Customer Story | Bookkeeping Firm
How Books To Go Made AP “Slick” with Ottimate
“If we’re doing a client’s payables, we tell them that this is what we use. And then we just wrap the Ottimate cost into our fee. It’s worth it for all of us. The customers see it, too.”
Founding
Invoices/month
Tech
QuickBooks Online
Receipt Bank
Located in the Portland, OR metro area, Books To Go specializes in providing bookkeeping services for businesses, many of whom have hit a wall trying to do their own accounting. And in the more than six years she’s been working as a bookkeeper at Books To Go, Jessica Glenn has helped more clients straighten out their books than she can count.
“We don’t have a specific industry, but we do have an ideal client: someone who wants a better understanding of their books,” Jessica shares. “They usually have things going to wrong GL accounts and their payroll’s mapped all wacky.
“So we run a good balance sheet and a good P&L for them, and they go, ‘Okay, that makes more sense. That’s about where I thought I was.’”
For a long time, the firm used Receipt Bank to transcribe the receipts and invoices they received on behalf of customers. A few years later, they added Bill.com to their suite of software tools to help their clients manage their Accounts Payable more efficiently.
The Challenge
For Jessica, her AP headaches started when they had difficulty synching Bill.com correctly with QuickBooks.
Every time I exported to QuickBooks, we had an issue. We would push invoices into Bill.com to gain approval, but then we’d have to hand-enter it into QuickBooks.
“We tried the other way as well: push it into QuickBooks from Receipt Bank, download it, and upload it into Bill.com. Even then, we were only using it for approvals.”
The challenges didn’t end there. Jessica and her team also faced charges for every payment they made, as well as additional fees for ACH transactions. And when their previous AP solution wouldn’t support some of their clients, the team knew it was time to look for a new option.
“The final straw came when we put about eight cannabis locations on Bill.com. They wouldn’t work with us on those accounts. That was a deal-breaker for us.”
After countless hours of manually entering invoices due to the QuickBooks sync issues, paying bills directly out of their accounting software to avoid the high transaction fees, and having to take their business elsewhere by restrictive policies on cannabis retail, the Books To Go team finally found a solution that would truly streamline their AP workflows: Ottimate.
Our Solution
Ottimate not only transcribes invoices at the line item level instead of just header info, but also welcomes all types of clients on the platform.
“As soon as I found out Ottimate works with cannabis, it was a win,” says Jessica. “Some of these clients don’t have bank accounts yet, but it was no problem for Ottimate.”
Right away, Jessica started spending less time typing invoices into her accounting software.
“Ottimate’s integration with QuickBooks actually works. It syncs instantly. I’m not spending the hours that I did with Bill.com on sync issues”
The workflow for clients who needed to approve their invoices also got much easier — especially when it came to paying vendors. Once invoices flowed seamlessly into Ottimate, all they would do was log in, approve any invoices in the queue, and let the Books To Go team take care of the rest.
And Ottimate’s solution went beyond invoice processing. Our VendorPay payment automation makes paying invoices a breeze. With Ottimate, Books To Go’s clients were given the option to have more control over their cash flow.
We love Ottimate because you don’t take the money out of the client’s account until the check clears the bank, which helps the restaurants — especially right now, with their cash flow issues.
Results
Serving Clients More Efficiently
Since Ottimate’s rollout, Jessica started spending less time typing invoices into her accounting software and more time helping hundreds of clients keep better track of their numbers, organize their finances, and streamline their businesses towards growth.
We’ve really, really seen the time savings. We job-cost our time at Books To Go. And we have seen the time spent on payables drop considerably in the last couple of months. Our time with each client just gets more efficient.
Cash Flow-Friendly with VendorPay
Books To Go used Ottimate’s VendorPay feature to schedule check runs for any vendors that don’t accept the firm’s in-house credit card.
Ottimate checks are cash flow-friendly, and, according to Jessica, “really easy to set up.”
“Slick” Automation
With Ottimate, Books To Go was able to set up sophisticated automation that routes invoices to the right accounts with minimal human intervention.
“We make email rules. So if it’s a bill from waste management, and it mentions one particular store name, it gets sent to that Ottimate address. We don’t even touch it. Now sometimes we have vendors who still send in bills to the wrong email address. So we’ll just grab that bill, put it into Ottimate, and contact the vendor to tell them to send future bills to the account-specific email address. We’ve been working on this for the last few months — and it’s so slick!”
Saving Time Each Day with QuickBooks Sync
Books To Go discovered that the biggest source of time savings was in how easily Ottimate pushes invoices into QuickBooks.
It’s accurate, because your AI is already reading it. We occasionally check on it just to make sure that it is in the correct location, but then it’s just done until it’s ready to be paid.
“I would say that saves us about 20 minutes a day for each of four big customers alone. So that’s about an hour and a half per day on that account alone from not having to download, forward, or enter stuff.” That’s nearly 390 hours saved each year with Ottimate!
Helping Customers Understand Their Books
Dedicated to helping customers better understand their books, Books To Go saw the value in the granular data available with Ottimate. By investing in analytics software, the Books To Go team gave their customers a deeper dive into the lifecycle of their finances — from initial invoice to payments.
“It’s a matter of balancing what the customer wants to know with the speed they want the work done at.”
At this point, if we’re doing a client’s payables, we just tell them that this is what we use and wrap the Ottimate cost into our fee. It’s worth it for all of us. The customers see it too.
Learn how Ottimate can speed up your invoice-to-payment process with our End-to-End AP Automation solutions by scheduling a demo today!