The Bookkeeper’s Tech Stack:
Love Your Business with Better Tech in 2025
We are celebrating the heart of small businesses—bookkeepers and small practice accountants! 💙 If you missed our exclusive webinar, The Bookkeeper’s Tech Stack: Love Your Business with Better Tech in 2025, don’t worry—the recording is now available for viewing below.
What You’ll Learn
Stay ahead of the curve with insights from industry experts on the latest trends and tools shaping bookkeeping in 2025. This session covers:
🌟 Hot topics in the accounting and bookkeeping space
🌟 The latest tech trends for bookkeeping in 2025
🌟 Expert insights from special guest speaker Tanya Hilts, CPB, FCPB, AIA, L5CA
Speaker: Tanya Hilts
Tanya Hilts is a trailblazer in the bookkeeping world and the dynamic founder of Cloud Business Services. With over 20 years of experience, Tanya has revolutionized how small businesses manage finances by leveraging cloud technology to improve efficiency. As a Certified Professional Bookkeeper and Fellow of CPB Canada, she has been instrumental in educating and mentoring accounting professionals across North America through her industry-accredited program, Tanya’s Bookkeepers’ Bootcamp, which she launched in 2015. Her dedication has earned her numerous accolades, and she continues to be a sought-after speaker and mentor.
Did you know?
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Learn more about the program and how it can benefit your practice here.
Audience questions, answered by Tanya Hilts
If this does happen, [the Rotessa user] is charged an NSF fee from Rotessa regardless if it’s the wrong information, the wrong bank information or not. So when you have your client sign up with Rotessa… it’s two dollars that they can actually connect directly with the bank instead of manually entering it in.
What happens is when it’s pulled, it’s done, it’s not going to pull again. So what you would do is you would simply go in and add a credit to pay that invoice offer… so that way, it shows everything properly because it’s going to show that it tried to.
So I go in and I do a credit back to sales and then I’m going to redo the invoice with a [non-sufficient funds] fee that Rotessa charges me.
The reason for that is not necessarily because I want to make money, it’s extra time for me to go in and do that.
I look at my clients like I look at my child. There needs to be serious repercussions for them to not make it happen again. So that’s why I say in close to 13 years, [we’ve had] two NSF’s from clients. That is it because they don’t want to pay those fees again.
But simply do that, create a new invoice and make sure that the invoice is dated that day or future the due date in order to be able to pull.
Throw yourself onto different webinars. Jason States has got some really good things about AI, Hector Garcia, good things about AI. Of course, myself, we’ve got the good things and just try to get in there. Just don’t let yourself be overwhelmed again. Just remember that it can be very, very overwhelming and just get in there and try to listen to people.
There’s also the Two Box have a really podcast as well. I’ve not heard them, but Sherri Lee Mathers loves them and they talk a little bit about [AI]. But these are people that I know for a fact are talking about how we can actually truly use it in a meaningful way that is not overwhelming. And if you found somebody to follow and you’re finding it overwhelming, that’s just the wrong person to follow.
So our setup, because we have voice over IP, we don’t use Google Voice, but it’s very similar. It’s called Moxie.
What we do is essentially we don’t answer the phones. It’s really funny. But our existing clients know to communicate via the portal, that comes first. Because think about it: if you’re in deep work, you’ve got to stop the deep work to answer the phones. So if somebody is leaving a voicemail message, somebody can grab the message, send it to the right person. So we’re just always busy, and you know what? Clients don’t have a problem with it.
I don’t spend all this time dealing with the sales calls, too, which is really nice because they don’t leave a message. So when I’m calling back, we’re calling back real clients or potential clients, real people that truly need our help. And then they’re like, wow, you’re really busy. And it’s like, yes, but I made time for you and whatnot. And that actually can put out the view that there’s scarcity that you guys are just really, really that important and that busy.
So I know a lot of people that use and love Keeper.
I want to say when it comes to Keeper… it’s very similar to like Xero, FreshBooks, QuickBooks. You know, we use QuickBooks. It doesn’t mean it’s any better than Xero, any worse than Xero on any given day.
Software is software. You need to look at your return on investment. It is going to be constantly changing, especially with what we’re looking at. You then have to retrain your clients. If you’re using the portal with your clients, you’ve got to retrain your team. So what is your ROI on that?
What we use is Xennet. Xennet Autoreview. I’ve been using Xennet since they were in alpha testing actually, which would have probably been the best way to do it.
And I actually really helped them with the review and they predated Keeper. But I love Xennet because I helped to build it and got to build it the way my brain works. So I did try to use Keeper because Keeper does do a couple of things that Xennet doesn’t do yet. Xennet does a couple of things Keeper doesn’t do yet, but they’re essentially the main competition for each other. But Xennet speaks to myself and my team better.
So if you’re looking for something to compare, I would check out Xennet Autoreview, but work with what works best for you and your team because they are going to be one upping each other, for you know, years. So look at that ROI. That ROI is really important so that you’re not jumping back and forth.
I do know people that love TaxDome, I’ve never used TaxDome. If I were looking right now for a portal that has all of that, the direct messaging, the organizers, we use ClientHub. If I were looking right now, I don’t know that ClientHub is who I would choose because we don’t use all of ClientHub. I would take a look at, but I guess the top ones would be probably ClientHub and Financial Sense.
Financial Sense came out for… mid-sized teams. Whereas ClientHub is priced toward mid-sized teams automatically. Financial Sense has now come out with a lower tier for just solopeneurs. Something that’s a little bit easier priced on it, as well as the fact that it has… Canadian pricing versus U.S.
It might be kind of pricey, TaxDome, but you’ve got to look at your ROI. Do you love it? Does your team love it? What about your client? If it’s affecting you and your team, you now have your learning curve to train your team on it. What about your clients? Are your clients using the portal? Now you’re going to have to switch them to another one. So just keep that in mind. Like I say, ClientHub is more pricey.
You know what? It’s actually very, very easy. Rotessa is not difficult. If they can sign into their bank account, they can sign into that. We did have the clients that we moved over their property management, and their clients are real estate property owners. Some are very tech-savvy, some aren’t. There were a couple of people who couldn’t figure that out or thought they were providing the password to their bank account instead of just connecting like in QuickBooks. So they gave a void cheque. Worst case scenario, there’s a void cheque. There’s an authorization with Rotessa that they signed. You can use your own authorization, you can send them an email authorization, you can print it for them. There are many options that Rotessa has to be able to help support that. And then that’s it, they don’t have to do anything else. So if you’ve got a client who is using QuickBooks, you can go in and help them connect it. Rotessa is absolutely amazing.
The client even ended up messaging Rotessa. And I don’t know if in the backend, because I don’t know if it’s just some people say it’s as soon as people see my name, they respond a little quickly to it. So I don’t know if it was that, but even my client, was like, nope. He says they got back to me in 30 minutes, they fixed it. And I’m like, oh, because normally I tell my clients, don’t call the software, we’ll try to call them. But he was like, nope, it was really great. It was really super easy.
So yeah, if they can make a payment, if they can take a selfie, they’re already tech enough to be able to handle Rotessa. And what they can’t, you can step in and help them in the backend. I do have access to my client’s account. If I need to go in and manage stuff, they don’t need to do anything, it’s really easy.
That is Xennet, Xennet Autoreview. We can go in and I can customize all of those so it automatically goes through. Is there anything in uncategorized? Is there anything miscellaneous? We can add our custom reviews. They even look for duplicate suppliers, duplicate customers, anything with that. And we go in the end of every month and we find it.
When I very first used Xennet, my first test… QuickBooks review showed me what they had for the new review, which was supposed to be based on my review. And I spent two years free time helping them with it. And I looked and I said, this is not the product. This is nothing, this is useless to me… And Xennet reached out to me and I hopped on a call with them very cynical.
Then when I used [Xennet] on my own books, if any mistake I made on my own books, it found that my HubDoc bill was, you know regular $25/month in one month. It was $28.50 because I did not catch the tax on it. And I’m like wow, that blew me away. And that was Xennet’s original product back in 2018. And it’s so much more.
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