• James Flawith

    Member
    November 9, 2018 at 6:52 am

    An update: after searching around locally and worldwide on Upwork I’ve decided to try something… different. I think the main choke point for information flow in any bookkeeping system is… the bookkeeper him/herself. They have different schedules and clients and data entry on a consistent basis seems to be a tough challenge. So, is bookkeeping without a bookkeeper possible?

    Believe it or not, the answer might be “yes.” I’ve engaged a company out of Boston, MA, called “Botkeeper” (www.botkeeper.com) to help me out with my bookkeeping. They offer Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to facilitate quick data entry. They offer human support in the form of a team of accountants who are assigned to your company and get to know your work flows.

    Botkeeper offers very competitive price points for various service levels, which are dependent on the number of transactions you run monthly. They actually offer FREE bookkeeping for the lowest transaction levels to help companies in the start-up phase. I dig that.

    I’m in the process of onboarding right now. It looks like right off the bat I can stop using Hubdoc which is about $60US/month. I still take pictures of POS receipts but instead of using the Hubdoc app I send them to my “Bot” via attachment with e-mail. I actually like this system better because it gives me a paper trail to find anything I’ve sent in (searching my e-mail “sent” folder) – Hubdoc’s app doesn’t let me search anything. Also, I am now coding everything myself using our Chart of Accounts coding sheet so I enter the class and code in the subject line of the e-mail which is super easy. An additional plus is that all invoices I get via e-mail can be forwarded to my “Bot” as well, which is basically identical to how Hubdoc works.

    I’ll keep you in the loop with how Botkeeper goes, we’ve got a progress update meeting next week. There have been some small growing pains – ie. pay stubs not getting sent to employees. I also had to keep my Canadian bookkeeper on for small Canadian-specific tasks such as tax remittance, ROEs, etc. The quoted cost for this services monthly (billed hourly) is about 1 hour which is about $50.