My name is Josh and welcome to the Lappin Bookkeeping Services presentation, today we're going to cover two main topics. The first,10 reasons why we should be doing your books and then we're also going to cover a secondary reason of why you would even want to consider outsourcing your bookkeeping in the first place. If you would like to get some more information, you can visit our website lappinbookkeepingservices.com.

So without further introductions, let's go ahead and get started!

Why would you even consider outsourcing your bookkeeping in the first place?

1. It’s required by law

First is you have to have bookkeeping no matter if you're going to do it yourself or if you're going to have someone else do it for you. It's required by law for anyone who runs a business. Back in the day you know they used to use pen and paper but now we're in the modern era, so more than likely, they are going to be using some kind of software.

2. Avoid issues with the IRS

The next reason is you want to avoid issues with the IRS. At some point in your life and in the life of your business, you're going to have to deal with the IRS. There's going to be a question that comes up about something and you want the peace of mind knowing that your books are in order.

3. Much easier and much less headache at tax time

It's much easier and much less headache during tax time if your books are constantly up to date. They're caught up, they're clean, they're organized professionally how they should be according to accounting standards. When it comes to tax time it's actually very easy. You just have to print a couple of reports and you might have to have a quick conversation or two with your accountant and you know you're off to filing. There's not a whole lot of this having to spend the last couple weeks of March or early April cramming all this bookkeeping into one month, which should have taken 12 months. You know, digging for receipts, all that kind of stuff. All that's eliminated if you outsource your bookkeeping to a professional bookkeeper.

4. Save time for more important tasks in your business

This is a really big one for a lot of business owners. If you outsource your bookkeeping, you can save your time for something that is more important to you and your business, which could be talking to customers, getting more sales, improving your processes and meeting with people.

5. Keep your spending under control

If your books are up to date, you can tell exactly where your money is going. It speaks for itself.

6. Find ways to cut expenses and raise profit

You can find ways to cut expenses for things that you really don't need or you're spending more than you thought you were and you can find ways to increase profit. Two ways you can increase profit is you either can make more sales, increase your service or your product and if with good with good bookkeeping, you can tell where all the sources of the sales are coming from. So if something's working really well, you can dig right down to that and try to figure out how to do more of that. The other way to increase profit is actually to cut expenses. If you're finding that you're spending money on things that are not of value to your business you can cut that out which is going to increase your profit.

7. Easier to get financing (loans)

If you're in the need for financing for your business for expansion or growth or temporary cash flow issues, you know you're probably going to approach some kind of lender and one of the first things are going to ask you for is your balance sheet, your profit and loss statements and your tax returns. If you have all that stuff organized, it's going to save you a lot of time and a lot of headache through the loan process.

8. Save yourself from frustration

Maybe you just don't like doing the books. That's fine! We're here to help you with that. Maybe you don't want to spend hours on YouTube trying to figure out how to do something in the accounting software that would take us five minutes to do because we know exactly where to go to do it.

9. Outsourced Bookkeeping = no employee to manage

If you outsource your bookkeeping, that's one less person you have to manage.

10. Cheaper and less hassle than hiring

You don't have another employee you have to bring on, which the employee is probably going to cost you more than it would to outsource your bookkeeping. That is because if you're bringing on an employee you have to pay all kinds of employer taxes, Social Security, Medicare things like that depending on the size of your business. You might have to pay for benefits like health care. Most of the time people just need some kind of part-time help and it's kind of hard to bring somebody on who is just going to do accounting. A lot of times you have to end up getting them to do other things and do different roles and then you have multiple things that you have to manage, so it just saves a lot of time and a lot of headache. So those are the reasons why you would even consider outsourcing bookkeeping in the first place.

Why Lappin Bookkeeping Services?

So the real point which you might be asking yourself is okay all that makes sense. I understand why I should consider be outsourcing my bookkeeping, why should I outsource it to you? What makes your company unique and different from all the other accountants out there.

That's an excellent question!

1. Experts in your industry

We are experts in the industries of real estate, child care and mental health based businesses. I've owned and operated all these kinds of businesses, so I know exactly what you're dealing with and exactly what you need for your bookkeeping.

2. Experts in our profession

We are experts at our profession. I've worked directly with QuickBooks helping small to medium sized businesses. I am a certified proadvisor which means I am. I've been tested and I understand exactly how QuickBooks works and where to go to perform all the accounting functions that need to be done. Other distinctions: I'm a certified bookkeeping professional and I'm a member of a lot of professional bookkeeping organizations, so I'm just not someone out there who just on a whim, decided they wanted to start a bookkeeping business. It looks like it kind of might be easy and fun, but there's a lot of education and a lot of experience behind what we do and offering these services and making sure that you get the highest quality service and the best possible experience you can from our company.

3. Quickbooks Online

We definitely recommend QuickBooks Online as our platform for accounting services and there are for a couple of different reasons. Number one is with online accounting services,

you can access your books anywhere in the world, through a desktop computer,

laptop, tablet or even a cell phone. So anytime you need to know something about your finances, you will have access to that. Another reason why we recommend QuickBooks is because we have found that that is the kind of the best, most professional available software

available for small to medium sized businesses. There are other softwares, but there are pros and cons to those softwares. I have worked directly with QuickBooks. I have an inside knowledge as to some of the things that they're coming out with and some of the technological initiatives that are really cool that a lot of other companies are not going to be able to offer. This is something else that we could discuss personally, one on-one with a potential client if that's something they're interested in.

Another thing that we do for your Quickbooks account is we do subscription management which means we're going to make sure that you're on the right plan for your business and that you're not overspending on your accounting software. Depending on what your needs are you may not need the most expensive account package you might need just a very basic, simple accounting system that suits the needs of your business. That's something we can help advise you on. The complexity of your business and what you do is going to determine which accounting software QuickBooks plan that you will be placed on. 7. Easier to get financing (loans)

If you're in the need for financing for your business for expansion or growth or temporary cash flow issues, you know you're probably going to approach some kind of lender and one of the first things are going to ask you for is your balance sheet, your profit and loss statements and your tax returns. If you have all that stuff organized, it's going to save you a lot of time and a lot of headache through the loan process.

4. Your books updated weekly

The next reason is your books are going to be updated weekly. So you may be wondering what goes into that, so we're going to really quickly flip over to QuickBooks and kind of show you exactly what I'm talking about here. Here we are inside of a demo company. This is with QuickBooks and I'm going to show you what exactly I mean by updating your books on a weekly basis. So unless you're familiar with QuickBooks, you may not understand exactly what you're looking at. A couple of key things that we do for our customers each and every week is we're going to make sure that your transactions that are coming in each week are categorized every week. So this particular sample company, they just have a checking account, a savings account and a credit card, which is actually an excellent setup for a lot of small businesses.

As you can see uh we're currently in this person's checking account and when in their checking account, they have all these transactions. They've got 25 transactions just sitting in there, so these are 25 things that have taken place in the checking account and what we would do for you is every week we would come in and check these and and go through each and every one and place them into the right category. So books by Bessie. Let's just say it could be depending on what this person's chart of accounts are. Let's say it's an office expense, so we would take this and we would add it right into your books and it would be put into the right category so you knew exactly what happened and we would clear out all these transactions for you every week.

The goal would be when you would come in here, take this savings account for example, you'll come in here and you would see that all your transactions were caught up and depending on how the transactions fall a lot of times we can get these two numbers to match up, the

bank balance and the QuickBooks balance. So we know that your books are exactly up to date with what your bank account or credit card is saying. The other thing we do is we keep an eye on these bank accounts and savings accounts and credit cards because occasionally they do become disconnected and we would make sure that they were updated. As you can see these are all connected at the moment because when I hit update you can see the little spinning wheel there which means it is going to bring in the most recent transactions.

Other things that we do for you on a weekly and monthly basis is we make sure that your chart of accounts is up to date. Your chart of accounts are the accounts that are used for accounting in your business. Most of the time it's set up with your assets, which is your checking, your savings, your accounts receivable or inventory anything like that. If you own physical assets like vehicles or buildings you would have those followed by liabilities, which are amounts that you actually owe. Then you go into your income and your expenses. So we would make sure that this is kept up to date for you so that all your transactions are being put to the correct account, so you can understand exactly what is going on with your finances.

5. Monthly Reconciliation of Balance Sheet Accounts

So reconciliation is the process of checking your bank records against the records in your accounting systems and making sure that they both match, so there's nothing missing and nothing off. Why would you even care about that? In our profession we've seen that a lot of people don't even do this. Why should you care and why should you want it done?

The first reason is because you want to know exactly what's in your bank account at the end of the month. Yes, you can log into your bank account and check, but it would also be nice to be able to log into your accounting software and know that that number that is showing is also correct. You also want to know how much you owe at the end of the month. You know how much is still outstanding on loans on credit cards and things like that. You want to make sure that you're not overdrawing your equity accounts. Based on the type of company that you're set up as, overdrawing equity accounts can lead to tax consequences.

Then finally for fraud. You want to make sure that you're having fraud prevention. You want to make sure that you're going through those bank statements every month and if something looks strange, you want to be able to go ahead and address that and get that taken care of before it morphs into an even bigger problem.

6. Monthly Review of Financial Statements

You are going to get a monthly review of your financial statements every single month. What that means is you're going to either get a one-on-one consultation via something like Google meets or if you're too busy for that and you just want a quick overview, we can send you a personalized video letting you know exactly what happens. What you're going to get is, you're going to know exactly how much you spent on what, which is going to help you to stay on budget and help you to make management decisions.

I'm going to flip back over to the accounting software really quick and I'll show you exactly what I mean. Here we are back into this sample QuickBooks company and I was going to show you exactly what kind of a financial analysis that you're going to get every month. We're going to go over things like a lot of things that are showing up in these reports. There's a lot of different other reports that we can pull for our customers. These are kind of the most popular ones. We can also create ones for you as well. For example, the balance sheet; this is going to show your assets, your liabilities and your equity.

Your assets are your bank accounts. We're going to show you how much you had in your bank account each month. We're going to show you your accounts receivables. This is money that is owed to your business and then we're going to make sure those assets are up to date. Our loan balances we're going to know exactly how much we owed at the end of the month for the different kinds of obligations you may have. Then we're going to see how your equity is

coming out at the end of each month. This balance sheet here needs a little bit of

work from what I can see. There's some things that I would update on that, so we

would make sure that our customers got the best possible and the cleanest set

of financial statements that they can.

Another report that we would share with you monthly and go over and give you personal recommendations on is the profit and loss. These are your income and expenses. It looks like for this particular month that this particular business did not have any income, which

is definitely a big problem for them. So the income would be listed here at the top and then you would have all the expenses that your business paid out and then you would see how much money that you're making each month. Another cool thing we can do for you as well is we can actually set this to see previous history. So if I set this to a different setting, the month setting, we can actually go in and see on a monthly basis how much you were making and then your expenses on a monthly basis . You can really analyze and see where your money is where you're making money so you know the different types of services that you offer. Then you can actually

see exactly where you're spending your money and you can see the trends over

time, which can be very valuable for a business.

7. Secure Online Portal

You are going to get your own personal secure online portal!

This portal will do two things for you. Number one is going to serve as a place of communication between you and our firm. Instead of cumbersome text message and phone calls in times where you're not available and emails, you're going to have the majority of

your communication comes through your personal portal. If we have a question about something that we see in your bank account, that question is going to show up in your portal and you're going to be able to log right into that thing and give the answer and send it right back to your bookkeeper. We'll keep on moving with the process of your books. It also serves as a great place for sending in and receiving documents. This way we making

we're making sure that your information is kept secure and out of the hands and

eyes of people who do not need to see it. I'm gonna go over real quick and show

you a real quick demo of the portal setup.

This is a very quick demo of what the portal would look like. We would send you a personalized invite and a link to your portal, and you would set that up and when you logged in, you would see something kind of like this. You would create your login from the email that we sent you and once you logged into your portal, you're going to see a view like this. Here you get two

different things, actually three. This view here is called transaction questions. These are questions that we would be sending you to answer about things in your books For example, say we saw a thousand charges at Best Buy. That looks a little out of the ordinary for your business, so we would send you the question via this portal and you could answer directly here.

You can also drag and drop files right in here, so that we can share documents

securely. At the end of each month, we're actually going to push your financial reports through this portal system as well, so this is where it would show up. This is an example of the transactions that we might ask you about. It would kind of look like this. You would see the transaction, the date, the vendor type, the amount and then you would see the question. For example you know what vendor is this for or what is this for and then you would send the answer back and we would update your books accordingly. Then just a little quick overview of other things. If you had questions for us, you could send a question directly to us and we

would get it through the portal as well. So this is a two-way communication street for you to be able to communicate with us and us with you.

8. Receipt Management

This all ties back into what we've been talking about. You want to protect yourself from audits and if an audit does happen, you want to be prepared for it and be able to defend against it. This also saves a load of time during tax season. If your receipts are all in order, and everything matches up, your tax experience is going to be a breeze. You know this can be a real chore for a lot of business owners. So you know let us deal with that for you or we can show you how to make it much easier.

9. Unlimited Email Support

This is probably going to take place mostly through the portal that we're going to set up for you but you can rest assured that you know you're going to get a quick response back to any questions that you may have.

10. Additional Services Available

We have a lot of other great services available that are beyond just the basic bookkeeping. We can set up training sessions for you if you need to learn how to work this software in QuickBooks. There are some things that the business owner needs to know how to do. I would say invoicing and paying bills is probably the biggest example and we can show you how to do that. Cleanups; if you're anywhere between a couple years to a couple of months behind on your books and you just don't know how you're ever going to get this caught up, that is something we can help you with. Another service that we offer is budgeting and reporting. We can help you set a budget and we can pull and create specific customized reports just for you and your business.

We also offer managed payroll through QuickBooks or Patriot. Those are the preferred vendors that we work with now for payroll. QuickBooks payroll integrates directly right into your current QuickBook setup, so everything would be right there for you to see. If you want something a little more basic and a little more affordable, we also offer Payroll Services through Patriot. Finally we offer AR and AP assistance that goes back to what I said just a few seconds ago about invoicing and paying bills. We can train you on how to do that properly to make

sure that you don't mess up your books and then we can also help you manage

that monthly through the reporting that we can offer, so you can see exactly how

how much people owe you and how much you owe other people.

Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this presentation!

The next step for a person who would be interested in exploring our services further would be to set up a free 30 minute consultation and analysis where we can go through your books and make some recommendations for you and give you a a good idea exactly how much bookkeeping services would be for your particular business. Just head over to our contact page and schedule your appointment