Role: I helped the business owner to implement an accounting system
Project goal
A business owner was spending too much valuable time with accounting. The business ran mainly on cash so there had to be a cash book that was permanently up to date, every three months the VAT had to be calculated and sent to the tax office and at the end of the year all the invoices had to be available to the tax advisor.
Time that should have been spent on serving customers was being used up for accounting and – being honest – accounting was not something that the business owner enjoyed.
Each year the business was billed for sorting out all the (paper) invoices and entering them in to the tax advisors system. Accounting was not only costing time, it was also costing money. We needed a system that saved time, saved money and was fun.
Solution
To begin with we digitalised everything. All suppliers were asked to only send their invoices as PDF files. Paper invoices were scanned on arrival and the originals thrown in a folder to be forgotten about.
We bought a license for Lexoffice, uploaded all the invoices to the system and connected the software to the businesses bank accounts. Every invoice was connected to the relevant bank entry. All this was new to the owner but I helped with the set up, trained him and was available when he had problems. In less than a month everything was working.
Lexoffice included a cash book so that was immediately digitalised and ready for any spot inspection by the tax office. The program also generated the figures for the quarterly VAT return.
We spoke with the tax advisor about which invoices were to be booked to which account so that at the end of the year they had all the data in a form they could use with no additional work (and costs).
Customer invoices could be written directly from Lexoffice and automatically appeared in the open position list until paid. At any time, it was obvious which customers still had open positions.
The time for accounting was now reduced to a few minutes a day, everything was always up to date and, as a reward, each time the program was opened it displayed an overview of income, outgoings and profit.