C A S E S TU DY
SWITCHING TO CLOUD-BASED ACCOUNTING SOLUTIONS In this case study, we look at the steps taken by Taunton Vale Sports Club to reduce the amount of time spent on bookkeeping from 1-2 days per week to 1-2 hours per week. The obvious first step was to move to a cloud-based accounting solution, Xero. This allowed for the bookkeeping to be dealt with from anywhere with an internet connection, and the associated app is particularly useful to take advantage of ‘dead-time’ to catch up on bookkeeping, for example waiting in line, on the commute, or even on the toilet! Once Xero was in use, Bank feeds were set up, saving the time spent manually inputting the data from bank statements previously. Xero’s Bank rules feature was utilised for any regular direct debits such as council tax, electricity, gas and rent, meaning a simple click on ‘OK’ on bank transactions Xero has been programmed to recognise deals with a large chunk of transactions each month. These steps alone helped to save a significant amount of time and most businesses who have made the switch to cloud-based solutions have put these in place. However, Xero also has a growing app marketplace allowing for integration with other systems used in businesses. Taking advantage of these can also save a considerable amount of time, and three in particular were used by Taunton Vale Sports Club:
Hubdoc allows for all invoices to be scanned directly into Xero, either by taking a photo of the invoice 08
ENTERPRISE NE WSLE T TER
on your phone, forwarding invoices received by email directly to Hubdoc, or grabbing the invoice automatically from larger suppliers. Once invoices are scanned in to Hubdoc, rules can be set up to automatically post invoices from your regular suppliers to the correct code on Xero, meaning no further data input is required after the invoice is scanned. When the invoice is paid, Xero automatically picks this up and allocates the payment for you, meaning once again a simple click on ‘OK’ in the bank reconciliation page is all that is required to post both the invoice and payment. Other benefits of using Hubdoc include having an online database containing all invoices, meaning there is no need to dig out invoices for the accountant at the year-end, or go searching for invoices in a paper filing system when required to check something. Payments by Stripe
Taunton Vale Sports Club’s main income source is taking bookings for its sports facilities. This was previously dealt with manually over the phone with each invoice created using a template in Microsoft Word, before being input manually on to Sage. An upgrade to an online booking system, Skedda, was the first step taken to streamline this process. As well as saving a considerable amount of administrative time taking phone calls and preparing invoices
