A Month’s Bookkeeping in Less Than Five Minutes

So I got a call last week from someone who’d been following my blog and was keen to get advice about whether cloud accounting was going to work well for her business, or not. What surprised me about this conversation was that despite the fact she’d read my postings, she still didn’t get how bank feeds worked, and she was amazed to hear that for her kind of business — which is a simple, cash-based business — bank feeds really do enable almost all bookkeeping entries to take place automatically.

I hadn’t updated my accounts in  either LiveAccounts or Xero for over a month, and so I thought I’d record a video of me doing my books for the last four weeks (it is the Sydney Film Festival this week, after all). Groundbreaking stuff.

So here’s the video of me doing my books for April and May in Xero. Even with all my chat and explanations and generating a Profit & Loss report, a whole month’s bookkeeping and bank reconciliation only took five minutes. (Compare that with what ‘normal’ bookkeeping would involve, i.e.recording transactions, allocating transactions, reconciling accounts and creating reports, and you can see why my video is way more interesting than anything Almodovar has to offer.)

And here’s the video of me doing the same thing in LiveAccounts (same business, same transactions, same twisted personality)… Again, even with me chatting and explaining how LiveAccounts works, it took less than five minutes to get the job done.

I hope these examples make it a little clearer how the whole bank feeds/cloud computing thing works, and just how efficient it can be.