Is the System the Problem?
I spent a lot of last week doing bookkeeping. I know, I hear you groan! But it’s a necessary evil, right?
I’m still relatively new to doing it in QuickBooks Online, and there were a few things I just could not seem to keep straight. Which category does this go in? Didn’t I already have an account for that? Why can I never remember where this particular expense belongs?
At some point, I stopped trying to push through it and took a closer look at the Chart of Accounts. Turns out, some of the confusion wasn’t because I hadn’t learned it well enough. There was actual confusion in the system. Duplicate and overlapping accounts. Categories that weren’t named consistently. Things that had accumulated over time and made what should have been a fairly straightforward decision harder than it needed to be.
I stopped entering transactions.
Instead, I cleaned up the Chart of Accounts. I went back and fixed the entries I’d already made. And then, I started entering again.
The next several months of bookkeeping went about twice as fast.
And there’s my observation for the week:
Sometimes, when you keep struggling with the same task, the answer isn’t to try harder or memorize the process better. Sometimes it’s worth stopping long enough to ask:
Is there something about the system that’s making this harder than it needs to be?
Fixing the system can feel like you’re losing time. Sometimes it’s the thing that gives you the time back.