Harmonize your document workflow

The problem: an inefficient bank statement collection and query process

Collecting bank statements from clients is a necessary part of the monthly bookkeeping process. While cloud accounting platforms such as Xero provide up-to-date bank feeds, having a copy of the bank statement is still useful for quality assurance and ensuring there are no duplicate or missing transactions from the bank feed.

Bank statements can be difficult to collect, however. “Before preparing monthly reports for our clients, we cross reference the bank balance in Xero to a bank statement,” says Bean Ninjas Founder and Owner Meryl Johnston. “We found that statements were harder to collect consistently from clients each month because they require business owners to actually log in to their banks, hope the statement we need is available, download them, then send them across.”

This multi-touch process was not ideal for Bean Ninjas, as it required staff to spend time requesting statements and sending email reminders, which took approximately 15 minutes per client, per month. Across hundreds of clients, that added up to hours of time simply logging in and downloading!

From the client’s perspective, having to send monthly statements to Bean Ninjas was also a time-consuming and tedious task – particularly for BRHYTHMIC Founder and Owner Bron Harrison, who frequently travels and rarely works from one location.

“Having to set aside time every month to log in to my bank, download the statement, and send it to Bean Ninjas was not a great experience,” admits Bron. “It sounds like a small task, but it if I’m in New York on business, the last thing I want to do (with a bad internet connection) is log in to a bank to get a statement and forward it to my bookkeeper!”  

The solution: a simple, automated process

The benefits of great client-firm relationships cannot be understated. When clients are happy, both businesses improve – clients will want to work with your firm more, and might even bring in referrals.  

When Bean Ninjas adopted Hubdoc in 2018, improving client relationships was one of their goals, particularly with clients like BRHYTHMIC.

“It can be tedious for the clients to actually log in and download statements, then send to us at our request,” says Meryl. “Fostering happy clients is important at Bean Ninjas, and our old process was not producing these results.”

The key for Bean Ninjas was an easy solution that provided staff with the information and documentation required, when it was needed. Hubdoc, a data capture solution that automatically fetches bills and statements from hundreds of suppliers and banks, enabled Bean Ninjas to achieve this goal.

“With Hubdoc, my staff saved time and it was a better user experience for our clients,” says Meryl. “Previously, staff would need to send an email, check to see if they received the right statement, then go back to it a few times – there were a lot of document touches.”