by MHolland | Oct 23, 2020 | Remote Work
I just read a good Blog from Regus (the global shared office company). Actually 2 blogs.
The first talked about 5 boundaries to set working from home. And who is not working from home (at least part-time), these days?
One idea is a new one for me. Our Team has been working from home for over 2 decades. I have not commuted in 23 years.
What the Blog suggested was a Fake Commute.
Most people hate their dreaded commute. Hours stuck in traffic every day. What is there to like?
Well, the commute was your time!
Now that you are at home, you need to reclaim your commute time. You do this with a walk around the neighbourhood in the morning before work! Great idea.
To read the rest if the ideas click here:
5 Boundaries Leaders Should Set
The other Regus Blog was about trust. As a leader you must trust your remote workers are productive.
I have written about this before. At ControllershipPLUS we trust our people. Our Team members flex their time. Yet they are super-productive. They get more done working from home.
Check out the “Trust” blog here:
Why CEOs Need to Trust Remote Workers
Thank you Regus for some great Blogs. And thank you dear reader for reading…
by MHolland | Oct 9, 2020 | Accounts Payables
When was the last time you wrote a cheque?
For me, I cannot remember. I have an ancient box of business cheques somewhere in my office, collecting mold. They are so old that the address is incorrect.
Think of it, dear reader, it is Covid 19 times. You are a mid-sized business. Perhaps multiple locations. Cheques need to be signed by at least two people.
The problem is hardly anyone is working at the office anymore.
What do you do? Sign the cheque and mail it to the next signer? Yikes!
This is just so wrong.
The Entire Cheque Cycle is Slow
That cheque, with one signature, is now in the physical Canada Post eco-system.
How long will it take to get to second signer? And then to the supplier? A week? 10 days? Two weeks? Oh my.
But wait! You have solution! Just pre-sign a stack of cheques and leave them with second co-signer. That will solve the problem, right?
Some of you may be either laughing (thinking of the obvious – the controls of 2 signatures have just been broken). Others, are thinking, “would anyone actually do that?”
It is done all the time.
Never Pre-Sign Cheques
A company we knew had the business owner pre-sign a stack of cheques for the bookkeeper to pay bills.
They were kept in the safe. “Safety first”, correct?
The bookkeeper had a new baby. The costs of giving her sweet baby everything she deserved was high. Toys are expensive on a bookkeeper’s salary.
These signed, blank cheques were sitting there, a severe temptation. Like wine in the fridge to an alcoholic.
Would the owner even notice if a few cheques ended up supplementing her low wage?
She secretly filled out some cheques payable to her credit card, not the owner’s. This went on for years.
She coded the “expense” to inventory. (Perhaps she was thinking how fitting – inventory of toys and things for her baby).
The owner never discovered the fraud. Finally, (and this is usually how these things are revealed), she took a holiday. The relief bookkeeper could not reconcile the bank. She got suspicious, and uncovered the fraud.
The morale of this story is – never pre-sign cheques.
Why Do You Trust the Physical and Not the Virtual?
When a signed cheque leaves your office, it can be intercepted.
Think of all the stops along the way. Your office (before it is mailed). The mailbox. The routing stations at Canada Post. The office where it is being sent to.
It is a crap shoot.
Cheques intercepted are acid washed. The payee changed. You would not recognize your signed cheque when you see it.
Compare This to an Online System
We use a Canadian company called Plooto for online bill payments.
Bills approved for payment in the accounting software are synced to Plooto. The source documents move with the bill.
Inside Plooto you can set a simple or complex payment approval matrix.
Payment approvals can be set to require multiple approvals. Dollar amounts can be set so that the owner is not having to sign everything.
Everything is approved virtually, online.
There is an audit trail.
The payments go through the Canadian payments approval process, just like a cheque would.
The supplier can receive the payment via email. They log into their bank using their own bank credentials and deposit the money you are sending.
Some Interesting Stats
Australia has virtually eliminated cheques. The banks charge about $50 to process a cheque. Not much of an incentive to use cheques!
The overall numbers are interesting – 5% of payments are paid by cheque in Australia.
In Canada?
In 2019, 39.38% of all payments were by cheque. If you remove personal payments, the business cheques are significantly higher.
My coaching – stop writing cheques.
You will save time, money, and reduce risk of fraud.
And in Covid 19 times, online bill payments just make sense!
by MHolland | Sep 22, 2020 | Cloud-based Accounting
There can be so much hype when new technology kicks in.
Also, monthly software fees to go online add up to more than desktop software.
Some people compare the price of online accounting to Quickbooks Desktop.
Likely QuickBooks Desktop is a lot less expensive.
This is false economy.
Here is why…
Online Accounting is a System
Online accounting is vastly different from traditional accounting.
In traditional accounting, clerks spend all their time on data entry.
To show you, here are all the steps to process a supplier bill.
Step 1 – The Supplier Mails/Emails Bill
The bookkeeper takes the vendor bill and enters the following:
- Date
- Looks up supplier name
- Records the GST/PST portion
- Records the amount
- Records the account to post to
Step 2 – The Bill is Paid
The bill is paid by cutting a cheque or doing an Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT).
The bookkeeper must record the payment in the accounting system:
- Do a payment entry to record a decrease to the bank
- Record the reduction in amount owing to that vendor
Step 3 – Bank is Reconciled
Once a month the bookkeeper must now reconcile the bank.
He/she does that by printing off the bank statement or viewing it online.
They must match each transaction from the bank to a transaction in the accounting software.
Note that all the 3 steps above take time. They are prone to errors (keying in so many numbers dates and other details).
It is a terrible misuse of a good bookkeeper’s intelligence. They become data entry clerks.
Now, compare the above steps to processing a bill using online accounting software.
I am assuming 3 software programs to do this:
- HubDoc for data extraction
- Xero for the accounting software (could be Quickbooks Online)
- Online bill payment service (Plooto, a Canadian company)
Step 1 – Vendor Emails Bills to HubDoc
HubDoc does the following:
Extracts for you:
- Date
- Invoice number
- Vendor
- Amount owing
- GST
- PST
- Due date
HubDoc codes the vendor bill to the same account as the last time you did it.
High-end accounting technician reviews what HubDoc did above. He/she glances over to ensure amounts for taxes and total bill, date, and account code are correct.
(Note the error rate for extraction with HubDoc is ridiculously small. Some bills if they are faint or formatted weirdly need some human intervention. I have seen almost zero error rate on the numbers).
Technician, after a quick once over, clicks “publish”.
Here is the recap of what the human does:
- Quick eyeball check of what the software “data clerk” did
- Click “Publish”
Step 2 – Bill Moves to Accounting Software
Now the bill moves automatically to Xero with a PDF copy attached to the transaction.
The transaction was recorded automatically.
Step 3 – Bill Moves to Plooto for Payment
The PDF copy of the bill is automatically fetched by Plooto.
The owner or manager now has 4 mouse clicks to do:
- Choose bill for payment
- Choose your bank account to pay from if you have more than one
- Clicks continue
- Clicks “process payment”
Step 4 – Recording Above Payment
Plooto then records the payment inside your accounting software (Xero) automatically.
It reduces the bank account and records the payment against that vendor bill, so your accounts payable goes down.
Step 5 – Bank Reconciliation
Xero has bank feeds. What bank feeds do is log onto your bank automatically and feed (hence “bank feeds”) the transactions into Xero, your accounting software.
Here is what your bookkeeper does:
- He/she goes to bank reconciliation screen and sees where the system has auto-matched your transactions with the bank transaction. When matched they turn green.
- She/he clicks “ok”.
Summary of Workflows
Look at the table below for a summary. The system does most of the work for you. Compare to the little the technician does.
| Done for You by Software |
Bookkeeper Tasks |
Document extraction for each bill:
- Date
- Amount
- GST
- PST
- Vendor
- Account Code
|
Glance over for accuracy
Clicks “publish” |
Records each transaction in accounting software:
- Increases accounts payable
- Increases the expense
- Decreases GST owing (recoverable)
- Adds PST to expense amount (non-recoverable)
- Attaches PDF copy of bill
|
Nothing |
Filing:
- HubDoc files the bill by vendor and pushes to Dropbox or Google Drive, etc.
- It adds copy of bill to the specific transaction in accounting software
Paying Bill:
- Transfers bill to Plooto (secure online bill payment service)
- Records payment in accounting software by:
- Decreasing accounts payable
- Decreasing the bank, you paid it from
|
Nothing
4 mouse clicks |
Reconciling bank:
- System matches the bank item to the transaction in your accounting software
|
Reviews transactions every day or so.
Clicks “ok” on green system matches |
As you can see HubDoc can easily replace full-time data clerks. Yes, exceptions must be managed. However, just look at all the steps done by the system above and the very few mouse clicks by the technician. The time freed up can go into systems management, and higher-end reporting.
What is the downside?
Mindset. Traditional bookkeepers are addicted to processing documents. They often bypass systems to feed their addiction to paper processing and data entry.
21st Century accounting technicians are tech savvy systems-focused users. They manage the systems and look for exceptions.
HubDoc is now free with a Xero subscription. Xero runs about $40 CAD/month. Plooto is just $25/month CAD and that includes 10 payments. Subsequent payments are just $.75.
When you add up the costs you can see it is low!
Imagine the times savings though! Would you rather have your bookkeeper do data entry, or high-level accounting that adds real value?
Thanks for reading..
by MHolland | Sep 9, 2020 | Business Tips
Why do we start a business?
To make money? Is that it? Is that ALL there is? Could there more to it than that?
Make new friendships? Have fun? That sounds a little more “user-friendly”!
Go a bit deeper and look.
Do we want a legacy? Yes? If so, how do we do that?
And what is a legacy? Is it the structures? The people? Or something more intangible?
Everything You See Will Disappear
Take a look at your business. Look at the buildings, offices, computers, the people. Think of the systems, the products you sell, the services rendered. Imagine the computers, the software, your website.
It will all disappear. All of it.
You will be gone. You may leave your great business to your kids or a successor. They will die and be gone. They may leave it to their kids. Ultimately, they, too, will be gone.
This is just the nature of everything we see. It is all created stuff destined to disappear. To fade into the source that it came from.
Take a look at this picture. John, one of my best friends, did it. Beautiful, isn’t it.
And, what a delightful symbol. We all see the water right behind it. The tide will come in and sweep it away. Back from where it came.
That is your business.
Feeling freed up, or despairing?
I hope it frees you a bit from the grip of control we all – as business owners – can have on our businesses. (Or the business controlling us)! We created our businesses and we want to be proud of them. We WANT them to last! To leave a legacy…
But wait, there is one thing that lasts…
I will come to it, keep reading.
Buddha Art
There is a style of painting called “Buddha art”. You start with a blank canvas, water, a brush, and evaporating ink.
You draw a beautiful painting. The water evaporates and the canvas turns blank.
Can we hold our businesses so lightly? Creating them as art. Letting them fade and re-create them daily?
How does that image make you feel? Less stressed, I hope…
Saint Theresa of Lisieux
Saint Theresa entered a Convent in France at the age of 15. She died at age 24. She lived a simple life. St. Theresa did not create an order, nor start a business, or a publishing house.
What she did do – and she is a great example for us – is this. She decided to love her fellow Sisters with all her heart. She did every small thing – washing dishes, sweeping the floor, serving others – with love. With love, she transformed a relationship with a grumpy older nun into a loving, caring one.
When people visit the convent, they are absolutely shocked at how small it is. They imagined a large Convent at the center of acres of gardens. No, it was tiny.
What is remarkable about her life is that she wrote so little. She was not ambitious in the physical sense. Yet she touches the hearts of millions through her book, “The Little Way”. She is a Doctor of the Church. One of a small few.
What has this got to do with business?
Legacy. Her legacy lives because she did small things with love.
Are we trying to conquer the world with our stunning acumen, great systems, brilliant competence?
Where is the love? The kindness?
“Our days on earth are like grass; like wildflowers, we bloom and die”.
Your Business Legacy
Your business legacy will be how much you did each act with love.
That is all that will remain. The tide washes the mandala back to sea. The ink disappears on the ink painting. In your business, what remains is the love you put in.
Imagine doing each act, each day, with all your love. How you talk to your team. The way you interact with your clients. An email dripping with softeners and kindnesses.
Build your business with skillful finesse and let that skill overflow with love.
The chances the “things” of your business will last a wee bit longer than the sand mandala above expand in direct proportion to the love poured in.
And who will we all become in the process?
Thanks for reading…
by MHolland | Sep 4, 2020 | Business Tips
I am almost finished reading an awesome book called Hyper-Focus by Chris Bailey.
Some of what I read I knew already. Keep reading and I will share some cutting edge pointers.
The stats he refers to are incredible. One study was done in situ – meaning live studies on real workers.
(In situ studies are rare. It took them 6 years to get permission, Why? Potential disruptions to the live workers).
They attached monitors to the workers to regulate heart rate for stress. Monitors were added to their computers. This was to see how often people switch from app to app, task to task.
Wanna know how often? Ready for this? Every 40 seconds. The average worker switches every 40 seconds from task to task, app to app.
That is stunning. How does any real, concentrated work ever get done?
Here is another stat. Let us say that you are in a hyper-focused state. You get interrupted. It takes an average of 22 minutes to get back to where you were before the distracting interruption.
Yikes!
You may be wondering what exactly is hyper-focus?
First, you will be working on a project that is challenging. Yet not too complex. It cannot be done habitually.
You will enter a state of flow. An hour whizzes by like 15 minutes. You forget to eat. No distractions (or few) are entering your space. That includes your workspace, your mind, your emotions.
At the end of a session of hyper-focus you feel energized, not tired.
The kicker – you get a LOT done and done well!
Here are my top 3 tips so far…
Number 1 – Buy an App to Stop Distractions from Bombarding You
Your smartphone is not a phone. Consider it is a very annoying computer in your pocket. Annoying because it is harping notifications all day long.
New email. Ding. New text. Ding. New WhatsApp. Ding. New call. Ring-ring-ring.
Ok, you may have turned off notifications and that is one step forward for sure.
I just bought an app/service called Freedom. Good name.
It is designed to stop the addictive pull to check emails, answer the phone, check WhatsApp or social media threads.
There are a few programs like this out there (Cold Turkey, Rescue Time). So far, I like Freedom the best.
What the app does is set up a distraction free environment. It blocks all sites and apps across all your devices (phone, tablet, computer). Or you choose which apps you want blocked.
Then you set the time. I use 90 minutes to enter into a highly productive hyper-space block. You could start with any block, say 30 minutes.
You can block groups of sites. One is news sites. Try to bring up BBC News – blocked. Shopping sites can be blocked. No getting into Amazon when in hyper-focus time.
Outlook can be blocked. Multiple phone apps can be blocked.
Think of it. For 90 minutes – no emails, no texts, no messages. No unconscious checking the news, or Facebook.
Number 2 – Set Intentions
One tip Chris talks about in the book is the Rule of 3.
Focus on only 3 top items/intentions for each day. (The mind cannot hold much more than that!)
(I have practiced this and it works)!
Set your intention(s) for the hyper-focus block you set. This would be something important that forwards your business, life, or work.
As your mind wanders (and it will), keep pulling it back to your stated intention.
Chris talks a lot about Attentional Space. Doing complex, new tasks, or problem solving requires a huge load of brain power.
You cannot multi-task in a hyper-focus state.
By the way, you can multi-task – when it does not require concentration and what you are doing is habitual.
Consider most people can walk, chew gum, and carry on a meaningful conversation at the same time.
Number 3 – Take a Fast from Social Media
Facebook is designed to keep you in a loop. An unproductive, endless loop – feeding you news and ads based on your comments and views.
It craves your attention. And what do you get from it?
Come on, be honest? New, meaningful relationships? Improved, deeper relationships with your Facebook friends? More clients for your business?
Facebook and Twitter – all of these types of software – are black holes. And you are not in control. You may even be addicted.
Take a cleansing, purging bath from social media for 30 days. Too much? Try only using them 30 minutes a day max.
Give it a go.
This book is chock-a-block full of great tips and studies.
By the way, the second one-half of the book is dedicated to scatter focus.
No one can hyper focus ALL the time. You get the most done in Hyper Focus. But you are most creative when in Scatter Focus time.
Here is a link to Amazon for the book:
HyperFocus by Chris Bailey
