Bookkeeping is an essential part of any business and as an Engineer, you may be wondering how to make your bookkeeping as efficient as possible.

Running a business keeps you busy and the last thing you need is to be bogged down by the mundane things to keep it running.

First off you will need to choose your accounting software. Quickbooks Online is a popular choice for many, however, Xero offers a lot of benefits for Engineers. Xero tends to be lower cost with fewer price increases over Quickbooks. The basic Xero program has a limit of 20 invoices per month and that may be plenty for many firms.

With that said, some firms don’t need the invoicing function so that limitation may not be an issue. Xero also comes with a robust receipt management tool called Hubdoc. This allows you to snap a picture of receipts or e-mail forward them into their system where A.I. will read the information and auto-categorize them. Quickbooks Online also has receipt capture but is not as robust as the option with Xero / Hubdoc.

Since bank feeds are the lifeblood of accounting software it’s good to know that Quickbooks tends to be compatible with more banks – it’s not foolproof, but across the board, it tends to have fewer issues. Xero’s answer to this problem is direct bank feeds whereby the bank connects directly to the accounting software and not passes through a third party. So if you bank with a large bank or virtual bank you can take advantage of this great feature of Xero. Wells Faro, Chase, Bank of America, Relay Financial, and Novo all support direct bank feeds with Xero.

If your firm has employees or if you are filing as a single member S-Corp you will need to run payroll. There are many options to choose from today. We have worked with a number and recommend looking into Gusto or OnPay as they offer affordable solutions with solid integrations into both Quickbooks and Xero.

If you are outsourcing your bookkeeping then finding out what software solutions they use internally can make a big difference in how you interact with them. For example, will they provide you with a Financial Management Report each month? When questions come up regarding unknown transactions do they have a simple solution for communicating that or are they emailing spreadsheets back and forth? Do they offer a secure client portal so that your information is safe?

As you can see there are a number of options available to make your bookkeeping simple and efficient. If you would like to have a free consultation to see if we can help you with your monthly bookkeeping needs please reach out to us here.