A good rule for life is ‘if you have to do something regularly, make it easier for yourself next time’. One of the things we have to do regularly at eQuality Time is put the accounts in order.
It’s got a lot smoother over the last few years. Proper use of Quickbooks, sending staff off to learn accounting, and increasing the amount of accounting knowledge on our board have all increased our general capabilities.
For example, one thing we’ve been doing much more recently is sending out proper offical estimates of work rather than working out a figure with a school or organisation and then having to search emails to find out how much we agree.
The thing we’ve changed over the last few months is that we now do a offical ‘end of month’ processing: quickbooks gets reconcilated with the bank, all the invoices are chased, all wages and bills are sent to trustees for authentication.
This month the thing I was very grateful for is how easy it now is getting to fix mistakes – we had found an old transaction without documentation and by working reasonably through Quickbooks audit trail, and then looking at our banks ‘transaction added date’, the right document popped up in our archived files. It feels a lot like that would have taken all day a couple of years ago rather than 15 minutes this morning.
There’s still things to work on (mostly things that are hard to do in a pandemic lockdown) – mostly around making sure that everybody can do all of the tasks, but we’re getting there. And the more efficient we get at managing our money, the more time we’ll have to do the things we really want to do.