We may not be able to make you fall in love with accounting, but at least you can fall in love with how little of it you have to do when you’re a Kashoo subscriber. “How can we make our apps simpler, faster and more intuitive?” You may not know it, but that’s a daily conversation at Kashoo HQ. We’ve made it our mission to keep improving Kashoo, often based on feedback from our subscribers, so it truly makes your life easier, not more complex. Over the past year, we’ve made some pretty significant improvements (10 of them, to be exact.) to our app that you may not know about, or may not have used yet. We wanted to take this opportunity to show you how you might be able to shave a few minutes, if not hours, off of your work week. 1. ACCEPT CREDIT CARDS AND GET PAID FASTER Reduce the amount of time it takes you to get paid (by up to 50%!), and give your customers payment options they really want – Visa, MasterCard, or American Express. We’ve got several great options so you can get paid today! If you run the type of business where you regularly send invoices to your customers you should consider using payments services from BluePay or Stripe, two of the industry’s most trusted payment processing services that are now fully integrated with Kashoo. Email your customer a custom, professional invoice with a link that they can click to make an instant online payment by credit card. It’s an experience they’ll love. But, which one is right for your business? Stripe is an ideal solution for start-up businesses that process less than $4,000 per month in credit card payments. Per transaction fees are a little higher but you can get set up and start accepting payments in just a day or two, without a credit check. For more established businesses that process more than $4,000 in credit card payments monthly, BluePay may be a better option. The signup and approval process is a little more extensive, but you benefit from lower transaction fees. Either way, payments are automatically tracked and posted in Kashoo. See, making you’re life easier already and we’re only at #1. If you’re one of the many small businesses that use Square for Point-Of-Sale (POS) credit card processing so that your customers can swipe their credit cards on-the-spot, you’ll also be happy to know that your transactional information including sales, tips, fees, and refunds will automatically import into Kashoo and post to the appropriate income and expense accounts. If you would like more information on any of these payment processing services, read this article, give our Kashoo Customer Success team a call toll-free at 1-888-520-5274, or live chat us by clicking the tab at the bottom right of your browser window. We’re happy to help, and our support is always FREE! You can also read our knowledge based article to learn how to set up credit card processing. 2. SEND YOUR CUSTOMERS A “STATEMENT” You probably get regular requests from your customers for a full statement of their account. With Kashoo you can create and download a “Customer Statement” PDF with the click of your mouse! (See the GREEN button on the right?) You have the power to choose an “Activity” report or a “Summary” report. With “Activity”, you see all the transactions related to a specific customer including invoices, payments, and credits over a specified timeframe. With “Summary”, you see the outstanding amounts “as of” a particular date. 3. LOCK YOUR FISCAL PERIODS “Period locking” allows you to lock your financial data up to a specified date, meaning that no further additions or changes can be made for that time period. Why should I care about “locking a period”? Ultimately, it comes down to protecting your business’s financial data from accidental or unexpected changes, especially if you’re business is being audited. Periods are generally locked when records are verified as of an “up-to-date”, typically at the end of a month, quarter or year. And if you need to open up a period to make some final adjustments, you can do that too. 4. SPEED UP BANK RECONCILIATION Reconciliation is an important part of accounting. It ensures that ALL expenses and payments recorded in your bank accounts and credit card statements are reflected and accounted for in Kashoo. This form of cross-checking is a great safety net for your books, ensuring there aren’t any transactions you forgot to enter. It means you can have accurate books that give you a clear picture of your business’s financial health. As part of our mission to make bank reconciliation quick and incredibly easy, Kashoo now supports more bank data feeds than ever (14,000+), increasing the likelihood by a lot that you’ll be able to connect to your bank accounts and automatically pull your secure transactional data into Kashoo. Once your data has been imported it’s a snap to match it to transactions already entered in Kashoo, or create new transactions as required. 5. QUICKLY ENTER REPEAT TRANSACTIONS Are you sitting on a pile of historical bills that need to be entered in Kashoo, and they’re all from the same vendor and the same amount? Think about things like lease payments, insurance payments or advertising you regularly pay for. Or perhaps you transfer funds from your checking account to your savings account every two weeks? Or it could be that you invoice a particular client the same fixed amount each month? Regardless of the transaction type, with the “Repeat” feature, you can easily create multiple transactions in one step. It’s all about saving time and clicks! 6. CREATE & TRACK PROJECT COSTS Do you run multiple job sites, or multiple offices? Are you managing multiple revenue properties? Or, maybe you have client jobs you’d like to track separately, such as website design projects? If that sounds like your business, then you’ll love Kashoo’s “Project Tracking” feature because it allows you to track and report income and expenses by “project”, however you define that. More importantly, it gives you instant insight into the profitability of your projects, so you can make great decisions to grow your business or cut back if you need to. Read our knowledge based article to learn how to set up and use Project Tracking. 7. KEEP ORGANIZED AND BE AUDIT READY Say goodbye to tote boxes, drawers, and slippers (yep, some people do that!) filled with your backup documents. Now, not only can you attach images (pictures) to your income, expense, transfer, adjustment, and payment transactions, you can also attach other types of source documents including PDF files, Word (.doc) and Excel (.xls) documents and many more. Once added, you can easily view, download, or delete images by clicking on the thumbnail at the bottom of the transaction record. Best of all, you have the flexibility to do this through both the iOS app and the Web app! Ensure that your source documents are secure, right alongside the matching transactional information in Kashoo. Never again will you have to dig up that expense receipt or check you received! A copy of it is right at your fingertips whenever you need it. 8. SIMPLIFY YOUR PAYROLL Kashoo has partnered with some of the leading payroll service providers in Canada and the US – INCLUDING Payment Evolution, SurePayroll, and Paychex – to implement a seamless connection between your payroll data and your accounting software. You can avoid needless data entry, and the potential for data mistakes by having your payroll data automatically flow into your payroll expense accounts. Sign up with any of our payroll partners, and start simplifying your life. Click on the “Payroll” link in Kashoo to learn more about the special offerings available from these providers. Or contact our Success Team at 1-888-520-5274 or at answers@kashoo.com. We can help you make the right choice for your business. 9. INVOICE & TRACK EXPENSES IN MULTIPLE CURRENCIES Are you a Canadian Business with customers in the US? You need to consider invoicing your American clients in US dollars. Why, you ask? Two simple answers: Make your US customers happy and make more money. It’s that simple. With the Kashoo web app, you can specify the currency for a given invoice you are planning to send to your US client. You have the power to choose whatever’s best for the client and circumstance. You can then save time by universally setting the currency you want to use for your US-based customers instead of on a case-by-case basis. By using Kashoo’s in-app payment processing feature in partnership with BluePay, you can give your customers the opportunity to pay using their credit card directly from their electronic invoice. As an added bonus, when you go through the signup process for a merchant account with BluePay, you can get one account in CAD and one in USD. That way, Kashoo actually handles the complexity of exchange rates for you so you can always see your up-to-date financial records in Canadian dollars, while at the same time having access to the transaction records in the original currency too. Want to read more about the basics of invoicing your US Customers, read our blog article. Or need to know more about using multi-currency in Kashoo, read this article. 10. MORE MOBILE, MORE AGILE Our award-winning iOS app for iPad and iPhone is the perfect fit for small business owners who are constantly on-the-go. We’ve made so many enhancements, where do we start? Here’s just some of the updates we’ve made recently to our mobile app, taking advantage of the unique and newest capabilities that iOS has to offer. Protect Your Business Data If you have an iPhone, you’re probably already used to signing in with your fingerprint. But did you know you can also protect your Business in Kashoo in the same way? Go to “Business Settings” and choose “Passcode”. Then, when you sign into your account and select your Business, you’ll have the choice to access it by 4 digit PIN code or by Touch ID. Add Contacts In-a-Snap Using GPS Does your business have you out on the road meeting new customers and you want to send an invoice? Or maybe you’re at Staples buying some office supplies and you want to capture the transaction right away? It all starts with adding a new contact in Kashoo. Here’s a really easy way you can do that! Tap the GPS icon on the “Add New Contact” screen to see a list of businesses near your location. Select a business and the contact record will automatically populate with all the details. Categorize it as a “Customer” or “Vendor” with a single click, and you’re done. Instantly Add Transactions With Attachments Kashoo offers loads of flexibility in how transactions can be added. You can either create the transaction directly in Kashoo and then add the attachment. Or, with your iOS device, you can select any image/attachment in ANY APP (like your mail app) then create the transaction by tapping the “share” menu, then selecting the “Add to Kashoo” icon in the bottom row. The Quick Entry screen in Kashoo will automatically open, and the attachment will already be included in the transaction. Try it once, and you’ll see it’s as easy as adding a photo to Facebook! Complex Payments Support Here’s a timesaver that you’ll really love. When you receive a check that covers multiple invoices for a customer, you can now record the payment across all applicable invoices in one quick, easy step! This feature was previously available in our web app, but it’s now we’ve made it available in the iOS app too. Easier Searches Searching is easier when you use the native Spotlight search function in iOS. Quickly look up your Accounts, Customers, and Vendors in Kashoo by pulling down “Spotlight Search” on your home screen, then tap in the search bar and enter what you’re looking for. As you type, search results from Kashoo will update in real-time with the “K” flag highlighting them. And for your contacts with phone numbers, you can initiate a phone call to them by tapping the phone icon. Just saved you a few second and a couple taps! Quick Access Using 3D Touch Give a firm press on the Kashoo app icon and a Quick Action menu will appear letting you do the things you do most often, faster and in fewer steps – like recording expenses and creating invoices. And when you’re looking at transactions in the app, you can use 3D Touch to “peek and pop”, to quickly preview transaction details. 11. Just one more… The best reason to fall in love with Kashoo is our commitment to you. We love our subscribers. In fact, you’re going to start seeing their smiling faces and hearing their incredible stories all over Kashoo.com. We are a small team that loves helping small businesses succeed, and we’re going to show it. Stay tuned.
