Check out this quick video on organizing your financials
But... Why change things???
Your bookkeeper, accountant, and CFO all speak Accounting as a mutual language. Accounting is a useful language, and AutoCFO is going to teach you a few terms that will be important for communicating with investors, accountants and other finance people. But at the end of the day, this is YOUR business and we want you to set up your financials YOUR way.
Your accountant might label an expense category as “telecommunications,” but if it takes you 5 seconds to realize that is your cell phone bill, then we think that is 5 seconds too many. Use our financial reports section to re-label any expenses categories you don’t immediately recognize with names that you will understand instantly. If “cell phone bill” is the name that you instantly understand, then use that! If you refer to the car payment in your account as “White Van with company logo,” use that!
Don’t worry, these labels won’t change anything on your accountant or bookkeeper’s side (AutoCFO purposefully does not write data back to QuickBooks to make sure we don’t get you in trouble with your Accounting Language speakers). We even put some hints in place for the accountant to find the original account if you have them poking around your AutoCFO dashboard and need them to speak YOUR language for once! Just hover over the label and see the original QuickBooks Online name and location.
We want you to organize your financials YOUR way. The goal of our user-friendly reporting is to help you understand your business operations through your financial data.
Your accountant has categories and groups of categories to help them identify taxable and non-taxable expenses. They use their language and their organization to understand your business in accounting and tax terms.
You, as the operator of your individual business, view things differently. Now you have the opportunity to group expenses the way they relate to the operations of your business.
For Example, let’s say you want to know how much the sales team is spending in total? Create a group for sales & marketing expenses and move all the related expenses to that category.
Why do this? Because you need to know what is going on in your business and the numbers tell you a story. The amount of money you spend in each category tells the story of what is important to make your business successful. The more important an item is, the more you spend. If you are spending a lot on an unimportant item (or more than you think you should), you can course-correct quickly because you’re tracking and monitoring that expense.
Ready to start viewing your finances in way that makes sense to you? You can try AutoCFO risk-free for 30 days, and with our 1-click sync (this is how your data gets imported) you’ll be up and running in minutes, not hours, days, or weeks!