees. If you want to have regular virtual meetings with them, make this clear.
2. Draw up those contracts
This is part of the clearly-defined agreements you have to be on top of but it deserves its own section. Your bookkeeper is the one who will be handling all of your financial transactions. This means they will know everything.
It’s always handy to draw up a few NDA’s to keep everything safe and lowkey just in case — because you never know what may happen.
3. Make use of applications
This is the meat and the most important thing to remember and to do. This is about how to get the actual work done.
Since everything will be conducted online, it would be smart to utilize applications that were made for these specific purposes. The best apps for these would be QuickBooks and/or Zero.
These are accounting apps to help both you and your bookkeeper to be able to stay on top of your responsibilities: for you (or your assistant), it’s documenting and sending the transactions to your bookkeeper. For your bookkeeper, it’s filing and organizing everything the way they do,
When it comes to sharing the documents with each other, there are a lot more options. You could utilize Google Drive, Evernote, Dropbox, etc. Just figure out which one works best for you!
Having a remote bookkeeper isn’t really a hard thing. It’s basically the same as having one around except — instead of handing them your transaction documents — you have to take photos or .pdf versions of these records for them to be able to keep track of them.
The digital way actually makes everything easier, simpler, and more streamlined.
