July 6th 2017 Meeting Minutes - The Cloud Ecosystem
/ALL STAR ACCOUNTING PROFESSIONALS, INC. Meeting Minutes
July 6, 2017
The June 6 meeting was held at the Meals on Wheels building located at 7710 SW 31st Avenue in Portland. President Kim Boaz opened the meeting by having guests introduce themselves. Regular members then introduced themselves, giving shout outs to fellow members and mentioning any needs.
Renee Trump, membership & promotions coordinator of All Star Accounting Professionals, Inc. was the speaker for today’s meeting on the topic of The Cloud Accounting Ecosystem. Renee is an owner with the firm of Pasaban Accounting Solutions and has a number of years of experience with accounting including experience at a law firm and in the hospitality industry. Renee stated that collaboration allows us to do more than we can do ourselves. Per research, 65% of users use the cloud for bookkeeping; 43% use smartphones to help run their business and 65% use the cloud for invoicing and payments. The benefits include real time information for decision making and the ability to provide advisory services for clients. Renee next discussed Defining the Workflow Adoption Curve which can be found at https://content.hubdoc.com/hubdoc-blog/defining-the-workflow-adoption-curve. This site shows the six stages of the workflow adoption curve, including awareness, research, trial period, initial adoption, client migration and workflow mastery. In the “Get Visual” portion of her presentation, Renee explained the main software her firm, Pasaban Accounting Solutions, uses to capture and report information. Pasaban uses Bill.com which allows invoices to be entered quickly and easily, permits approval of the bill and scheduling of the payment, including the method of payment. Hubdoc automatically pulls bills and statements into one secure hub so you don’t need to log onto multiple sites each month to gather recurring bills. QuickBooks Online is used as the main accounting software and Futrli allows clients to visualize their financials with graphs and easy to use reports that are more business owner friendly. The final portion of the presentation discussed documenting and refining your processes. Melissa Barton stated that there is an app called Transaction Pro Deleter which costs about $200 and can quickly and easily remove unwanted transactions from QBO and QuickBooks desktop. Kim was interested in an online ability to store and securely share files for multiple clients in one location. Box.com was offered as a solution.
To wrap up the topic, we broke down into smaller groups to discuss one of more related questions that Renee included on the overhead screen.
Kim closed the meeting by mentioning our website which can be found either at ASAPPDX.com or AllStarAccountingProfessionals.com. Meeting notes can be found on the blog tab of the website. Meetings are the first Thursday of each month from 11:30 – 1:00. The location is currently at 7710 SW 31st Avenue in Portland but we are looking for an Eastside location as well. If anyone is aware of a potential Eastside location to hold meetings, please email Kim Boaz at Kim@backtobasicsbookkeeping.com. We currently pay $50 for a 2- hour timeslot at the Meals on Wheels location. We also host quarterly social events with the most recent events including seeing the movie The Accountant and an after-hours social at The Punch Bowl Social in downtown Portland. September 21 is our next quarterly event date so please hold that date open. Terrie Marsh is working on this event. We are interested in growing our membership so please remember to promote ASAP on social media. We are also starting to offer short promotions to those who bring in a gift card or similar item of value for a business card drawing.
The next All-Star Accounting Professional meeting will be held on August 3 at the Meals on Wheels location at 7710 SW 31st Avenue, Portland 97219. We hope to see you there!