It’s always important to set the foundations of a small business correctly from the start. Now this is easy to say and somewhat obvious but I’ve seen a number of small businesses start their financial, inventory and customer management systems using an excel spreadsheet and face the difficulty of trying to migrate all their information to dedicated software applications once they realise that excel isn’t meeting all their needs.

This can be a nightmare and normally comes as the business is growing and the owner has a thousand other important issues to focus on.

Our plan was to get our financial system in place even before the first financial transaction had taken place. We had previously tried the standard range of online financial management systems including quickbooks, freshbooks and MYOB however knowing how fast these products evolve every year we went back and trialed a number of them again.

The criteria for our financial systems was that it had to run in ‘the cloud’, have a great mobile app, simple customer centric email quoting and invoicing system, integration with other plugins such as customer relationship management (CRM), and of course be easy to use.  In the end we went with Quickbooks online which met all our requirements.

Like all new software applications there was still a bit of a learning curve associated with quickbooks. It had certainly changed since we last used it six years earlier. The most significant change however was that financial accounting had got simpler! This was incredible news. No longer do you need to have a degree in accounting or an MBA to manage your business finances. Maybe that MBA was a waste of money? No more double entry accounting and no more manually balancing the books. We remember wasting hours in the past ‘balancing the books’ in an excel spreadsheet.

The ability of these online accounting systems has certainly reduced the stress of small and medium sized business owners.

Now the trick was to sell some products so we could ensure that Quickbooks was meeting our needs and that we new how to invoice our customers so we could get paid!