There are many business owners who are great at product development and sales, but struggle to keep up with the daily demands of business management. If you’re finding it difficult to allocate time to basic but essential tasks such as bookkeeping, it’s worthwhile considering outsourcing the job.
At Ozlop we regularly meet business owners who need help getting their books into shape because bookkeeping is seen as a chore best left for another day. For many, the biggest challenge is ditching paper in favour of technology. That said, once they cross the digital divide they soon start to see the many rewards.
An example of this is Litmus Wines, a Surrey based wine consultancy launched in 2008 by friends John Worontschak, Mike Florence and Matthieu Elzinga.
Litmus Wines received a major boost in November after Waitrose & Partners highlighted the popularity of its orange wine, Litmus Orange, in its annual food & drink report. It might have been a completely different story for the team at Litmus Wines had they not come to Ozlop for bookkeeping support.
Here founder John Worontschak shares his story:
“We are not technophobes at Litmus Wines so decided to use one of the bigger bookkeeping services to manage our finances in the early days. The problem was finding the time to keep track of all the paperwork so that we could be sure it was being properly invoiced.
We would print off all our receipts and invoices, stuff it in an envelope and send it to a bookkeeper who would then manually input it into an online system. This wasn’t unusual at the time; we knew many business owners who did the same thing.
But we also knew that doing the books had started to turn into an unnecessarily difficult and expensive process. When we looked a bit closer at our costs, we discovered a huge amount of time and money was being wasted on bookkeeping. Of course, doing the company finances is an essential task, but surely it shouldn’t be overly demanding?
While the printing of receipts was clearly draining profits, so too was the money we had spent on a bookkeeper who was spending most of their time doing basic administrative tasks. On top of that, we had spent lots of money on fancy tech to help us with business management, but it wasn’t doing the job it promised.
We had to do things differently.
When we spoke to Ozlop founder Alex Weddell we were relieved to find someone who understood the challenges our business faced. He quickly helped us discover where we had been duplicating processes and showed us what to do to get rid of all the paperwork that had been piling up in the office.
Now Ozlop manages our books in one place, making use of a variety of online tools that work to make the bookkeeping process simpler. Instead of printing receipts and keeping physical records, for instance, now we use ReceiptBank which allows us to simply photograph a receipt and upload it onto the Ozlop cloud for processing.
Of course, there is still a few bookkeeping tasks to be done weekly, but rather than paying someone a bookkeeper’s salary, we have an office helper come in for an hour a week to do the scanning and help chase debtors.
We are an ambitious and fast-growing business and we need accurate and timely books to be able to make sound business decisions. Working with Ozlop has been a hugely beneficial business decision for Litmus Wines, helping to take the stress out of doing the books so we can focus on supplying a great product.