Did you file an extension this year?

How many times have you told yourself that you weren’t going to file an extension this year? Then how many times after filing that extension have you said you were not going to wait until the deadline only to find yourself scrambling in September or October to get it all together? 

You don’t have to do that again this year! We can help. Lack of planning is the single biggest and yet most avoidable cause for stress! How can Nerd Enterprises, Inc. help?

I’m glad you asked. We can send you a staff member to evaluate your current status, what needs to be done and how long it will take. Then we can either train you or your bookkeeper as the case might be on how to tighten things up or we can go to the next step for you and have our staff do the work to get you cleaned up and ready for Year End, tax planning (i.e. estimating what you owe for the year and helping to plan on setting that aside if necessary between now and March Or April).

Now what about the plan for Next Year? How many of you have sat down and spent some time thinking about what you expect your income to be next year, compared that with your expenses and now have an idea of what you might be able to afford to do much less save during the year? I have already spent hours on it for my Company as well as for myself personally. Even if you are an “employed” person you should do this. My experience has been that unless you do this you will not likely generate a significant savings. I’ve read articles that people my age (in their 30’s) have substantially less savings on average than our parents did by the time they were our age. And we make a lot more money!!! 

I’ll give you a few reasons besides the obvious, why you should do this and how it can help.

First and foremost… Peace of mind! When my mind is at ease, I am much more productive and I have found that my mind is MUCH MORE at ease when I understand exactly where my finances stand. Then when I am not working I find it much easier to relax – I don’t have to worry about spending because I know exactly what I can afford to spend.

Second… Goal setting and reaching. This applies more to the self employed (but not entirely). When I know what I should be able to make at a minimum, I can then see what I can do to raise the bar. For the employed person maybe that means putting in an extra 10% in order to lock in that raise and promotion. Sometimes it might mean a lateral move in order to position yourself within the organization for an upward move. What ever the case might be, plan it and see what you can do in order to make that happen. For the Self employed this means thinking both in and out of the box. Inside the box it is the obvious – how can I get more business? Outside of the box means thinking about new ways to generate revenue and perhaps most importantly, how do I generate residual / recurring revenue. Come up with some ideas and add that in to your model or projection. The idea is to have the same effort invested one time continue to generate revenue.

Third… Motivation. It is a lot more likely that you are going to get excited about where you are headed if you have that concept well defined. If I know that I can earn $250,000 this year but I am going to need to work to do it – as long as this is a realistic goal for me, then I will get excited about it and I will in turn be motivated to do what it takes to make it happen. Caution here! If I set unrealistic and unachievable goals then I am setting myself up for failure and I will be overwhelmed and disappointed. This is the opposite of what we are trying to accomplish. So be realistic but do plan and do set the goals. If you have never operated this way before then I suggest you start off by setting fairly easy to attain goals and then each time you achieve one, set the next bar a little higher over your head than the last one was.

So there you have it. A few reasons. We can help you with all of this using two very important tools (and the very things that have made my life what it is today) – QuickBooks and Microsoft Excel.

Remote Bookkeeping Services

Remote bookkeeping is going to become more and more prevalent for small businesses for a few basic reasons. First, it is efficient for the bookkeepers. This means we can charge less because we can go from one client to the next with no travel increasing our billable hours. This is good. Second, it is convenient for the client because you don’t have to make space for a physical human being. Depending on the setup option you choose, you might have to reserve a computer while we are logged in, however if the computer that hosts the QuickBooks file is is used during the day, we can have a bookkeeper log in during the evening hours when no one is there. This means less interruption during normal business hours. Because of the portability of QuickBooks we can also log in and upload a copy of QuickBooks to ourselves. This will mean 5 minutes that someone has to stop working on that computer while we do this. Then when we are finished we can log in after hours and download the updated copy of QuickBooks to your computer. Of course during this time no changes can be made by anyone at your office to QuickBooks. I have one client that I work this way with (actually through a VPN, no computer needed) and it works beautifully. I can even pay his bills by setting the checks “To Be Printed”. When the QuickBooks Company File is back on his server I e-mail him to let him know, and he just opens up his QuickBooks as if it never left his server. Then he prints the batch of checks and signs them. This is convenient for him and I, and it is really efficient while still allowing for him to review all checks before they are sent.

I mentioned “portability of QuickBooks files”. The reality is that with services like yousendit and other FTP site options it is easily to seamlessly transfer your file without interruption on your part. If the file is particularly large, then we simply save a QuickBooks Portable Company file before we upload. None of this really matters to you as the business owner, all you care about is that we will get your file, work on it and put it back without you even feeling it!

So how do we get your information in order to work on your books remotely? There are a few ways to do this. The BEST way is when the client is comfortable and trusts us with the login info for their bank & credit card accounts. It is possible to give us read only access with most banks so that all we could ever do is download the information into QuickBooks and categorize the transactions. The other way is you send us the PDF’s and we enter them manually. It really doesn’t matter to us. In some cases we will set up a private blog site – you can easily upload documents as well as post notes for us as far as things you need us to follow up on. Yes of course you could e-mail that too, but the blog gives us nice platform to track the progress on things while e-mails get filed and forgotten!

So how do we log in to your computer?

The best way is that we set up a VPN (Virtual Private Network) on your server where the QuickBooks file is hosted. This enables us to get to your file without you even needing to interrupt anyone at any computer there. The other way is that we set up one of our gotomypc accounts on your computer. Finally you can set up your own gotomypc (or other remote access) and give us the information we need to log in to your computer. If we provide the gotomypc account there is an annual charge of $150 (about half of what it costs to have your own) and you can use it all you like to get access to your files and of course your own QuickBooks file. As long as you are a client the account is yours to use.

Setting up the VPN will of course require about 3 hours of time with our IT department at $150/hour, once this is done, however you have permanent remote access set up and it doesn’t cost another dime. Oh and yes – we can do this remotely!

In the process we will also be working with you to go as much paperless as possible – scanning bills and other documents in order to make them available to us for input. This is better (more efficient) for you and of course better for the environment – and we like that!

What About Security?

Of course we do everything in our power to protect your information. Everything we see is confidential and treated as such. Our service agreement provides for a bi-lateral NDA (we give you information about our company that we do not want disclosed to the general public as well). The VPN’s are all very secure as is gotomypc.

You can read more about remote bookkeeping services in our main website:

http://www.nerdenterprises.com/accounting/in_house_bookkeeping.htm

Please feel free to post your questions in the form of comments here.