Academy / Lessons / Systems and process

Systems and process

Making the books fast and steady: choosing the software, designing the flow, scanning and filing, cloud storage, reconciliation, and taking over a set of books someone else kept.

• EP11

  Two worlds, and the times have changed: business needs accounting, accounting needs business

  An accountant cannot stay in the back office, and a business owner cannot live on sales alone. Knowing how to use an app is not the same as understanding a business — experience is earned by doing.

• EP12

  The front of your business: logo, documents, a website and your own email

  Your invoice is the name card you hand out most often. A one-page website is your digital shop number, and your own email domain is the cheapest proof that you are a proper business.

• EP13

  Why are accounting fees worked out this way? What makes a Sdn. Bhd. cost more, and what makes the cloud cost more

  A sole proprietor's books are a tidy-up. A Sdn. Bhd.'s books are a file built to be examined. A year-end job buys you compliance; the cloud buys you being able to see it any time.

• EP14

  The LTT bookkeeping process, opened up: from understanding your business to AI cutting up your receipts

  Sixteen steps, starting from understanding your business. Telling us everything up front is the cheapest route — leave out one car on hire purchase and the process rewinds to step three.

• EP15

  Managing digital files: how to name them, and how to set up your folders

  Can you find that one bill within two minutes? A filename has to answer four questions, and folders go two levels deep at most — set the structure once and keep it year after year.

• EP20

  What modern accounting makes possible: every "can I…" bosses have asked us, answered

  Can I do it without a computer? What if the warehouse is a hundred kilometres from home? Can Shopee orders post themselves? Mostly the answer is yes — if your books are in the cloud.

• EP22

  Why Bukku? After we had tried a lot of systems for you

  Desktop packages, international cloud packages — we have used them. In the end our clients' books sit in Bukku. This is not an advertisement; these are reasons we arrived at by using them.

• EP23

  Reconciliation: why taking over a half-finished set of books is better redone than continued

  Redoing it is labour. Continuing it is a puzzle. Labour can be quoted for; a puzzle cannot — and the older the puzzle, the more it costs.

• EP24

  The small matter of scanning: why the photos you take slow the whole process down

  One transaction, one file. Pasting receipts onto A4 was the clever move in the paper age; in the computer age it works against you.

• EP25

  Choosing and using cloud storage: syncing is not backup

  Most people treat cloud storage as a thumb drive that lives online, and then something goes wrong. The most expensive lesson of all: the entire accounting database corrupted.

• EP27

  Is the bank statement where the year's accounts start?

  One payment settling three invoices, a gateway paying you net, director advances and petty cash — a bank statement hides more than it shows.

• EP28

  Five warning signs it is time to change accountants: done is not the same as done right

  Year-end only, treating the auditor as a bookkeeper, all talk and no doing, permanently vague, and never asking you for documents. Two or more of these and it is worth thinking seriously.

• EP36

  Why does AI bookkeeping keep dumping everything into "other expenses"?

  Reading a document is its strength; choosing the account is something you have to teach it. The software is not lazy, it is under-informed — so it picks the safest answer available.

• EP38

  How do you set KPIs? The financial ones, and the ones that ring earlier

  Financial KPIs have a built-in flaw: they are slow. By the time the gross margin drops, it happened one or two months ago. What actually lets you act early is the other half.

• EP40

  Accounting schedules: the other half of the books, beyond Dr and Cr

  The entry records how much; the schedule records how it got there. Every figure on the statements should have a table behind it — without one, the audit burns money, the bank stalls, and next year has no manual.

• EP42

  Several businesses, one truth: how to see it

  Two companies, three branches, and the boss asks what the whole group actually earns. Stack the reports and add them up? No — the total comes out inflated.

• EP44

  Ask ten people in your trade what accounting software they use and you will hear ten names

  And every one of them will say, with complete confidence, that theirs is the best. Spread the Malaysian map out and you will find the question is not which one is best.