Maui Macaroons & More! member since 2012 Uses Cheqbook so they can relax after a busy day at the swap meet selling their wonderful cookies.
Cheqbook automatically connects to your bank and credit card companies, downloads and categorizes your transactions – saving you time and hassle. More importantly it finally solves the dirty little secret of online accounting by giving you the first workable means of managing what it does for you.
The Early Frustrations
The year was 2009, and our CPA founder was excited about saving time on data entry. So he switched his wife’s small Bed and Breakfast from QuickBooks to an online competitor. After connecting it to all the necessary bank and credit card accounts he was quite pleased to see it downloading and categorizing her transactions so he didn’t have too. Fantastic it seemed.
However as the months passed he slowly discovered he was spending more time, not less, keeping her books in order. By the end of that year he abandoned the effort and returned to QuickBooks Pro. Hundreds of thousands of others have had a similar experience.
Why has the great promise of online accounting failed so far? In theory it’s a great idea: you connect to a company’s bank and credit card companies, download transactions, and automatically categorize them. Even if some of that sorting is incorrect it’s still saved a lot of time, right? Well, so far it hasn’t.
The Dirty Little Secret of Online Accounting
The problem turned out to be those categorizing errors. Even if the error rate was low, finding and fixing the bad ones actually takes longer than keying them in correctly in the first place.
Now that may not make initial sense, but think about it. It’s not just about fixing the ones that are wrong, it’s about finding and fixing them. To do so you have to read and consider every, single, transaction.
By setting up simple poker chip sorting tests, our CPA founder discovered that finding and fixing bad transactions was almost twice as time consuming as entering them correctly in the first place. In other words if you’re asked to find and fix errors in already sorted barrels, it turns out to be faster to dump all the barrels back together and start from scratch! Almost twice as fast. We call this slower method “hunting and pecking” after the old typewriter term.
Other Software
Better online accounting offerings have realized this is a major problem, and have adopted a different method we call “quarantining” to fix it. This approach holds all downloaded and categorized transactions off on the “side” until you get a chance to review them. However if you haven’t logged in for several months you can be faced with the daunting task of reviewing hundreds of transactions before you can get the financial statements you need to manage your business.
More importantly this method doesn’t save much time over the otherwise great QuickBooks Pro, since you still have to review every transaction. So our founder continued to seek a better way.
Breakthrough
As he studied the problem, he learned that more than one method or algorithm was used to automatically categorize your transactions. Some of these were very accurate, and some of them were not. Essentially these systems work by seeking a highly accurate answer first, then continue down through increasingly less accurate methods until (if necessary) it gives up and leaves a transaction uncategorized.
This gave him an idea: if a user knew how accurate a transaction was, they could save time by focusing only on the ones that needed attention. It worked! Again and again poker chip testing showed users could finish faster – almost twice as fast – as QuickBooks or quarantining and more than three times faster than hunting and pecking!
Faster, Better Management
What this breakthrough eventually led to was the first workable tool for managing auto-categorization: the AccuScore system.
Now online accounting can finally fulfill its great promise: to save you valuable time and effort and give you accurate books in minutes instead of hours. Click here to learn more about AccuScore
Why Cheqbook?
Your bank and credit card companies already have all your data, why do you have to key it in again?
Every minute you spend entering data into your accounting system is a minute you’re not spending on your business. That’s where CheqBook comes in — we link with your bank and download your transactions daily, giving you accurate, real-time books without the hassle.
We aren’t the only accounting software offering this service. But we are the only one with AccuScore, our patent-pending system that tells you at a glance which transactions require your attention. So you can get back to business — faster.