Bookkeepers CRM

 Some of us might be covered in stitches, or recovering from cancer, it may even be your birthday and were supposed to be sitting on Brighton beach right now but nothing stops.  The world of Pure Bookkeeping marches on and today became pivotal with the launch of the PB CRM (Customer Relationship Manager). Now this has been years in the making. How to best serve our bookkeeper customers? Build them a digital platform to better manage their own customers.  This CRM can be used to manage, track and store their customer interactions and keep it all in the PB Cloud.

Yes keepers united all in one place. Keepers United sounds like a world cup team.

Banks

Banks make $6 billion profit every year so having bank shares is a good way to get some of that back. Another way is to close stuff no longer required. I have been on the chase for three weeks now to close an account. Once they have their claws in they do not want to let go.  I paid all outstanding fees and interest components from an old credit card but you have to wait for the next statement and finally it was all cleared but statement day is also monthly fee day so a new $8 fee was listed.  This time there is no interest as I paid it immediately however pending transactions can take two days.  So after four weeks there it is everything is zero so press the close button. No wait you can't close this account there are Points available on this card, thousands of them.  I have thrown away some of this in order to close it but there are vouchers coming for the rest. Now that it is closed I have just ordered an upgraded debit mastercard to allow me to pay for stuff using my phone.  Oh boy.

PB New Release

 In a lot of businesses there is often a company blog.  There is no time for these niceties in Pure Bookkeeping.  Last night was a significant launch of the latest and greatest PB implementation course in Canada and the USA.  It is week one of a a four week course and everything went smoothly.  Behind the scenes there were many dramas. The PB course training program is a software development entirely by PB staff. The content of this is 100% Debbie's work being 10 hour days for months at a time.  Access settings were incorrect, but Debbie spotted a work around at 5:00am to get everyone going. The staff in the Philippines have now been chastised but this has to be done lightly as Philippinos take things to heart.  The Pure Bookkeeping process has a co-ordination element, now called Pure Work Flow. This software is not under development by PB but it may as well be.  PB have taken on a role to manage the bookkeepers using this since the new owners in Australia are now concentrating mainly on accountants.  Previously we were dealing with English owners via Canadian PB staff and all the time zones in between.  This is the 10th time the PB system has been totally revised and updated over the last 20 years.  Getting the system from a paper based manual to an online system has taken three solid years.  

The Pixie Button

 Pixie's are a mixed bunch but generally they are meant to be helpers. Not sure if Pure Bookkeeping found Pixie or the other way around.  Pixie is an English online workflow management program.  They are fairly new and competing with established websites like ClickUp and Asana.  Pixie were all about accountants and not bookkeepers, then Pure Bookkeeping came along with procedures for bookkeepers that are already in place.  PB explained the how and the why of all things bookkeeping but in this day and age of  button pushers it is never enough.  So Pixie shared their expertise, to set up Pure Workflow which explains the when of bookkeeping.   Debbie initially left it to others.  There are more qualified people than me for this. They will do a good job, make sense of it, make it flow, do it right.  *$!@@**   

After two years of hard graft Debbie has had to become an expert in Workflow Management.  The Pixie people were now aware of someone new, hard on their heels.  "We can't update your work as we have ours to do."   "We'll slot that in when we can." ect etc.  OK you can have your own Pixie Button.  Whenever you have something new,  you press this magic Pixie button and your templates and worksheets will populate.  Months of 4:00am starts culminated in a complete update and overhaul of all training courses and procedures. Now for the Pixie button. Nothing happened. The dreaded time zone problem now comes into play.  Debbie wakes up the English bosses who will look into it in the morning. No! We have made promises to have this ready.  He gets up and gets the Portuguese office to work on the problem, as their time zone is still daylight.  Hooray the Pixie Button has worked this morning. All PB maintenance on workflow can now be done by PB staff.  OK What's next?

Bookkeeping Summit

Things mesh a bit differently around here.  Like we need to get to the shops. However there is also the physio appointment, the online meetings and the World Pure Bookkeeping Summit.  OK, so I can get to the shops after my dentist appointment and before we head over to Collendina, which is also where the dentist is. This tooth has been repaired twice in 6 months and there is hardly any tooth left. It's a good thing bookkeeping summits only go for two days.  I know, I'm rambling.

                                              I wonder if the dentist asked him to say "ARRRRH"

BBB rolls around again

Bookkeeping Business Boardroom that is. There is talk about only doing this Australia wide PB promotion and sales trip once per year. In the mean time, the 2nd trip this year is underway with the east coast cities done, while the south and the west are still to go.  The aim is for 30 new customers. 

Bookkeepers stamp of approval

Glad Wrap News

  30 yar ago I used to get the newspaper delivered. We used to get milk delivered and bread delivered. Its what my parents did so we did it too. In 1980 the horse drawn wagon clopped up the street at 5:30 am and I can remember it was time to get up.  After some years we got rid of all these home deliveries.  About 4 months ago newspapers started arriving again.  The house sitter next door made a mistake and put our house down for the delivery but he is long gone and the papers are still coming.
  I went to the original newsagent that delivered the papers years ago but they said they don't deliver any more,  try the newsagent in Buckley St.  In the mean time Julie said her mate Ivan was the one who was buying up the various newspaper delivery runs and combining them into one larger area. The house sitter went to a shop, filled out the form and put down the wrong address. So there is a newsagent, more likely a Secret Agent, that is still delivering.
  I have just come back from the Buckley St newsagent, he doesn't know what I'm talking about. A guy called Ivan bought up their newspaper run before they were even in this newsagency!!! You don't say.  He has "read only" access to the Ivan database. OK. He verifies that Ivan has no deliveries in Woolley St.  I already knew that.

Who ever is delivering needs a new Bookkeeper

Outback Bookkeep

We are always up to our necks in Bookkeeping and Bookkeepers around here.  I am always noticing the spread and depth of the industry.  I have to quote this book I'm reading

"Mum is going to be the Drogheda bookkeeper, instead of Harry Gough's office. He's going to send someone out to teach you properly. It's quite complicated apparently. You've got to balance the ledgers, the cash books, the journals, record everything in the log book , and so on."

If they only had Pure Bookkeeping in 1930, Colleen McCullough may have had to write this passage differently.

Pounds and Pence

ABN Again

2005 was the last time I got a guernsey at an ABN Conference.  I have worked for my supper on this occasion.  I would say a large percentage of the 300 odd delegates were already PB licensees however there were still 35 ticket sales for the next round of seminars. The booth was being dismantled around me as I was packing stock and working out the labeling.

Inside Laneway - Sheraton Four Points

Who's minding the store?

What to do when 250 delegates are inside at sessions and I am sitting in the booth with no customers in sight?  Get out the blogging tools.  The booth was constructed overnight. We have had a few customers but the main session is at 4:30pm today.

Pure Bookkeeping at KeeperCon

The Travelling Bookkeepers

Yes its Pure Bookkeeping time again with another tour starting. That means I can get to the scanner without upsetting the office routine as the boss has left the building.  I have spent two hours getting 35 pages scanned but will need to spend at least another day cutting them into individual photos as well as a third day to get the annotations off which have been scribbled on the album page.

Pure Bookkeeping

Who are these Clowns? Note arrow.

Proof Reader

Spent the last two days doing some proof reading of a new book. Not something you do every day. In this case the proof  is a penultimate copy of the text prior to printing.  Seems in the old days etched plates, known as proofs, needed to be carefully checked before going to the printers.
Michael Gerber knows how to get those practical notions down into words, not to forget the co-authors, one of which is my wife. She has done a marvellous job building her enterprise and is the main reason I am typing this now as opposed to being out doing the daily grind. 
 Doing some proof reading isn't as hard as writing the thing in the first place but if you are working in a practice and would rather work on a business then read it numerous times. If you have a head for business or want to change direction or just make a better return on your bookkeeping then this book is for you.

Receipt and Invoice Scanning

In my capacity as chief technologist for bookkeepers, I checkout the progress on scanning of receipts etc . Five years ago I  had a look and the best then was a system where you had to describe the region of the document where the item you wanted plucked off was located. This was ok if you had hundreds of those receipts and if you have that many constant transactions you would be better off with a direct e-business arrangement. Years ago E-commerce referred to the electronic transmission of financial documents eg sending orders, getting receipts. These days E-commerce means having a web page where you can sell stuff.

This time around the Neat Company is getting closer. They even have a hopper to load different sized paper. This system uses OCR but there are still too many mistakes in the scanned numbers to make any time savings because of manual corrections.  If a bookkeeper can accurately feed through 100 receipts and this software can pick out relevant numbers like Total Cost and GST and place them into a file and there are no mistakes then you will have a winner.

There's also the  Certify Mobile Company where you can take a photo of the receipt and up to 15 items are extracted to a file. They are cagey about how this is done but there is meant to be no human involvement.  I would rather see the results go to my local device rather than be sent to the cloud for a fee.

Maybe in another five years we will have scanners where the DPI will be such that 100 documents will get 100% recognition rates. You can always cut out the middle man which brings us back to E-business or more likely E-receipts.  The E-receipt company will send receipts electronically and you will have your own cloud account where these transactions are stored.  Bookkeepers could save a lot of typing if they had access to that.  Not too far off everyone will have cloud account created when you are born.

Don't believe the Zero company hype about bookkeepers disappearing into the Internet.  Bookkeepers will still have to sort out the mess.