Apps & Tech for Bookkeepers

Automation is the backbone of my bookkeeping business, and tech plays a key role in optimising profit, reducing stress, maintaining quality service delivery, operating efficiently, and managing capacity.

While the benefits of an automated business can be seen year-round, they are particularly apparent in times of heightened capacity and pressure - like EOFY, BAS and STP deadlines (right now!).

Here are just some of the apps that make up my tech stack, and may be worth considering for your bookkeeping business.
 

• Practice Protect
• Karbon
• Dext
• Tanda
• GovReports
• Office 365
• Bizink
• Pandadoc
• Slack
• Zapier
• MYOB
• Xero
• Zoom
• Calendly
• Loom
• Retriever (thanks to one of our members for putting this on our radar)
• Practice Ignition
• Peppol
• Content Snare
• Intuit
• Xbert

There are of course a lot more, and we're always testing out newbies to the market (and old faithfuls that have had an upgrade).

My top tips when determining the right tech for your Bookkeeping business.

• Do your research - make use of free trials and demonstrations, check in with your peers and industry associations to gain their feedback, and find out what best caters to your niche.
• Consider the individual needs of your business and of your clients.
• Consider the stage of growth that you and your clients are in and how this (or changes to it) may affect your use of systems and tech.
• Make sure that there are appropriate security, safety and access protocols in place.
• Determine how scalable the tech is, and how growth/scalability will affect user access and pricing.
• Determine how flexible you need the contract to be - how easily can you exit, are you locked in etc
• Determine the level of support, onboarding, or integration assistance you may need, whether the provider will meet these requirements, and/or if you need to consider external, expert support. 
• Consider how it will impact your internal systems and team - training required, workflow updates etc.
• Ensure it integrates with your other tech and systems you and your clients use. Ideally, your tech should operate as one big connected eco-system. 
• Start small - trial it internally (or set up a dummy client) to test it out before you roll it out across your business, and upgrade to higher packages only if/when you need to.