Blog Archives - Beth Anne Bookkeeping (2024)

COVID19 IS HERE. The government has basically shut down most restaurants and businesses in the United States.

Some restaurants are allowed to stay open as long as they do takeout only. Some states have even allowed restaurants to sell alcoholic drinks to go. (never thought I’d see that become a thing)

So what are some things you need to know during this time as a Restaurant Owner?

My friend Kristen made a great set of videos I am going to post below with a summary. Her first video is all about the finances and money things.

Here is a summary of her video:

1. Sounds simple but you need to know how much cash you have available to you.
2. You need to know what inventory you have on hand right now. Stop reading this and go take an inventory count and come back.
3. You need to know who you owe money to vendor wise and employee wise
4. Figure out what vendors you must pay whether you stay open or not (utilities, rent, mortgage, etc.)

Are you going to be participating in a To-Go/Delivery Program but you have never done much of this in the past? Below is a great breakdown Kristen did in setting this system up.

Here is a summary of this video:

1. Make it Simple – Not everything on your menu will be good an hour or two after it has been made. Find the items on your menu that will do well and only offer a few items.
2. To Go containers are like GOLD – Find the best togo containers for your food that you can afford.
3. To Go Doesn’t mean To Home – While most customers will be taking their to go orders home some may be going to a nearby park or beach to eat it at a Social Distance from others.
4. Think Outside the Box – Sell obscure things you are known for. Rubs, sauces, chocolate dipped ice cream cones, giftcards, and retail.
5. Help Them Help You – Your customers want to help you and are worried about you.

This last video is all about Surviving the Wild

If you are a restaurant that has decided not to do TO-GO/Delivery and has closed I totally understand sometimes that is easier. But I have a few ideas of things you can work on during this time of closure.

1. Catch-up on paperwork. (I know not very glamorous but you know it needs to be done)
2. Clean up the restaurant. When was the last time the restaurant had a deep clean? Now is a great time to make sure all that gets done.
3. Do any repairs/upgrades you have been putting off. Now is a great time to do all those repairs and upgrades that you didn’t want to shut the restaurant down to do. Since you can’t be opened now might as well do them.
4. Get caught up on all your Bookkeeping. Have all your accounts been reconciled? Are all your bills up to date? Is everything for 2019 in Quickbooks/Xero? Sit down and send all the information your CPA needs to do your taxes to them.

If you have any questions about your Restaurant Bookkeeping I’d be happy to get on a short call with you to review your books, answer any questions you have about bookkeeping and restaurant finances.

There are two parts to purchasing any vehicle. The first part is recording the asset and the second part is recording the liability (if there is a loan on the vehicle).

If there is no loan and the vehicle was purchased in cash then you can skip the second part.

A Fixed Asset is anything purchased for long-term use (usually anything that will last more than a year). This is usually equipment, machinery, land and cars.

To properly record purchased vehicle or any other fixed asset, follow the steps provided below:

I. Creating a Fixed Asset Account for Vehicles

1. Go toChart of Accounts
2. Click onNew
3. SelectFixed Assetsfrom the categories provided.
4. Enter the name and description for the account
5. Select theDetail Type

II. Adding the Purchased Vehicle

To record the purchase of the vehicle, simply record a purchase and link it to theFixed Asset Accountthat you created by following the steps provided above.

III. Setting Up Liability Account

A purchase of a fixed asset may come with associated liabilities like loans and EMI payments. To properly record the entire transaction, the user must enter and track the liability. The liability account will be aLong Term Liability Account.To set up such an account, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Chart of Accounts
2. SelectNew.
3. Click onLong Term Liabilityfrom the provided options and click on Next
4. Enter the details for the account such as name
5. Click on Save

At this point, you should leave Unpaid Balance field blank as we’ll be handling that later and note that we are still not yet done with “how to record a vehicle purchase in QuickBooks”. Here we need to pass the loan entry

To record the loan amount, follow the steps provided below:

1. Click on theCreate Button
2. SelectJournal Entry
3. Click on the Account Dropdown options and SelectLiability Account
4. Enter the total amount for the loan on the Credit side
5. Select theAsset Accountthat you want the loan amount to be linked with
6. Enter loan amount again but this time on the Debit side

You should also record every payment made for the loan. This can be done by entering checks and linking them to the loan.

Let me know if you have any questions or would like a video to go with this in the comments.

In the last few months, I have seen a lot of talk on the internet that bookkeepers are going to become extinct in the next 5-10 years.

Due to all the automation tools, you can use with your bookkeeping software and the bank feeds you no longer need bookkeepers because you can do it all yourself. Well, that is how they are advertising everything at least. But I feel like this information is totally wrong and inaccurate.

I do think becauseof the automation tools you probably don’t need a full-time bookkeeper working in your office 40 hours a week…but I think it’s still a good idea to have a bookkeeper on some kind of retainer at least to review everything each month.

See a Bookkeeper understands your Chart of Accounts maybe even better than you. They will know how to code things properly. There are many times that your bank feed guesses how to code things based on activity and guess what it’s not always correct.

Also if you make a mess of your bookkeeping and your CPA has to fix it they will charge you $200/hour. A bookkeeper will do it for about $50-$100/hour. So that is a big savings.

Do I want to bring up the monster that is Amazon? You can order so many different things from Amazonfrom office supplies, materials, inventory items to sell, food, etc. Another reason to keep up with receipts.

In other words I think bookkeepers will always be here but we will just be here in a different way in the coming years.

So one of the big email list things that go around is to create an autoresponder series for your email list. An autoresponder is basically when someone receives an email from you every day for 5-10 days. Because it’s not a very long period of time it usually works with no issues.

As a blogger, entrepreneur, and creative person I add myself to A LOT of email lists. Some I’ll be honest I add myself to many lists because I’m curious of the behind the scenes of their business. I’m curious about what they are writing and how often they are talking to their lists. By no means do I copy their stuff or anything. I’m just observing.

Many other lists I join because the content really interests me. Recently I got into learning how to do Brush Lettering Caligraphy. One blogger that was recommendedto me to learn has a 90 Day Challenge. No big deal right? Well, the way the challenge worked was you signed up for their email list and she sent you 7 days worth of the challenge every Monday. Made sense. Except this meant that for 12 weeks you’d be getting weekly emails from this person. And that is a LONG TIME to go for something to not get messed up.

So about 5 weeks into the challenge I screwed up my subscription and accidentally UNSUBSCRIBED from the list. Because of the way the autoresponders are set up there was nothing she could do except start all over from Week 1.

Now I get it that was my own fault but then there were other people subscribed to the list with Hotmail or AOL emails that would think the emails were spam after a few weeks and they would bounce. If the email bounces there is nothing she could do about it.

After a lot of thought, she ended up just shutting the email program down. And just offeringthe program as a workbook on her Etsy shop for purchase. She is also going on maternity leave and doesn’t want to have to worry about a million tech issues while she is gone.

I don’t blame her she probably was getting a lot of emails complaining about it messing up. And who the heck wants to attempt at manually fixing it. That’s why it’s called an autoresponder so you don’t have to think about it.

So this made me think about myown autoresponder…which I haven’t created yet. How long is a good amount of time to have it? Should it be a daily one or a weekly one?

After giving it some thought I feel like a 3-5-day challenge might be the perfect amount of time. I think anything longer gets to be too much. Especially with how many emails we are already receiving from other people.

I do like the idea of doing an autoresponder challenge because it gets people to learn about you, your business, and gives them some freebies which eventually gets them to purchase your paid products.

I just wanted to share this little insight that I learned recently and hope it’ll help you in planning your autoresponder series. Do you have an autoresponder series? How long is it? Tell me about it in the comments and I’ll come over and check it out!

In order to stay organized in your business, you need to have a set of systems in place. There are four categories I’m going to cover in this post – Credit Card Processing, Invoicing, Email, Onboarding, and Project Management/Task Management.

First, you need to decide on a credit card processor. How will you get paid? The three most popular forms of payment are Paypal, Stripe, and Square.

However, if you are using a bookkeeping software I would use whatever will easily sync with it so that everything is all in one place.

And once you pick one just stick to it. It can get very confusing if you are using more than one credit card processor. But it is a good idea to have a backup in case you are in a rural area at a craft fair and one isn’t working for whatever reason. But only use that one if necessary.

The same goes with invoicing as credit card processing. Pick one invoicing software and stick with it. There are SO many programs that can do this. Freshbooks is very popular with online businesses.

If you are using a time tracking software like Harvest or Paymo you can invoice through those programs. But in all honesty, the easiest thing to do is to invoice through whatever bookkeeping software you are using.

If you are using a bookkeeping software you should just invoice through those programs. And if you don’t like the way the templates look ask your bookkeeper or a graphic designer to set it up the way you would like it to look. They all have customizable invoices. And most of the programs have apps so you can use it on an ipad or phone when you are out in the field.

Get out of your email trying to schedule meetings back and forth. Calendy is a very good appointment calendar and the one that I use. If you click here you can see what mine looks like.

But there are many others out there. Just find one and stick with it. (that is the main theme of this post ha).

Email is my BIGGEST struggle. I’m not perfect at it but I am getting better. So do as I say not as I do.

Only check your email at certain times of the day. I’m so bad about having my email opened all day long and looking at it. I’m sure most of us can relate to this.

Create label filters for certain emails at a glance. I have all my “deal” emails go into a folder automatically and if I’m looking to go shopping I look at that folder.

Some email management apps are:

• Polymail – I used this one a while ago but don’t remember why I stopped.
• MixMax– This one looks really cool. It has a lot of stats and looks like it may work as a CRM as well.
• Postbox
• Spark – What I currently use
• Mailstrom – Also what I currently use. This makes it easy to go through large amounts of email and sorts by a sender, dates, subject, etc.
• The Email Game – This helps speed through 100 emails at once and makes it a game. At the end, it even gives you a score.

If you use Gmail there are a lot of bonus features in the “Gmail labs.” One that I’ve been using is the one where you have a second inbox. So on the right, you can set u searches for certain clients or starred emails.

This is the process from getting from your website to being a client. You need to come up with some sort of flow for this. Usually the typical flow is filling out a form, scheduling a meeting and then from the meeting sending a contract and setting up a start date. This doesn’t have to be complicated and can all be done in google drive.

Okay, this is a big one that people are CONSTANTLY talking about. And really this doesn’t have to be hard.

It can be as simple as using a bullet journal or planner. Or you can use asana, slack, trello, or another program.

Just don’t make things so complicated for yourself. I have found if you aren’t working with anyone that pen and paper are the easiest ways to do. You don’t have all the shiny objects to deal with and it’s on your desk to check off. Or maybe I just have a pen and notebook obsession. LOL

Whatever programs you decide to use in your business it doesn’t matter but you need to pick a few and stick with them.

So many people are wasting too much time researching apps and programs and not getting any work in their business done.

If you have any questions about any of the apps or programs I have mentioned here just let me know.

What is your favorite one that you want to check out? Or is there a program you are using that I didn’t mention? Let me know!

Bookkeeping software have a lot of add-on apps that make your life easier. Depending on your needs and what you are trying to do will depend on what apps will be best for your business.

Right now the app I am working with and loving the most is Hubdoc. Hubdoc is AWESOME. It allows you to do a few different things. One thing you can use it for is it will auto fetch any statements from your bank or other bills you have online like cable, internet, utilities, etc. I have not used this feature because the banks my clients use are not available but the people I know that have used this really like this feature.

The main thing I use it for is for capturing receipts. I scan my receipts using Scan Cloud. With Scan Cloud you have several options you can use for where the scans go. Some of the options are Dropbox, google drive,etc. But Hubdoc is also another option.

I set all the scans to go to my Hubdoc account. After I do that I wait like 1-2 days for Hubdoc to do it’s thing. In the background Hubdoc will read all your receipts. They pull the vendor and amounts out. In Hubdoc you go in and create the receipt, categorize it, and then send it right over to your bookkeeping program with the receipt as an attachment.

Here is a video of how it works.

I cannot wait for you to join me in my Mini-Course to prepare you for tax season.

Please join our facebook group to talk about the daily challenges. You will receive daily emails that we can talk about in the facebook group.

Sign Up for my Bookkeeping for Bloggers Mini Course

When I started as a Virtual Assistant and heck I can even go further back as to when I started blogging the first thing I noticed was since it was all online I had collected A LOT of electronic documents. Between ebooks, PDFs, photographs, headers, images, blog buttons, information from sponsors, documents and spreadsheets from clients, contracts, etc, etc, etc.

Soon my hard drive was getting VERY FULL. I had files EVERYWHERE!I started asking people what they do with all this stuff and they said they save everything in THE CLOUD! So what is “the cloud?” The cloud is just a web based program where you can save things.

The awesome thing about the cloud is you have several options. You can use multiple different services. And the best part is almost all of the have a free version. I have most of my stuff saved in multiple different programs so I currently don’t have to pay. The services I currently use are Dropbox, Google Drive (probably my fav because you get the most space), and ShoeBox (pictures only).

Dropbox is the first program I ever used. I started using it probably when it was very new in 2010ish. At the time I had a computer in my room and my mom had a computer in the living room I sometimes would use when I was watching TV and it was really cool to be able to save documents I was working on in dropbox and just open it on a different computer without having to save it to a flash drive.

When you read that it sounds like such a first world problem but it was seriously the coolest thing ever! And I was in the same house! Then my mom and I started saving work documents and opening them at work and that was super cool for us! Now I use it to auto sync my budget, YNAB (You Need A Budget) from my mobile device to my computer. I can also easily save my photos from my iPhone using the app to my computer.

The main cloud based program I use right now is Google Drive (formerly Google Docs). The #1 thing I like aboutGoogle Drive is it’s connected to your gmail. So if you have a gmail account you have Google Drive. They give you 15GB of storage free. Dropbox only gives you about 5ish. And if you need more than 15GB for $1.99 a month you can get 100GB. This is VERY affordable in my opinion compared to other programs.Other programs if you want extra storage it is usually $99 a year a or $9.99 a month.

The great thing about Google Drive is you can create the equivalent of a word document, spreadsheets, and powerpoints all online. You don’t even have to save it..it saves automatically. You can easily share these documents with other people so they can just view them or they can view andedit. Many of my clients will share instructions, spreadsheets of stats they want me to track, or other tasks via google drive documents with me directly and I go in and view it online. Sometimes we both need access at the same time and it’s not a big deal. I really like using google drive documents I rarely ever have to worry about losing files anymore unless I lose my internet connection and even then it’s not really an issue.

The last cloud storage I recently learned about is the ShoeBoxApp. It’s just for storing your photos and videos (although if you want videos you have to pay extra). The great thing about this one is it’s TOTALLY free for photos there is no limit on the amount of photos you have. Right now I have over 20,000 photos in it. I know this isn’t really online business related but we all take SO MANY photos it tends to clog up our hard drives so this is a good way to get them off our computers.

What other cloud storage do you use? Do you have any other tips on using the cloud? Let me know in the comments!

Social Media can be fun when we are using it for personal use but when we are using it to grow our business it’s a TOTALLY different ballgame.

In our personal lives we tweet and gram and facebook pictures or our thoughts and what happens to the content happens. We don’t care if we get a million comments (okay we kind of do)…but our life or business doesn’t depend on it.

The hardest thing for most online business owners is Marketing. Most of us have never taken a marketing class in our lives. And if you add Online Marketing to that it’s a totally different ballgame. Most of us understand hey we need to get a facebook page, twitter, instagram, pinterest, etc. But other than that we don’t know what to do.

There are so many different opinions on how many times a day we should post, what we should post, what time we should post…the list goes on FOREVER and EVER. Trust me I have driven myself crazy reading about this stuff.

The one thing I do read over and over again that is the same is you need to be CONSISTENT. If you are going to post on facebook 3 times a day post 3 times a day everyday. If you are going to blog on Mondays and Thursdays that is fine just do it. If you are going to tweet 5 times a day do it on a consistent basis. And if something happens that you know it might end let your audience know – example: you have a baby, you go out of the country, you are having renovations done, your moving, your going to a conference, etc.

One of the best social media tools I have used over the years is called BUFFER. When it first came out I didn’t understand it at all. I couldn’t see anything in my twitter timeline. And that is the point of this app.

All this app is for you to schedule tweets (you can use it for other sm but I haven’t). Then you tell the app what time you want your tweets to go out. 1:02pm, 5:30pm, 6:00am, etc.

It’ll even give you a few examples of times it thinks you should tweet based on your timeline. You write the tweets click “add to my buffer” and the tweets go out automatically at the right times. Buffer will also analyze your tweets and let you Retweet them again later on and you can also tweet at the current time or a scheduled time. And you can tweet the same thing to multiple twitters (not sure I’d recommend that but it’s an option).

One of the best tools for using BUFFER is getting the browser extension app. It allows you to tweet a photo with a link or just a link for whatever website you are on. If you have the pro version of feedly you can set it to automatically add certain feeds to buffer as well. So many good tools!! I love it!!

Do you use bufferto schedule tweets? If you use something else what do you use? Let me know in the comments I’d love to chat about it!

Well here we are Day 1 of the 31 Days of Blogging Challenge! I am so excited that October is FINALLY HERE!! I feel like we have been talking and preparingfor it since July. I have been thinking about this series for awhile and looking forward to the next month as I share my tips about organizing your online business.

As a Virtual Assistant I loveto tell people that “I organize the boring parts of the business so my clients can do the creative things they love to do.”

As creatives organization isn’t always your strong suit. Even I have my struggles. (You DO NOTwant to see my desk right now). No matter what kind of online business or blog you have you need to have some kind of organizational system in place.

When you first start off you may not have a lot to handle but eventually you will. And it’s good to start a good organization system when you are small in trying to figure out how to handle everything.

I know so many entrepreneurs who say they’ll just learn to be organized later but later never comes. One of the main reasons you need to be organized from the beginning is come January for that lovely thing most people hate called TAXES!! If you are unorganized you won’t have any copies of receipts you may need. Income.

Heck if you are really unorganized you may not even know if everyone paid you! That is a BIG DEAL! You need to make sure you are getting paid for the work you do. I have heard many horror stories of these types of situations.

If you don’t keep good records of your receipts you won’t be able to deducta lot of things from your taxes. This is a big deal you want to take as many deductions as possible. The more you deduct the less you will end up paying in taxes. It’s really a win-win all around.

So if you have trouble organizing your online business and want tips, apps, and courses to help you organize your business or learn things a Virtual Assistant can help you with make sure to continue following me for the month of October!