Archive for category Guest Bloggers
Bookkeeping and Tax Preparation Help with DocSnaps
Posted by gordonlo in Guest Bloggers on October 17, 2009
Whether you are a sole proprietor or a small business, bookkeeping data entry is a nettlesome problem. DocSnaps helps you solve the paper problem and provides you completed books that you can take to your accountant or export any bookkeeping software like Quickbooks, or Simply Accounting.
Paper Pile
So gather up all your receipts and documents (bank statements, credit card statements, etc) that are needed for your bookkeeping and instead of manually entering all the information into an accounting software, you can scan the documents and upload them to your DocSnaps account. Not only are all your records stored online, but bookkeeping transactions are created for you. Here are the steps:
1. Create a DocSnaps account – First create a DocSnaps account if you don’t already have one. Go to the Signup page and fill in the simple form to get your new account activated. You will get an email to the email address you entered in the sign-up form with a welcome message and your own account on docsnaps. This is an email in the format: xxxxx@send.docsnaps.com. This is the email to which you send all your documents.
2. Upload all your documents – Next depending upon the number of documents you have and the type you can either snap them, scan them, eFax them, or email them. Here is how:
Snap a receipt
a. Snap them – This is ideal for receipts that you encounter on the road – eg. at the gas pump, or restaurant. Use your cellphone camera (resolution should be more then 1.5 MP) to take pictures of individual receipts. Place the receipt on a flat surface and hold the camera at least 1 feet above the receipt until you can see the full image in the viewfinder. Snap the picture keeping the camera steady. Similarly snap pictures of all your receipts – one snap shot per receipt. You can email each of these to your DocSnaps account one by one, or first capture them all, and when you get to computer download them and email to your DocSnaps account as an attachment.
b. Scan them – This is ideal for processing a large backlog of documents. With a good office scanner like Fujitsu ScanSnap scan in all your documents into PDF files. It is very fast and can take in paper of different sizes and thickness – bank statements, telephone bills, store receipts etc. You can get through a full folder of documents in less than 10 minutes. Once done log in to your DocSnaps account and upload the scanned images. You can even zip up all the documents and upload them. We will unzip the file, and split up large pdf files into individual documents.
c. eFax them – Ideal for automatically storing all your faxes, and capturing vendor invoices. If you have an eFax account then set the email address to your DocSnaps account email. This way any vendor invoices and faxes sent to you will go directly into your document repository online, where it will be indexed and processed. You can get an eFax account from eFax, or Octopus IP.
Record list in DocSnaps
d. email them – Ideal for capturing online transactions. When you purchase goods or services online vendors send you the bill to your email account. Services companies also send you monthly bills online (eg. utilities, server hosting, etc.), which can be set to automatically forward to your DocSnaps account.
3. Manage records online – DocSnaps FLY account comes with a set of expense categories. In the SPEED account you can create your own chart of accounts. Once all the documents are in your DocSnaps account, they will be indexed, categorized based on your expense categories or chart of accounts, and transactions created for them. This allows you to search all your records, tag them (eg. Project 1, business trip to new york, etc.), and view them online from anywhere. It gives you a breakdown of all your expenses by category, and generates tag reports.
DocSnaps Overview Page
4. Get expense reports and bookkeeping done – You can then export all this data to Quickbooks, Simply accounting, or a csv file. Select all the transactions you want to export and choose the format and it will generate the file for you. Then open your accounting application and import the data. For example, the Quickbooks export produces and iif file. This can then be imported into Quickbooks which will generate transactions for you. Similarly a csv file can be opened and manipulated by Excel.
5. Bookkeeping online – Need bookkeeping help? There are several virtual bookkeepers who can help you with your bookkeeping online. Just send a twitter to @docsnaps or email marketing@docsnaps.com, and we will hook you up with a good bookkeeper or accountant.
Bill Clinton Business Innovation at PanIIT 2009
Posted by vinkash in Guest Bloggers on October 11, 2009
The keynote on the second day was delivered by Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States. He spoke about how innovation by a few sharp minds can be scaled up to bring prosperity in developing countries. He used props, statistics, and his personal experience in countries, most recently in Haiti. Here are a few notes about his speech and general observations about IIT:
- In the middle of his speech he got a call on his cell. He took the call since he said that only Hillary had that number, and told her that he was in the middle of his speech to IIT. He then asked her “Yes or no?” and hung up after that
- I met a recent graduate from IIT (Chemical Eng – 2009 batch) doing his masters at MIT. He was just one of 15 from his batch of 500 to come to the US. During my time it was not uncommon to have 10 times that many come abroad.
- The team that was a runners up to us called ECPS were a group of recent graduates. At a time when most people their age would be looking for their first job, one of them is already running a company with 10 people, they have several clients, and they were able to raise sponsorship money for 3 of their team members to come to Chicago.
Bill Clinton addressing PanIIT
More information can be found at Pradeep’s blog and Christopher’s blog.
It is good to see some real work being done in the area of innovation and entrepreneurship in developing countries. And others that are further along and opening their borders to innovation.
DocSnaps wins Biz Plan Competition
Posted by vinkash in Guest Bloggers on September 4, 2009
DocSnaps was named runners up at the IIT Roorkee Heritage Fund business plan competition 2009. The objective of the competition is to “foster entrepreneurship among IIT Roorkee alums, and to provide an integrative learning experience for the community”.
DocSnaps Logo
Now onto the Pan IIT competition in Chicago in October!
5 Reasons Why We Created DocSnaps
Posted by admin in Guest Bloggers on February 6, 2009
In 2006 when I was working on my previous startup we had a geographically dispersed team located in the US, Canada and India. Team members would send their receipts to our main office where the bookkeeping took place. Our bookkeeper was located 20 miles away and she had to visit our office twice a month to do our bookkeeping. There were several problems, and the idea for what was to be DocSnaps took shape…
Collecting Financial Documents – Documents came in all shapes and sizes (long faded print-outs, short faded receipts), different locations (at the gas station, restaurant, or via mail), and in different formats (email receipts for items paid for online, bank statements as CSV or QIF files). Just collecting all this information in a folder to present to the bookkeeper was a problem, let alone managing the finances.
The Bookkeeping Process – The bookkeeper spent a total of 4 hours every month travelling to our location to do about 1-days worth of work. Admittedly she was a joy to work with but it was probably frustrating for her not to get answers to some of her questions right away becuase someone was not at the office or was always late in providing answers she had painstakingly jotted down on a piece of paper. We decided to scan all the documents and email it to her to make her life easier. But then the trouble was being able to corelate the transactions she entered into Quickbooks to the scanned documents she received weekly. Despite the fact that the documents were neatly organized into folders, and we had full access to a remote desktop hosting the accounting software there was confusion.
Communication Problem - Emails flew back and forth. We even maintained a sort of communication log as a text file in each of the document folders. But when it came time for the accountant to take a look at our books at year-end, he was confused and confounded by the document and communication trail. Overall we had spent a lot of time (and money) for something that was more trouble to maintain than the status quo.
Easy Auditing – Our earliest DocSnaps product consisted of a simple GL with each transaction connected to a source document. Basically attached to each expense item was a scanned image of the expense in pdf format. We also solved the communication problem with the ability to enter comments for each expense item or document which made collaborating with our bookkeeper a lot easier. But the happiest person in all this was the accountant. His tech-savvy staff could login to our account with the password we provided them, look at the balance sheet, drill down to the transactions and if they had any doubts or questions about a particular item, just click on it and view the source document, right there on their computer screen! To our development team this was nothing extra ordinary, but to the accountants that we showed it to, it was a joy to behold.
Bookkeeping Automation - Over time the product was improved incrementally. What we have now is a well tested, secure, and user friendly application a far cry from the first application that was presented to our bookkeeper. What makes the bookkeeper really happy now is the innovative expert system we have that automatically creates a transacton for each scanned documents. She used to spend 80% of her time doing data entry from documents. But the time she got to the point where she had to ask us some questions and provide us some insight into our business it was time to leave. Now this tedious part is taken over by our software which is able to perform this task more accurately than a human being. What it does not understand it flags for our bookkeeper to enter.
So overall these are the 5 big reasons why DocSnaps was created – to make the bookkeeper, accountant, and our team happy. There are a lot more things DocSnaps can do which will be the subject of future blogs.
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