How I keep my store's books
without knowing bookkeeping

I run a Shopify store in Canada, and I've done the books for my own businesses for seven years. I still don't know bookkeeping. I mean that literally: I don't know it at all, and my books are current. Before HQ, those two things didn't go together for me, and closing that gap is why I built Talisk HQ.

What it was like before

My store's books and my GST returns lived in QuickBooks Online. They were always a month behind. The books lived in a separate app from everything else I use to run the business. My mail was in one place, my store in another, and the books were a third place I had to remember to go and do something in. A chore in its own app is easy to put off.

So I built the books into the place where my mail and my store already are.

The routine, honestly

I should be exact about what I do and what HQ does, because "automatic" is a word that hides a lot.

1. Documents come to the inbox, HQ picks them up. Supplier bills and receipts arrive by email like they always did. HQ scans my connected mailbox, finds the ones that look like bills, and drafts them into my expenses: supplier, date, total, tax. A drafted bill is not in my books until it is approved. When a bill needs nothing more than a yes, I can approve it right from the email without opening the ledger.
2. Sales and payouts book themselves. With my store connected, HQ books each payout (sales, fees and tax) and matches it to the deposit when it lands in the bank. There's no post button for me to press.
3. The bank side gets coded. Charges from the bank feed are matched to bills or coded, and when I've told HQ how a supplier should be treated once, the next charge from that supplier arrives already coded that way. If HQ is only guessing at a supplier, it waits for me instead of posting the guess.
4. I confirm the odd item. Now and then something needs a person: a document HQ isn't sure is a bill, a total that doesn't add up with its tax, a possible duplicate. HQ says what it's unsure about, in plain language, and I answer it. I'm not choosing between debits and credits. I'm saying what something was, in words.
5. I look at where I stand. The top of the Ledger Dashboard tells me how far the books are caught up (“Books current through” and a date), and what's holding that date back. Clearing those items is the whole month-end for me.

I open HQ every day anyway, because my mail and my store's sales are already in it. I've never spent more than five minutes on the books in a day, and plenty of days there's nothing for me to do on them. That's my store; yours will have its own number.

What I don't do

I don't make the judgment calls. Adjusting entries, depreciation, tax strategy and the filing itself are the accountant's work, and HQ doesn't pretend otherwise. At year-end HQ produces the pack an accountant needs: the trial balance and the listings behind each balance, in a zip of readable files with the source PDFs. My first year-end on HQ is still ahead of me. When my books were in QuickBooks Desktop, my accountant took the file, did the rest and sent me back adjusting entries. HQ is built for that same hand-off: the pack goes to the accountant, and their adjusting entries come back into HQ.

I'm not claiming it takes no effort. It depends on my actually answering when HQ asks. What I've lost is the pile. The books don't wait for me to feel like doing them.

Why this works for someone who knows no bookkeeping

Because the bookkeeping isn't the part I'm asked to do. Underneath, HQ keeps real double-entry books, and every figure opens up to the entry, and the email or payout, behind it. The reading and coding is its job. What's left for me is the part only the owner can know: what a purchase was for, and whether something is really a business expense.

If you run a Canadian online store and recognise the month-behind feeling, you can read more about how HQ compares with QuickBooks or how the company came about.

Mark Haimes
Founder, Talisk HQ