Owning your own business has its ups and downs. You can create your own schedule, you have the flexibility you need to raise your family, deal with your health, or have the lifestyle you want. But also, you are responsible for the entire business. Which comes with a whole lot of pressure- it certainly isn’t easy. The good news: You are not alone. Do any of these sound familiar?
The Pain Points
Time Consuming Manual Bill Pay Processes
Feel like you are spending most of your time trying to get paid by your clients rather than doing the work that they are paying you to do? Having trouble remembering who you already sent an invoice to, and whether a payment was received? Or perhaps you have a small team, and it’s getting confusing trying to figure out who has sent estimates or invoices to the client, and whether someone has followed up on those communications?
Poor Visibility Into Business Spending
The last time you or your staff needed to make a major (or even minor) purchase, how long did it take to figure out whether you had the funds needed, and how your staff could access them? When you are looking at your bank statements, how easy is it to see what was purchased, by which team member, and for which project? Wouldn’t it be awesome if you didn’t have to spend hours every month sorting through receipts and emails matching up every purchase your team made?
Collaborating on Finances and Banking
Are you sick of getting messages from your accounting firm telling you that you need to re-link your bank account to Quickbooks, or answer some kind of security question on your banking website so they can download a statement? Would you love to have one of your team members start helping you manage your finances, but you don’t want them to have access to all of your accounts yet? Would it be really nice to share information about your business with an advisor, but you don’t necessarily want them to have bank account privileges?
Getting to the Bank When It’s Open
With everything else you need to do to serve your clients, send them invoices, coordinate getting paid, make sure your team has everything they need, and answer questions from your accountant, when do you find time to actually take your deposits to the bank? How much time have you spent waiting in line in the lobby, or wasting gas sitting in the drive through line? And who decided what bankers hours should be anyway? Certainly not someone with a job and a small business to run!
Many small businesses struggle with one or all of these pain points, and they don’t have to!
How can Thrive Accounting help?
Thrive Accounting has recently partnered with a banking service that turns the old relationship on its head- Relay. Don’t want to deal with the pain of a brick and mortar bank? You don’t have to! Tired of your accountant calling you at all hours asking what a certain check was for? They don’t have to! With Relay, you can share a view-only bank login with your accountant, and allow bill processing to happen minus the late night calls. Relay is powerful, free business banking designed to help grow your business, automate financial management, increase financial visibility, and along with us, make it easy for your business to thrive.
Some more about Relay:
Relay is a modern digital bank for small businesses designed to make financial management easier.
Bill Pay Processes: Relay allows you and your team to auto-import unpaid bills from Xero or QuickBooks Online, set-up approval workflows (and an audit trail), schedule payments, and pay via ACH, wire, or check. You can easily collaborate with your team, accountant, or bookkeeper, and make sure everyone is on the same page as to where your client’s account is in real-time.
Visibility: Relay lets you allocate and distribute funds as needed in seconds. You can give your staff access to physical or virtual cards instantly. (You can also freeze those cards online in the case that they are lost or stolen.) You can also track your team’s spending by category, project, or team, and set up spending limits.
Collaboration: Relay allows you to invite staff, business partners, and advisors with just the right levels of access. You can also create roles for different team members to distribute responsibilities.
Online Banking: You get to control everything from your phone. You never have to set foot in a branch again (which is also super awesome for social distancing). Relay has a reputation for outstanding customer service. On top of that, there are no account fees or minimum balances.
Relay is business banking built to help automate financial management and increase small business success. Here at Thrive, we strongly believe in their concept that banking should be a growth enabler and not the other way around. Relay is packed with features to help small business owners tackle common pain points and streamline collaboration with their advisors and accountants, and we are here for it!
If this sounds like something that would help you and your small business thrive, make sure to reach out to us to schedule some time to chat!