Just Get Started

Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it. -Salvador Dali Being a perfectionist can be dangerous. You’re never going to achieve it. Some people do end up achieving greatness along the way to perfection, but more often than not people just don’t bother getting started because they know that they’ll never do it […]

Plan ahead for a stress-free holiday season

I can’t believe it’s almost December. In just over a month retail businesses will be completely swamped…and my business will be a ghost town. If you are in the world of retail, where everyone pays you before they leave the store…you can safely skip this post. This information is for those of us who provide […]

Let Xero Supercharge your bank reconciliation

The trouble with trying to pick a “favourite” cloud-based bookkeeping service is that they all have unique things that make them stand out. In Xero, at least for me, their standout feature is bank rules. Most services will automatically pull down bank transactions. Some of them will even “learn” how to categorize some of your […]

Should bookkeepers be certified?

I know I have mentioned this at least 153 times…but I’m Canadian. And, as a Canadian, we bookkeepers don’t require any type of official certification in order to start working. Sadly, you probably don’t even need to know how to spell bookkeeper before you start charging people to do their books. Let’s not forget the […]

FreshBooks: Get paid automatically without asking for their credit card

Today I wanted to share a little tip I just discovered. FreshBooks has a nice feature that I just have much opportunity to use. It’s called auto-bill. If you have clients who get billed the same amount each month (a subscription service for example) you can setup a recurring invoice. The recurring invoice gets sent […]

Hourly or Flat Rate: How to Charge For Your Time

UPDATE: I wrote another post on this subject in 2023 that might be more current. Check out How To Charge For Bookkeeping Services to read my latest thoughts. One of my favourite readers, and former guest poster Irvin emailed me recently. He suggested I write a post about how I charge for my services. It […]

Dropbox isn’t a backup solution

On a post I wrote last week about Streak for GMail I included a screenshot. That screenshot was showing off Streak’s functionality, but it featured an email I received from Dropbox. Dropbox has a really handy feature called Selective Sync. With this, you can choose to only have certain sub-folders synced on a given computer. […]

Streak for GMail

I wanted to finish up the week of picks with something that covers one of the most frustrating topics I can think of…email. 20+ years after getting my first email address and I still haven’t figured out the perfect system. The part of me that grew up with apps like Eudora and Outlook longs for […]

CSV2QBO

This week I’m sharing some of my favourite utilities. On Monday I shared my love of ChronoMate. Today we’re going to talk about a little app called CSV2QBO. This is definitely one of those apps that does one thing well. This is about as niche as you can get. What is it? CSV2QBO is a […]

ChronoMate

This week I wanted to share with you a few of the tools I use to get things done. They’re not huge apps made by gigantic companies, but they do one or two things really well and help me make the most of my busy days. Today I’ll start out with ChronoMate. As I’ve mentioned […]