How to Use Keeper App and Asana to Manage Your Bookkeeping Practice
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Ben Stein and Kenny Song are co-founders of the Keeper app. They met at the University of Southern California and started this company together after realizing a need for a software that could facilitate a better client/bookkeeper relationship.
Ben used to be a startup CFO, which allowed him to experience first hand how inefficient the process was for both him and his outsource bookkeeper.
"I was getting a spreadsheet full of client questions every month."
This experience inspired him to create the tool he WISHED he had as a CFO, but also as a bookkeeper.
Ben is the front-facing portion of the company (you can totally book a call with him for a demo of the app or get your questions answered!), which he deems the easy job.
Kenny is the developer, who works hard to add in features and write a beautiful, user-friendly program.
Why Should Bookkeepers Use Keeper?
We wanted to know how Keeper serves the bookkeeping and accounting community in a way that hasn't been done before. What makes this app so special?
"So right now, the way that bookkeeping work gets done is you have your task management in Asana. And, if you were smart, you paid for Alyssa's course and it was helping you build that out."
"Then you have emails to your clients with bulleted lists and maybe a spreadsheet that you attached to that... then you email them and then they don't respond and you email them again and you have this task floating in Asana to remind you to keep reminding your clients."
"And then maybe you deliver the profit and loss, balance sheet, and cashflow through QuickBooks as well."
"So what we have built in Keeper is the ability to do that entire process in one place. So you can track your tasks across all of your clients. You can communicate with your client, so instead of going over all of those bullet lists and spreadsheets, all of that happens centrally through the client portal and Keeper, which you can also white-label."
Want 20% off the first three months of any Keeper plan? Sign up for Keeper and use code: WorkflowQueen20
Keeper gives you the ability to integrate your business email and domain, so the client doesn't need to worry about logging into an additional software for communication.
"You can communicate with your client, you can track your tasks. You can also review the data in their files, catch and correct coding errors, and general business anomalies."
How Do the Reports in Keeper Differ From Those in an Accounting Software?
What really sets the reporting apart from what you can do in your accounting software is the Executive Summary. This is where you can add personalized commentary on your client's financials!
"You can show them auto-generated, high-level trends in their income statement and how that compares against prior periods. You can track custom metrics for them. So this is tying back into those KPIs. Like, here's this other custom metric that we track for you."
"You can track those KPIs all on this one-sheeter and then also show them a more visual overview of how their business compares against prior periods."
"Couple that with trend-based metrics reporting as well. So you can deliver things that just live in QuickBooks, or you can build out your own custom formulas in Keeper as well and deliver these as trend based reporting for your clients."
In short, this software makes it super easy for bookkeepers to create highly custom reports with accompanying visual graphs to present to the client.
"The big thing about Keeper is the flexibility to define your own metrics. And you can even put in custom values that may not exist in QuickBooks. If you have a customers count, you can do revenue per customer or cost per customer. We could track that in Keeper and then build out more complicated KPIs here as well."
Can You Track Your Time in Keeper?
You may know that we are huge fans of time-tracking here at Workflow Queen, and we encourage all of our students to adopt this habit as well.
Keeper has an integrated time-tracker that allows the user (and team members) to document how much time is being spent per client.
This data is super important to analyze because it will help you identify inefficiencies in your firm, and make sure you are charging each client appropriately.
Note: All Keeper plans include unlimited team members!
If you are familiar using Clockify, the Keeper time tracking integration will feel very similar.
You will also have the opportunity to run reports that can show things like client profitability, for example!
Does Keeper Have a Client Portal?
Keeper has a client portal that you have the option to white-label if you sign up for their premium plan.
Within the client portal, you have several different ways to communicate with your clients directly from the app. What's even better, is that the client has the opportunity to ask you questions and get information from you without having to jump on a call.
This means, you can communicate quicker and more efficiently with your clients throughout the month!
Do You Need Asana and Keeper?
In short, the answer is yes.
It's no secret that we are huge advocates of Asana, but most people want to know why/if they actually need both pieces of software.
We believe that the two actually compliment each other beautifully!
Here is our recommendation if you are looking to add Keeper to your tech stack:
Stick with your workflows in Asana for running the business side of your firm (marketing, team management, etc.), and turn to Keeper for your client work.
"You can use Keeper for everything else like close management, client communications, management reporting, error catching, KPI tracking, and client data storage."
That being said, the most important thing you can do is create a process that would work well, regardless of the software you are using.
"Process beats software, 10 times out of 10"
How Does Keeper Support Its Users?
"We live to support our customers...any time a customer asks us a question, whatever we're doing, unless it's answering another customer's question, it is drop everything, and go answer that question. That's the way that we think about support."
They understand that their users are actively trying to run a practice, so they pride themselves on a quick response time to support questions.
But it goes beyond just "how to use XYZ feature".
Ben will even help you set up your white-labeled client portal so that it lives behind your custom domain and carries your branding.
Want 20% off the first three months of any Keeper plan?? Sign up for Keeper and use code: WorkflowQueen20
"If it helps our customers get up and running and productive in Keeper, I can't imagine a better use of my time."
What Are the Top Three Reasons to Use Keeper?
Ben laid out three main reasons why Keeper would be a game-changer for you and your firm:
Spend less time doing the boring parts of your client work (downloading spreadsheets from QBO to email your client "Just looking for some clarification on these..."). Use the time you are saving to better serve your current clients, or go out and get some new ones since you will have more capacity!
Catch and correct coding errors with Keeper to deliver better client financials. Keeper has a built-in consistency checker to help you identify when a transaction has been coded incorrectly. This way, you can avoid an embarrassing mistake that could lead to the client losing faith in your services.
Give your clients high-quality deliverables at month end so they have the power to use this data to strategically grow their business. You can also leverage these custom reports to move into more of an advisory role and start charging more for your services. Increased value = increased rates!
Does Keeper Offer a Free Trial?
Yes! Keeper offers a 14-day FREE trial to new users! Within that time period, you would also go though their high-touch onboarding process to ensure that you have Keeper properly set up in order to be successful right from the start.
You read that correctly.
The team at Keeper will help you set up the software AND walk you through how to use it without collecting a dime.
So ultimately, it's up to you to decide if adding Keeper to your tech stack is right for you and your firm.
Ben was able to provide SO much helpful information during our chat, but he is also available for a more 1:1 consultation experience if you have more questions.
We use Keeper internally here at Workflow Queen (since we do not serve bookkeeping clients), so here are the features that really stand out to us:
The advanced reporting, KPI's, and custom metrics that Keeper offers go so far beyond what we can do in QBO, it's unbelievable!
The transaction inconsistencies checker is super valuable so that we can be extra sure that everything is codded correctly and we have the most accurate books possible.
Running month end close with that extra layer of quality control is so much more enjoyable with the use of Keeper.
Want to try Keeper for yourself?
Sign up with the button below and get 20% off the first 3 months of any Keeper plan with the use of our code: WorkflowQueen20
