automate your business finances

Andrew McCauley: In today’s podcast we are going to talk about how to automate the financial parts of your business. We are going to show you how to get rid of that receipt boxes forever and absolutely free up your time.

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Andrew McCauley: Hey, everybody! This is Andrew McCauley. Welcome to Podcast No. 32. This is the fifth edition of our automate series, our little subseries in our podcast. We really hope that you are enjoying this information and getting some really good ideas out of it and how to really free up your time. I am going to introduce the lovely Heather Porter. Hey, Heather!

Heather Porter: Hey, Andrew! Hello, everybody! Welcome back. We are excited to have you and financials and money and all that stuff is a little bit of a tricky topic to talk about because I think a lot of us as entrepreneurs and business owners get bored or get overwhelmed or think “Oh God! I can’t be bothered” and we are a little bit reactive to the situation. So, this episode we are going to show some amazing tools and some things you guys can bring into your business to really free up your time and make your whole financial aspect in your business so much easier.

Andrew McCauley: Yeah, yeah. I think one of the important things is that so many people sort of if they don’t understand something, they won’t do it and financial is a big one and I think it’s the no. 1 factor; the lack of understanding of financials is the biggest factor of businesses going belly up because people think they are doing a good job, they think they are business is going well but in reality they don’t know what their figures are telling them and sometimes if you know your figures properly before that happens, then there is a good chance of survival but so many businesses don’t survive. So, we wanted to just talk about some of the tools that we are using, we have implemented in our business, some of the tools that some of our clients are using and just what are they using, how they are using them and what is it doing for them and how they can free up their time by using these tools because there are so many new tools coming out all the time and we won’t cover all of the tools that are out there, that’s for sure and there will be people who are listening to our podcast thinking “Well, I have got a better tool than that” and if you have, great, as long as you are using these tools. That’s what we want people to do is just use something, make sure you are doing something that’s freeing up your time. So, let’s kick into it but before we do it, as usual, we are going to find out what you were learning this week, what were you poking your little head around this week and discovering new.

Heather Porter: I have been poking around my head in something called Google Experiments. This is the analytics experiments. So, we have talked at length before about having Google Analytics accounts for all of you guys to manage your website numbers and your stats and understand that. There is something in there called ‘Experiments’ which allows you to basically set up goals and testing. So, really you think of it like this, it’s simply this easy. You set up two versions of the home page of your website and Google randomly delivers one and then the other and then the other and then the other back and forth and back and forth and it’s testing to see under which page you get the best stats. So, which page people

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stay on the longest, which page people opt in to your opt-in box on the most. So, it’s a really cool system and all you need to do is get your web team or somebody – if you are a web designer as well, you could do this – two versions at least of your homepage is what we recommend and also a couple of versions of landing pages but this, Andrew, I cannot believe how easy this thing is to use. I have been loving it.

Andrew McCauley: Yeah, I have had a look at it in the past. I haven’t done a lot with it myself personally but I know a lot of people who use it all the time and it is a really cool tool actually and, as you said, it’s easy to use.

Heather Porter: It’s easy to use and, guys, the thing is you can develop something that you think looks fantastic, no matter what it is in your business but the best thing you can do is to have the market tell you what they prefer and this is the easiest way of setting up different pages on your website and just quite simply letting the market to tell you what they prefer and then of course use that version going forward.

Andrew McCauley: Hey, you know what I like about today’s “What did we learn” section is that you are talking about a platform Google that everyone uses every day and sometimes you don’t understand or you don’t realize what other functionalities some of these everyday platforms can serve. Google is not just about search. It’s not just about Gmail. It has these other functionalities. What I learned this week was another large platform that I didn’t know was doing this. I knew it was doing it but I didn’t exactly how. So, I dug into it a lot deeper this week and that is Amazon and fulfillment. We spoke about fulfillment in a recent podcast and automating fulfillment. We spoke about fulfillment houses but what I dug into this week was all about Amazon Fulfillment and how they operate as a fulfillment house for people selling stuff. We got a client that’s looking at selling some stuff on Amazon and using their fulfillment agency and once again it’s a pretty simple task to start selling items on Amazon, almost having your own little store so to speak but it’s all through Amazon. So, you get all the traffic, you get all the value of people coming to a large site like Amazon and, let’s face it, they are one of the best e-commerce platforms around. Building your platform on something like that is a really good way of doing some business if that’s your business model.

Heather Porter: It’s interesting because one of the biggest barriers to entry on selling actual tangible goods is once you get the goods developed, whether you go and get them made in China or wherever how do you ship them out, how do you package them and ship them out. That seems to be the thing that everybody can’t figure out. So, the fact that they have this available is quite amazing. I mean, what it’s saying to me is really anyone with a little bit of funding and a good idea can go and get some goods created and manufactured and then use something like this to actually distribute them.

Andrew McCauley: Well, you know what, that’s another misconception; you don’t need some funding. These people out there who have created Amazon Stores by going to their local shop and they are buying, let’s say, discontinued items or some items that they can find cheaply at their local store. I am talking small items. It might be books, it might be CDs, it might be something that they can sell and take home with them in the car, they send it up to the Amazon Warehouse and they put it up on Amazon. Now, once it’s sold, it’s sold. If it doesn’t sell, Amazon will send it back to your house.





Heather Porter: That’s amazing.

Andrew McCauley: So, these little things that you don’t need to have a lot of.

Heather Porter: I love it. So, I guess the kind of the theme here is just every platform that exists, there are multiple ways of using it and not necessarily the top level thing that you go in knowing. So, if you dig a little deeper and ask better questions, you might be able to really start to use the advanced features of things quite easily.

Andrew McCauley: Yes, yeah. Well, let’s see. I mean, I have always known that there is some ridiculous figure like 10% to 15% of a tool is never used and I am thinking like going back when electronic calculators were around and all the buttons that were on there, you would never use 95% of that stuff and it’s same about computers; there is so much stuff on our computers these days or iPads or iPhones that we just don’t use because we don’t know what it does, we don’t know how to use it, we don’t know why we should use it, so we don’t use it and sometimes great discovering things that you have been so close and so near yet you haven’t actually seen it and it’s like opening a new door to a room and it’s like “Hey, this is pretty cool!”

Heather Porter: So, that’s a good intro I think to what we are about to talk about because these tools, they are floating around all the time and I know you use a lot of these and we are starting to use more of them in our business. So, by talking about these financial tools today and actually giving you guys some examples of how you can use them, I think you are going to find that it’s really easy about what we are going to share and you will get excited and how you can start to implement these in your business as well. So, shall we move on? Let’s talk about our financial automation tools.

Andrew McCauley: So giving a quick overview of what we are going to talk about, we are going to talk about things like accounting, sales, bookkeeping, receipts and expenses – I think people fell off their chair when I said accounting – quotes and proposals like how can you automate that sort of stuff and also some time tracking. I know we touched on that in our episode but we will dig a little bit deeper into time tracking in this episode. So, let’s get kicking off with some sales and talk about just some platforms that are out there to automate your sales. Do you want to kick us off with that one?

Heather Porter: Sure. So, a big part of your financials of course is being able to have reporting with your sales and to make that easy, the best thing you can do is get a system that you are going to use to sell your services or products online that allows you to do reporting and what I mean by reporting is that you can find out who bought, you could actually run a reporter’s spreadsheet where you can find out who bought, what, what their history purchases are, you can do a date range and pull what’s been purchased in that certain date range. Now, we talked previously about One Shopping Cart as an automated sales tool and that’s for an online shopping cart system. They have a fantastic reporting where whatever you want to report on an export into a spreadsheet, you can base on what’s been sold. PayPal even does this. I know a lot of people don’t even know this but you can go into PayPal and you can do exports of your transactions that have happened there as well but the idea here is that when you are creating your sales system as your thinking “How can I create this into report that I can use internally but I can also provide to my accountancy team or my bookkeeper literally at the click of a





button?” So, those are, I guess, a couple of mine and obviously we use Office Autopilot, we love Office Autopilot, it has good reporting as well. Do you know of any others as well, Andrew?

Andrew McCauley: I wasn’t going to go into too many of them. I was just going to say that there are a number of them out there. There is a bunch of platforms out there but I think what you said is getting the reports that you want for your business is important. Now, I was just following a thread on Facebook today about someone talking about two particular systems that they use or they were using. One of them wasn’t doing what they wanted. So, they left to go to this other platform and this other platform is just not doing what they want it to do and since then the first platform that they were on has now actually started implementing or put into practice what have these people wanted in the first place. So, the issues was “Should I leave this new one for the second time and go back to the old one or should I stay?” and it was all about why they wanted to leave was because it wasn’t giving them the reports that they needed.

Heather Porter: That was key to have that, isn’t it?

Andrew McCauley: That’s right. So, if you don’t know what you are looking for in a platform then maybe start with “What do I really want to see, what sort of reporting do I need, what sort of reports do my accountants need, and what sort of reports does my…” There are lots of financial tools out there. Let’s say you are in Australia and you might buy a financial tool but it doesn’t report on GST or VAT if you are in the UK, there is no point buying that financial tool. So, just check what tool does what for you because there is no point buying a tool if it doesn’t do the right thing.

Heather Porter: And the easiest thing you guys can do to do is if you are shopping around for systems, a lot of these websites like say Office Autopilot, for example, they have a live chat feature right there on their homepage. Click on that and have a list in front of you of everything that you want the system to do for you and just ask the questions one after another until you get all the answers that you need and then go to the next one and then ask the same questions over there. They also have their helpdesk, their ticketing systems, and their phone numbers. So, really get on the phone with these guys. They are there to help. They know their systems and they will be able to offer that advice to you.

Andrew McCauley: Yes, yes, okay. So, that’s sales and that sort of stuff. Now, anything, Heather, you want to add for sales side of things?

Heather Porter: No, no, just make sure you have your reports.

Andrew McCauley: We are going to touch on that. We are going to talk about automation like the thing about what the connection is, is that when you sell something online, these reports are automatically generated; you don’t have to go and enter the data. I think that’s a key piece that maybe we haven’t said is that it’s all good selling something but if you got a system where you have to take the sales, grab the receipt, grab your invoices and then manually enter them into some sort of data component that puts it into a report, then you are missing the boat. What we are talking about is we don’t want you to touch any of that. We just want you to be able to do what you do best, let the website or let your shopping cart take the money, process it, put it all together in a report and send it to you and your accountant when you need to. So, that’s a key thing is you want to make sure that that’s all automated. That’s the biggest part of it. We don’t want you





just getting a list of your sales and then manually entering it into One Shopping Cart because you can do that with anything. So, the reason we talk about One Shopping Cart is because it does all of that for you as an automated product.

Heather Porter: Yeah, well said. So, now moving on from there and now that you have your sales reports, we are now going to move one to invoicing, I suppose, invoicing and actually where can you can keep track of movement in your financials, the incoming and the outgoing of your business. I know we have a few tools we can talk about right now which is quite cool. We would like to give you guys a few different suggestions so you can research them and find out which one might work best for you and as Andrew said earlier you probably have something as well or some of you might that you are using that we are not even going to talk about and that’s cool because there are so many of them that we are not going to share all of them today.

Andrew McCauley: Yeah. So, I guess the first one and it’s a big one right now is Freshbooks. Freshbooks is a platform that you can do all your accounting on. It’s cloud based. So, what cloud means is that your information doesn’t live on your computer, it doesn’t live on your iPad; it lives on the Internet. Now, a lot of people and I hear this still commonly all the time is a) “What is Cloud?” or b) “Is it safe?” because putting all my data up there is it safe? Cloud computing is becoming safer and safer all the time. It’s really, really important for it to be safe because so much data is stored on the cloud. So, it is very, very safe and you will find that many of these companies that run cloud-based software have to go through a stringent – they need to for their own sake – go through a stringent privacy and security setup so that they don’t have breaches. So, Freshbooks does cloud accounting and it means that you can on the go, let’s say you are a consultant, you are out and about, you are dealing with a customer somewhere, you can get at your iPad or your iPhone and just punch in their invoice, you can send them an invoice from where you are at, you can do some accounting on the go. So, it’s a very good tool, very good for US-based companies and Canadian companies. There is a few limitations for Australian companies and the UK. There are some reporting aspects that it doesn’t do. It does most of the accounting for you. So, it does all that; it just doesn’t do some of the reports that you may need like you VATs and that sort of things but know that it’s a very, very good tool if you have got a small business and you just need to keep track of what’s going on, on a regular basis. It’s good and quick and nimble to actually be able to do that on the go.

Heather Porter: Yeah and I like how professional the invoicing is, the whole invoicing part of that I suppose. It’s just really beautifully done. It is very clean and it has your logo and the system emails out the invoice, somebody can just click a button from their email and go in and pay you whether it’s by your payment gateway like a credit card or from PayPal and the system itself also if you haven’t paid your invoice, it will send you another one, it will actually send you a follow-up one and say your invoices are overdue. That in and of itself, I think, is a massive time saver because as a small business owner you can get really overwhelmed and busy building your business and if you have a system behind the scenes, just ticking along on autopilot doing this for you, it’s amazing. So, I love that part of it.

Andrew McCauley: It logs expenses invoicing, puts in a little file format so you can send it to your accountant and your accountant will say “Hey, that’s great. You have kept of being up-to-date” and you won’t have headaches trying to work out where things are. So, that’s Freshbooks.





Heather Porter: Cool. So, let’s talk about a couple of different options that are similar to that. I know there is that is also out there called Harvest and what was the domain for that?

Andrew McCauley: You can go to www.GetHarvest.com. It does time tracking and it’s powerful. You know a little bit more about it than I do. Do you want to give a quick rundown?

Heather Porter: Yeah. Look, just a similar sort of thing where again, like you said, time tracking, it does the invoicing, the automation of the invoicing and just reporting and tracking of your incomings and outgoings in your business. So, similar sort of thing in Freshbooks. My understanding is it’s not as robust, it doesn’t have as many options and I believe it’s a little cheaper as well.

Andrew McCauley: Yeah, it has multicurrency support. So, you can invoice in different currencies if you want to do that. You can also set up recurring invoices, online payments, automated reminders. You only have to do that at once and Harvest will set that up for you and remind you on an ongoing basis. So, if you have got monthly ongoings, then it will help you do that sort of stuff too.

Heather Porter: These are great systems for any of you that are consultants that are on a retainer and coaches as well and you have your ongoing monthly fee, it’s a brilliant system for that because you just plug it in at once at the beginning and it will take care of the rest. PayPal has that sort of subscription thing, that automation thing but you have to send somebody to a button in PayPal and then sometimes the payment defaults and it’s just trickier in PayPal to manage that. So, a system like this is great.

Andrew McCauley: Yeah, definitely, definitely. One other one that’s good and we are actually switching to this one ourselves and that’s www.Xero.com. It does all that sort of stuff. The reason why we are switching is because we have got our business based in Australia, we are looking for specific Australian accounting and reporting and it’s being used by a lot of people out there, our accountant prefers it. So, we are going with his recommendation. Once again, it does a lot of that sort of stuff. We do it on the go, he gives us reports, and it just makes it easy for us to maintain. So, that’s Xero, that’s just another one.

Heather Porter: That’s Xero.

Andrew McCauley: Yup.

Heather Porter: Good one. Now, here is the thing and this is my biggest arcane thing that I still need to sort out with myself. I love this tool, I need to start using it. Receipts – paper receipts, all those pieces of paper floating around. What, Andrew, you have discovered is an amazing tool for managing these.

Andrew McCauley: I discovered this a couple of months ago and it’s called www.Shoeboxed.com. Shoeboxed being a shoebox representing a shoebox full of receipts and a lot of people have boxes full of receipts or bags or satchels of receipts and stuff. This is a pretty cool site. It does a couple of things. One is that if you are familiar with Netflix in the US – I am not sure if Blockbuster are still doing this; I know your Bigpond were doing it for a while in Australia where you could hire movies and they would send them to you in an envelope. Do they still do that? Do you still have sort of a company doing that in Australia now?





http://www.Shoeboxed.com/

http://www.Xero.com/

http://www.GetHarvest.com/

Heather Porter: That’s a very good question. Even though I am a movie buff, I don’t use those tools. The biggest things I have noticed in Australia are the boxes where you go into the grocery stores and then you kind of plug in your money and those things.

Andrew McCauley: Yeah, yeah. Well, NetFlix over here, they do an envelope, you order your movie online, it gets deliver the next day, you watch it and you send it back in an envelope. What Shoeboxed does is a similar thing except it doesn’t send you receipts; it lets you put receipts to an envelope and then you send it to a warehouse, it scans the envelope, it knows that it’s yours and it actually digitizes all of your receipts. So, it puts it all together, files and tags them, puts them into a spreadsheet for an accountant to deal with later but it knows that’s yours and it puts all the information right there. If you are getting receipts on an email, you can just forward, you have your own email address at Shoeboxed and you just forward all the receipts you get straight to your Shoeboxed account, they take it, they put all into a Spreadsheet and deal with it for you that way. So, it’s an awesome way to deal with receipts. You can also, if you don’t want to go and send them through the mail, you can take a photo with your phone of a receipt, it actually digitizes it and once again it sticks it into a file and you are done with that receipt. So, there is a lot of cool apps out there like mobile apps and we are not going to get into today with mobile apps but just know that there is a whole bunch of resources that lets you do all these sort of cool stuff to really save your time because I know what I am like with the receipts and when I am good, I am good but when I am bad, I just forget about them and that’s not what I want to do. So, that’s Shoeboxed.

Heather Porter: I love it and I will be getting in to do that, yes.

Andrew McCauley: Shoeboxed is available in Australia and the US.

Heather Porter: Okay.

Andrew McCauley: So, yeah, it’s just great.

Heather Porter: Now a big thing too after receipts, we talked about invoicing and we talked about the receipts but a big part of financials is your proposals, like obviously getting your clients on and you want to take really good care of potential new clients with clean professional delivery of your proposals that’s easy to understand and also for you to know if they have read it as well as a business owner so you can jump in and help out if they haven’t. We have discovered an incredible tool that we are in the midst of setting up for our business as well called Quote Roller. Now, Andrew, tell me a little bit more about Quote Roller.

Andrew McCauley: Quote Roller is excellent if you are doing a lot of quotes or proposals if you are service based and you need to give someone a price for work that’s coming up. So, what it does is you basically log in to your account, you fill in the details of your new client, you put their quote information in there, it saves it as a template, you can use that information again. So, if you are doing the same job for a lot of people, let’s say you are a pool contractor, you are building pools and a lot of the same sort of stuff is there. Without having to reinvent the wheel, you put all the stuff on Quote Roller, you send it out once. If you get another job later, you can just take that information and it automatically inserts into a new quote so you don’t have to spend time retyping it all up. It’s a pretty cool tool. Then, as you said, it actually tracks analytics and lets you know, let’s say you quote maybe 8 to 10 pages long. So, you may have an ‘About Us’ page, you may





have some ‘Pricing’ pages, you may have some ‘Details’ pages, you may have some ‘Overview’ pages. So, it tells you how long people read each page.

Heather Porter: Amazing.

Andrew McCauley: This is pretty cool because if you know that people spend all their time on the price page, then is the other stuff even needed or if they are looking at the ‘About Us’ page, does it mean that they are looking for more information about you to reassure them that you are the right person for the job. So, it can give you some really, really good information and analytics about your particular quote. It also lets you save time by just, as I said, creating in advance and it also keeps track of who won and who didn’t. So, you can see actually how many proposals are getting accepted and how many are getting out beat.

Heather Porter: Yean and in a high growth part of your business when you are doing a lot of proposals, it’s important that you keep track of what’s going out and the responses coming back from people as well so you are able to follow up easily. So, to have something that’s all in one place like this where it’s done professionally and like Andrew said there is tracking is an amazing tool. Again, for some of you guys that are selling stuff just strictly online, this is probably not going to be your thing but for those of you that are service based, like we said, that have potentially the need of having custom packages done out for people, this is a great tool for that.

Andrew McCauley: A couple of other things about these tools is they also synch with a bunch of other great tools. So, Quote Roller syncs with Xero. So, I am very happy to know that. If you are using Freshbooks it syncs with Freshbooks, it syncs with Basecamp. So, if you are using Basecamp for project management sort of stuff, it syncs with that as well and it syncs with Harvest. There is a number of other ones that it syncs with it as well. So, it just means that everything can come together in a seamless operation. So, think of this – you go out and put a quote together, the quote syncs with Basecamp because that’s your project management system so you don’t even have to go and spend time putting your project together because it sucks to that of Quote Roller and then Quote Roller goes and syncs with your Freshbooks account so that when the job is awarded through Quote Roller, it gets automatically integrated and then invoice gets to sent out to the person via your Freshbooks. Pretty cool stuff.

Heather Porter: I just have one question. Hey, guys out there listening, are you still with us because this might have just popped up your head off. Actually, how cool is that, Andrew? This is like when you get to this level – and I know that it takes setting up time and getting some of these systems in place – but when they all are talking together in the right way, it is literally like you click a button and you have a report and you can have a login for your accountant and he goes and he gets what he needs and then your bookkeeper, whoever it is… It’s an incredible thing because suddenly you are not working out of boxes anymore of receipts; you are working out of a fully integrated amazing system.

Andrew McCauley: Exactly, yeah, yeah.

Heather Porter: I love it.

Andrew McCauley: So, these are some of the cool tools. One of the final ones I think we want to talk about before we wrap up this podcast is Minutedock. Minutedock is good for time tracking. We spoke about time tracking in a recent





episode as well but Minutedock lets you organize your time tracking. So, if you need to track your time working on a project, let’s say you bill per hour, you may be a legal person, you may be a secretary, or you may be a freelancer that gets paid by the hour, then Minutedock is a great tool as well. www.Minutedock.com lets you track your time, puts it together, sends out invoices as well. It’s another cool tool. So, if you are looking for something to help you track time, Minutedock amongst others is one of the ones that is being pretty highly recommended as well.

Heather Porter: Brilliant! Wow! I think we got our bases covered.

Andrew McCauley: I think we have pretty much. Now, before we wrap up, a couple of shout-outs to some reviewers for us leaving us a five stars. If you want to leave us a five star review on iTunes, please do that. We would love to hear your five-star review. So, this week we have got JP John. JP John has left us five stars. Thank you, JP John. We have also got the Danish Blue. The Danish Blue is leaving us five stars.

Heather Porter: Brilliant.

Andrew McCauley: Thank you for that, you guys. That’s awesome. Where else can we find more information, Heather?

Heather Porter: They can head on over to www.AutopilotYourBusiness.com/Podcast and that is our podcast website. We have all sorts of resources. Now, each and every episode that we film, we have show notes and in those show notes we have links to the resources and tools we have talked to. So, even if you are just coming onboard with us right now, head on over there, check out the different resources that we have on there. We have a ‘Resources’ page as well. There is so much good stuff on that website that we would highly recommend you have a little look.

Andrew McCauley: Speaking of resources, you know what, we have actually put a resource guide together for this series.

Heather Porter: We have.

Andrew McCauley: And if you want to find out all of this resources we are talking about in one nice easy guide, where can they get that?

Heather Porter: They can head on over to www.AYBGuide.com and it is incredible. Actually, Andrew put this together for you guys. He has done a beautiful job and it has all the automation tools that we are talking about in this current series with more information about each and links directly to their websites. So, hop on over there.

Andrew McCauley: www.AYBGuide.com. So, check it out, leave us a review too while you are there. You will see a little page that says “Leave us review.” So, do that as well. Alright, Heather, is there anything else that we need to cover before we wrap it up?

Heather Porter: That’s it, Andrew. That is all we have today for all of you listeners from all over the world and we really as always appreciate you tuning in and having a listen.

Andrew McCauley: Thank you very much. Look forward to connecting with you. Leave us a review. Give us a shout-out. Send us an email. Join us on www.AYBSocial.com; that’s our social sites too.





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http://www.Minutedock.com/

Heather Porter: Yes, that would be great to see you there.

Andrew McCauley: Alright, guys, take care. We will talk to you in the next episode.

Heather Porter: Bye guys.

Voiceover: Make sure to grab our free business automation guide now and get access to other special bonuses. Head on over to www.AYBPodcast.com.

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