Hey Makers
December knocked on the door and just like every year, we’re shocked to see how the time flies, right? On this fine day, I’m sharing an automation story of the community’s own @loic.wiseflow who saved quite a bit of oh-so-valuable time of his client.
Check it out and get inspired
As important as bookkeeping is, it often goes hand in hand with endless streams of manual tasks. Due to that, you see highly skilled people stuck in cycles of copy-pasting data from one system to another which is not only inefficient and error-prone but also kinda soul-crushing.
To demonstrate this, let’s have a look at a Service Marketplace that uses QuickBooks as its accounting software and Stripe for payment processing:
- Every month, the bookkeeper went into QuickBooks to manually create deposits for Stripe payouts.
- The average time to create a deposit is 15 minutes and there are ca 25 payouts per month.
- That’s 6.25 hours/month and 75 hours/year of tedious work performed by a qualified professional which quickly became difficult to manage.
At that moment, the company decided to call Make Partner Loic Sebe of Wiseflow to fix their issues through workflow automation. Loic used Make to create a scenario that:
- saves $4500/year in bookkeeping
- runs daily to immediately identify any issues and improve the accuracy of the client’s books
- makes troubleshooting a breeze by identifying which transactions are missing
Curious to learn all the details? See what Loic told us about his automation below.
What problem were you trying to solve with your automation?
Automating Quickbooks deposits for Stripe transactions.
Why did the problem exist?
Stripe sends a daily payout that is composed of many transactions: charges, refunds, chargeback withdrawals, chargeback funds returns, etc…
On top of that, there are Stripe fees associated with each transaction. Also for some accounts Stripe put a portion of the charged amount into a reserve account.
My client can have payouts with over 250 transactions so creating a deposit in Quickbooks Online was getting very difficult and extremely time-consuming.
How did you solve the problem? What does your solution look like?
When a new payout is sent by Stripe, it is added to a data store. Once a day a second scenario looks for payouts to process. The basic outline of the scenario is this:
- Get all the charges and find the matching sales receipts in Quickbooks
- Get all the refunds and find the matching refund receipts in Quickbooks
- Get all the chargebacks and find the matching refund receipts
- Get all the chargeback reversals and find the matching receipts
- Calculate the total for all the Stripe fees
- Create a journal entry for Stripe Reserve account contribution
- Create a journal entry for Stripe Reserve account remittance
- Create a deposit in Quickbooks online for all the transactions and fees
- Send a notification to the Accounting channel in Slack
If a transaction can’t be located in Quickbooks, the process is aborted and a notification is sent to the Accounting department via Slack
What did your solution achieve?
- Eliminated 95% of the manual work
- Deposits are created daily rather than monthly
- No more human errors that were inevitable with this type of tedious task
- Eliminated the back-and-forth between the client and their outsourced bookkeeper when troubleshooting was required
the star of the show - Loic Sebe
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