At Solvaa we love helping our clients streamline their business, saving them time and money in the process. A perfect example of this was our work with One Year No Beer where we helped slash 63% off their bookkeeping time, a massive 32 hours per week – nearly the equivalent of a full-time member of staff!
One Year No Beer (OYNB) is a digital platform where members receive coaching and support to improve health and change their drinking habits forever. They were processing thousands of transactions every month but in a very disconnected way. It was a chaotic mess and co-founder Ruari Fairbairns admitted “I never had any real understanding of how big the mess actually was”.
This needed to be addressed urgently as they were anticipating a tenfold increase in sales over the following 3 – 6 months, so a scalable solution was top of the list.
Xero automations and integrations
Xero is a cloud-based accounting application with a wide range of integrations that connect with other systems. As Xero Certified Advisors we have a wealth of experience in optimising the system itself and harmonising the technology stack to achieve a slick, streamlined process.
We optimised Xero’s built-in automation functions by implementing standard bank account transaction feeds and creating rules for processing them. To handle the large volumes of Stripe transactions we implemented SilverSiphon (this solution no longer exists) bank feeds. We then streamlined the bookkeeping function by strategizing and implementing the automation of sales and purchase invoice creation to assist with reconciliations.
Delivering a simplified sales process
We simplified the sales process to address the thousands of sales transactions that were being processed on a monthly basis. We introduced Quaderno to manage worldwide digital tax compliance for sales and connected it to the various sales channels, payment solutions, and Xero. Memberships sales made via the Keap and merchandise sold through and Shopify using PayPal and Stripe were imported into Quaderno. Customer invoices and credit notes were then sent from Quaderno to the customer and sales invoices are created in Xero.
Automating the purchase process
Purchasing transactions were automated by adding Dext, an optical character recognition (OCR) solution to read text and numbers from receipts, and purchase invoices in email attachments and photos taken using a mobile app. The financial data is then posted automatically into Xero as a bill coded to the correct nominal ledger automatically. To improve the tedious team expense process we recommended Pleo prepaid cards that integrate with Xero to create the correct financial transactions from expense receipts. This significantly improved staff compliance with handling expense claims.
Each step in the process was delivered using the right technology solution, ensuring the new operating model was lean and cost-effective.
This project was finalised in January 2018, and with only minor improvements since then, OYNB continues to successfully use the systems that were implemented. Their sales have grown as expected and with that, the number of financial transactions that required processing.
Focusing on the business rather than mundane manual tasks
Automating the creation of revenue and purchasing information directly into the accounting system without any manual intervention, saves OYNB hours of extracting, sorting and importing of data, and correcting entry errors. Having the data in the system momentarily after the transaction occurred allows for quicker reconciliation.
Staff engagement has vastly improved too, as a result of being liberated from a constant tread-wheel of manual processes. Despite having thousands more transactions, their finance assistant spends the majority of her work day on valuable data analysis and less time on the actual bookkeeping, giving her better job satisfaction.
Crucially, for Ruari, having more accurate and timely data in Xero ensured he always had access to key performance indicators and a range of management information at his fingertips. He says “I could see very clearly how my business was improving, where we were, month by month. Before that it was just a much more complicated and difficult way to get that data”.
Productivity has increased and the business as a whole can easily cope with the predicted rapid expansion.
Successfully delivering cost and time savings
The success of the One Year No Beer project is clearly demonstrated in the time and cost savings we were able to deliver.
The bookkeeping automations resulted in a 63% time-saving equating to £2,826 per month.
We delivered a total saving over three years of £79,377 which represents a 765% ROI.
Ruari was really happy with the results, saying “I would say that Kelly is one of the best things to happen to my start-up.”.
You can read the full One Year No Beer case study here.
More about automation using Xero
If this story has inspired you to see how you can save time and money by connecting Xero with your other apps then we have some other automations you can try:
- How to automate adding invoices to Xero from Pipedrive
- Send a Slack message with a daily digest of paid Xero invoices
- How Xero automation saves time and reduces errors
- How to automate thanking your customers for paying their Xero invoices
Our other resources
We also have plenty of free resources:
- Our free e-book is the perfect introduction to business automation.
- Our Zapier functions cheat sheet delves into the powerful inbuilt helper apps which can supercharge your automations.
- A free checklist to help you justify an automation budget.
And finally, our founder / chief problem solver / chief automator Kelly Goss’ new book, Automate It with Zapier, is out now and is the most comprehensive Zapier guide on the market. It will get you up and running and to the stage where you can build and debug advanced automations. Buy your own copy today directly from publisher Packt using this link. Or here are links to Amazon (.co.uk) and Amazon (.com) if you prefer.
Solvaa: Strategy, Solutions, Support, Education
UK-based Solvaa® is a systems, process and automation consultancy specialising in improving business workflows. Solvaa® works with SMEs worldwide to implement digital tools, better processes, use business process automation and generative AI to boost productivity, enhance lead management, and remove unnecessary time, costs and hassles from stretched business owners’ days.
We help you simplify and streamline existing processes, integrate your business tools to make data transfer more efficient, and automate manual tasks. Our business process automation specialists have extensive experience using multiple cloud-based business tools, including Zapier, Pipedrive CRM, SmartSuite, Xero, Google Suite, ClickUp, Asana, Airtable, Hubspot, Active Campaign, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Quickbooks and many more. We are Zapier Certified Experts, SmartSuite Certified Partners, Pipedrive Certified Partners and Xero Certified Advisors. We also educate teams about using AI in their daily roles, mindset, governance and strategy in our Solvaa AI Academy.
Solvaa® was founded in 2016 by Kelly Goss, a no-code solutions architect, business process automation specialist and author of Automate It with Zapier (first edition) and Automate It with Zapier and Generative AI (second edition).
A thought leader on business process automation and digital adoption, Kelly attended an invite-only Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the UK government at No.10 Downing Street, providing insights and recommendations on how SMEs can benefit from productivity gains by using digital technologies, automation and AI. She has also been invited to speak at the House of Lords and at many other events.
Contact us today to find out how Solvaa can help your business make big savings on operational costs and time, and significantly increase productivity.
