Frequently Asked Questions
General FAQ
What should I do if my books are incorrect or behind?
If your books are caught-up and in good order prior to migrating to us, then great. If not, we are happy to provide catch-up bookkeeping services for a separate fee and will propose this solution in the final quote.
Can I skip the catch-up work and go to monthly bookkeeping?
In most cases, your current records are only accurate if the past records are correct. While we are practical in how far back to go, we believe it is important to start a fresh set of books with a good starting point.
Do you have examples of your Bookkeeping work?
From DIY bookkeepers to scale-up businesses, we’ve helped multiple clients get a grip on their books. Please read the latest case studies in Bookkeeping Solutions.
How will working with you be different? We’re on our third bookkeeper in the past few years.
As a licensed public practice firm, we are equipped to perform more than bookkeeping and grow with your business. As a fully remote digital firm, we put our efforts into value-added work for our clients. While not for everyone, we work best with clients that take an ongoing interest in their accounting and financial performance.
Who does our Bookkeeping at your firm?
Client bookkeeping is completed by a team of Cloud Bookkeepers. While remote, the team is based in Metro Vancover. The Bookkeepers are experienced, Quickbooks Online trained, and supervised by a designated Cloud Accountant. The Cofounders are regularly involved in all aspects of delivering high quality bookkeeping services.
Once I sign up, do you take care of everything?
We will require regular input from you to record your books on an accurate and timely basis. We endeavor to provide you with the tools and training to easily provide the necessary information. We have developed processes to balance the need for accuracy and timeliness. Generally, clients should expect to take a year before settling into a regular flow of bookkeeping.
Do you perform cash or accrual accounting?
We carry out hybrid-accrual accounting through our Bookkeeping Services because we are thinking two steps ahead for our clients. Larger companies use accrual accounting because it records when money was earned or spent instead of when money entered or left a bank account. This method improves your financial reporting and future proofs your business.
Do you provide accounts receivables, accounts payables, payroll or inventory management?
Although not part of our bookkeeping packages, our team is experienced in performing these functions. We are happy to provide a custom quote on the above services.
Do I have to provide receipts and bills for every transaction?
Our goal is to ensure you are compliant with the CRA requirements for eligible expenses (short answer is yes, the CRA requires receipts for everything. But we understand the need to be pragmatic as you are busy running a business and receipts can be lost. We generally will forgo receipts for recurring expenses (i.e. app subscriptions) and receipts less than $100 in order to keep the bookkeeping process moving along.
Do you file corporate taxes?
Through our Bookkeeping services, we can assist with your GST, PST, Worksafe BC, and Employer Health Tax, and payroll tax filings. For corporate tax preparation, you will engaged separately through our Accounting & Tax services.
Do you prepare personal tax returns?
If you are a business client, we can prepare your T1 personal tax return along with your T2125 for sole proprietors or T2 for corporations. This is a separate engagement through our Accounting & Tax services.
Pricing
What comes with my plan?
Each bookkeeping plan comes with subscriptions to Quickbooks Online and Dext. A Bookkeeper is assigned to record your monthly revenues & expenses and prepare bank reconciliations. There is a periodic Controller review of your financial performance. To facilitate communication with your dedicated team, you are given a private Slack channel.
Does your plan include tax filings, payroll, collections, and payables?
Each business is unique and may not require all the above tasks. And business owners may have varying degrees of need and competency to offload this work. And as such, these are considered as Additional Bookkeeping Services and we are happy to provide a custom quote for your needs. Year-end financial reports and corporate tax filings are prepared separately through our Accounting & Tax services.
How do I get charged for the plan?
Monthly fees are automatically withdrawn through a pre-authorized debit (PAD) on the first of each month.
Can I cancel at any time?
Yes. You’re not locked in and just need to give us 30 days notice and pay for the current month. Just like how we care about onboarding, we’ll carefully offboard you to your next Bookkeeper.
Can I change my bookkeeping plan?
We will review your plan annually. If we find that your number of transactions, entities, and bank & credit card accounts have changed (either increased or decreased), we’ll let you know one month in advance before adjusting your price.
Can I put my bookkeeping plan on hold?
We understand that there are times where you’re required to step away from the business. Just give us notice and we will stop performing any bookkeeping and other add-on services. We will maintain your app subscriptions and bill a lower monthly plan. Once you are ready to recommence bookkeeping, we can catch-up your books separately.
Are there any one time fees?
We charge a one-time fee at the beginning to provide a white-glove onboarding service. We migrate your data, setup Quickbooks, integrate apps, provide training, and be available to answer any questions.
Do I pay extra for other apps?
Each plan comes with a subscription to Quickbooks Online and Dext. If you require additional apps and support for other services such as payroll, ecommcerce, it will be included in the monthly quote.
Apps & Integrations
Why do you use Quickbooks Online?
We believe in working with the best accounting software available. Intuit Quickbooks Online is the gold standard for small business accounting which gives you more options to integrate other Apps.
Do I have to pay for the apps?
Each bookkeeping plan comes with a subscription to Quickbooks Online and Dext.
Can you maintain our books in Quickbooks Desktop on any other on-premise accounting software?
Our workflow is built around the efficiencies of working remotely with a limited number of apps. Unfortunately, we do not provide monthly bookkeeping services for on-premise desktop software. Depending on your needs, we can provide Advisory Services which are billed in 15 minute increments.
How do I transition to Quickbooks Online?
Depending on your current accounting system, there’s a few ways to migrate to Quickbooks Online:
- If you’re already on Quickbooks Online, you just need to add us as Accountant
- If you’re using Quickbooks Desktop, Sage, or Xero, we can convert your entire file to Quickbooks Online.
- If you’re using another accounting app (Wave, Freshbooks, etc), we’ll setup your closing balances in Quickbooks.
Before any migration, there are other considerations such as the years of data, volume of data, and cleanliness of data. Unfortunately, data degrades with size and time and we need to make trade offs to set up a clean set of books. Depending on the size of job, we may elect to migrate client data with our Bookkeeping Onboarding Services or Technology Advisory Services.
Can you connect bank accounts to Quickbooks Online?
Yes, connecting your bank and credit card accounts are essential to the automated features in Quickbooks Online and Dext. It will give us access to your transaction history and account statements to do our jobs – that’s it.
How do you integrate Quickbooks Online with our other apps?
Our onboarding fee includes integrating Quickbooks Online, Dext and Wagepoint for payroll clients. If there are non-standard or new apps required for integration, we will include in a separate quote.
Accounting & Tax Services
Can I use my own Accountant for corporate tax filing if I go on your Bookkeeping plan?
While we recommend clients consolidate bookkeeping and accounting & tax services to get a holistic view of the business, we are happy to provide our bookkeeping information to your preferred choice of Accountant.
Do you prepare T1 personal tax returns?
We only provide personal tax returns to our business clients with corporations or sole proprietorships. We do not prepare tax returns for people with T4 employment slips.
My bank requires an annual compilation report, do you provide such a report?
We are licensed to provide compilation reports through our Accounting & Tax Services. Take note, the previous Notice-to-Reader finanacial report was replaced by the new Compiliation (CSRS 4200) report in 2021. This service forms the “accounting” of our Accounting & Tax services.
My investors require a review or audit engagement, are you licensed for such services?
We are unlicensed to provide review or audit engagements and are happy to recommend fellow public practice firms suitable to the size of your business.
Multiple engagements seems like a hassle, can my Bookkeeping engagement cover everything?
As required by the Chartered Professional Accountants of British Columbia, we are required to provide separate engagement letters for our services.
Advisory Services
What if I need you to be onsite?
As we are a virtual firm, travel to and from work sites will be billed at 50% of the billable rate in 15 minute increments. We encourage you to consider whether the cost spent traveling can be spent doing extra remote work.
Can I call you our CFO?
Short answer is no. We are independent contractors and are not a manager nor officer of the business. As Advisors, we cannot bind the business to any agreement nor have the fiduciary responsibility as an officer of the company would. Clients agree not to misconstrue this relationship to internal or external parties. Clients typically introduce us a Fractional Controllers or Advisors.
Technology Services
Can you automate Excel reporting?
We have partnered Good Picnic Consulting to launch GoodReports.ca – a collaboration to bring custom QuickBooks and Excel reporting solutions to small-medium sized businesses.
What’s the best way to move our systems to the cloud?
For small business clients, we recommend clients to move to Quickbooks Online or Xero as the program is common and simple. For medium-sized businesses with inventory and manufacturing, there are a few options to integrate multiple apps into an eco-system, move the existing ERP to a hybrid-cloud, or upgrade to the next product tier such as Netsuite.
Can you help us move our accounting to the cloud?
We are happy to provide custom solutions based on your needs and internal competencies. Our strength is in project management, practical implementation, and pre-post follow-up. As required, we can assemble other technical experts to assist in the process.
Data Security
How do you protect our data?
We maintain reasonable and appropriate measures to protect our clients data including, but not limited to: strong unique passwords, two-factor-authentication and VPN access. And we use a secured app to collect confidential information.
Our hardware is secured with up-to-date anti-virus software and operating systems. We train staff to understand security best practices. We do not accept your app logins and passwords by email. We maintain Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance by not accepting credit card information by email. Confidential information such as Social Insurance Numbers are collected offline.
What are your cyber security practices?
We have developed a Data Security Policy based on the Baseline Cyber Security Controls for Small and Medium Organizations V1.2 as developed by the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security.
Are third-party apps safe?
Before we deploy any app for client use, we evaluate the app’s data security practices. Practically, we cannot expect every app to maintain the highest security standards custom to our needs and must weigh the cost-benefit of use. In all cases, we are governed by the Third Party App’s Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
Where is our data stored?
As part of our bookkeeping, your data may be transferred, stored, and processed outside of your country of residence depending on where our third-party apps operate. Due to the number of client-facing and internal apps, we cannot govern where the data is transmitted.
How do I grant you access to our current apps?
Ideally, we are granted separate access to your apps to maintain separate activity logs. For the apps where this is unfeasible, we will ask for access to your apps using a secure password manager during the onboarding process.
