A tour of our software

We believe Backroom Management’s software is the easiest and most powerful online management and accounting system serving small- to medium-sized companies on the market.

Why? Because the accounting software you buy at your local office supply store was designed by programmers. That’s why it’s so complex and confusing. It loses the beauty, simplicity and symmetry of accounting.

Our proprietary web-based software distills the full business pipeline—both financial AND operational numbers—into just 7 Key Numbers that you use to drive your complete business funnel. This is the source of our power.

Traditional bookkeeping software only tells you where you’ve been. We provide real-time metrics that tell you where you are, where you’re going, and what you can do to change your trajectory.

A STAAR Approach to Software

• Scalability. No more upsells. The system expands as you do automatically. No punishment for growth. One seat or many seats, it’s the same monthly charge.
• Transparency. With all operating data at your fingertips, you can see the whole organization’s performance at a glance. Now, there are no excuses for not using the tools that help you make better decisions.
• Alignment. Integrated information prevents managers acting as an independent silo.
• Affordability. Preserve your capital for business growth and eliminate expenditures on hardware maintenance, updates, add-ons, IT staff.
• Real-time. By having fully-integrated systems, you have timely insight into all aspects of your business so you can monitor, manage, and model.

Management software, not accounting software.

In the old days, accounting was done with pencils and paper. Even for very large companies. But then computers came along and made it all difficult. Backroom Management’s online system makes it easy again, because it’s designed by small business accountants who know the secret: accounting is most powerful when it’s at its simplest.

If you use this system right, it makes you more profitable. It gives you the insight into what your money is doing. And you will spend less time on the computer and more time out there actually building your business!

But it’s more than just online accounting. The best part is that real live humans help you with it. When you sign up, we set up your system for you. So the first time you log on, all your information is waiting for you.

Now let’s explore the key functions of the software.

Key functions of the software (click to jump ahead)

• Software Features: Planning
  • The Planning Dashboard
  • The 7 Key Numbers Worksheet
  • The 7 Key Numbers Dashboard
  • Budgeting
• Software Features: Accounting
  • Lists
  • Transactions
• Software Features: Reporting
• Software Features: Driving Revenue (your CRM)
• Software Features: Controlling Costs (Job Costing)
• Software Features: Controlling Time (Time Management)
• Software Features: Other Tools
• Why these features matter: the 7 Key Numbers

Software Features: Planning

Watch this video to see how just three screens let you set your business agenda by giving you a real-time snapshot of the state of the business.

The Planning Dashboard

This dashboard shows cash balances, receivables, and payables. You use them to see whether or not you’re in alignment or if you have an emergency brewing.

• Profit and loss trends
• Account balances
• Whom you owe money, who owes YOU money
• Overdue payables and receivables

Benefit: If everything is going well, you spend more time making money.

The 7 Key Numbers Worksheet

Most accounting focuses on accounting. But five of our seven key numbers are about revenue. While most accountants focus on cost savings, we know that the most you can cut your cost down to is $0 – which is when you’re out of business. Use the 7 Key Numbers worksheets to start with the end in mind.

The 7 Key Numbers Dashboard

This is your tool for the 3 M’s: monitor, manage, and model.

• Monitor. You spot problems by looking for unusual variance between your expectations and your reality It’s a simple exercise of thumbs-up or thumbs-down: is the number better or worse than you want it to be?
• Manage. Let’s say you just gave a thumbs-down to the number of leads you’re generating. You want more leads. So you ask yourself, what do I need to do to GET more leads?
• Model. To get new leads, you can invest in newspaper advertising, or better marketing materials, or a new website, or many other business decisions. You will use the 7 Key Numbers to model the impact of each possibility BEFORE you make them—to predict which action will be the most profitable choice.

Budgeting

Once you know where you are going, you can use our software to develop your detailed budget. And you can have as many budgets as you want. You won’t need to create an spreadsheet for budgeting. Best of all, the budget is automatically structured like your chart of accounts.

Software Features: Accounting

Traditionally, accounting is a mess and a hodgepodge in your computer. Our software simplifies it into three tabs:

• Lists keep track of contacts, vendors and other repetitive info
• Transactions record the day-to-day operations or activities of your business
• Reports generate powerful financial information

Lists

All your master files are located in the lists section. This includes:

• Accounts. This is where you structure your chart of accounts. We have a default set of accounts to help you get accurate reporting as soon as you are ready to input transactions.
• Vendors. This is the list of people and companies you purchase from. In addition to our comprehensive layout of vendor records, you can add as many customized vendor fields as you’d like.
• Customers. This is the list of people and companies who buy from you. Again, you can add as many customized customer fields or drop-down attributes as you’d like.
• Employees. This is where you keep track of employees or contractors who work or perform services for you. This primes the time and billing system.
• Inventory Items. We allow not only for inventory items, but can create assemblies as well.
• Price Levels. These files have create standard price discounts or premiums for any vendor or customer.
• Departments. Unlimited departments and sub-departments. Or you can use this to have various funds as well.
• Company Data. All company defaults are set up here. This is automatically set up when you open your system for the first time.
• Users. Allows for permission-based access to the system. Your users are only allowed to see what you allow them to see.
• Locked Periods. You can lock any periods you want. The data doesn’t disappear, but access to change the data is locked. Only the company administrator can unlock a period, yet you still have access to reports for past periods.

Transactions

In the course of a business, a business is either selling something (generating an invoice) or buying something (receiving a bill). And, in the days before computers, we used simple pieces of paper to record a transaction. This is all the information you need: the type of transaction, the customer information, the quantity, a description of what was being sold, and the price per unit.

Using a computer should be no different. You just need a few codes so we know what was sold, what accounts to code it to and what departments, jobs or projects this transaction needs to effect.

That’s why our software is so straightforward.

• Purchases. You just click depending on whether you’re issuing a purchase order, recording a transaction that you’ll pay later, paying with a check, or returning merchandise for a credit or cash. Then all the other information is the same in any of these categories. If you have a recurring entry, it is simple to get it on the future commitment calendar.
• Sales. You just click depending on whether you are issuing a quote which can later be used to issue a work order or converted to an invoice, a transaction where your customer or client will pay you later, or a cash receipt. If your customer is returning something, you can credit their account or issue a check on the spot. If you have a recurring entry, it is simple to get it on the future cash receipts calendar.
• Journal Entries. This is where you enter non-standard or non-cash items affecting your business. Examples include recording depreciation or the purchase of a large asset subject to a loan.
• Collect on A/R. As you collect on your receivables, you can apply it to individual invoices. If you need to give a discount, here is where you do it.
• Pay on A/P. As you pay on your payables, you can take discounts and pay one invoice or multiple invoices. You can make full payments or partial payments.
• Paychecks. We link into a few payroll systems, and when you run your payroll on their system, it will automatically and seamlessly enter the transactions into Backroom Management’s software.
• Reconciliations. You can reconcile any type of account, including bank accounts, trust accounts, loans, and more. Suppose you want the period open but the reconciliation comes in the middle of the month? We have the ability to lock the account, even through the period is open. Therefore there’s no way that the reconciliation can be changed (except by the administrator).

Software Features: Reporting

All the functions you need to effectively manage your business come standard in Backroom Management. All your reports are in one place. You can analyze an account by client or you can do an account analysis to see what’s going on, what kind of activity is happening in an account. This automates activities that are normally done by hand. All your reports are self-documented. You don’t have to worry about setting up reports in the system.

• Financial reports. Not only do we have the standard financial reports, but we have specially-designed reports to track changes in account balances, analyze accounts by client or inventory type.
• Customers and receivables. Follow a customer through the customer journey. Special reports are collections by salesperson (so you can see how much cash a sales person is generating), customer profitability (by type of products sold), sales by source (so you can see who is giving you the best leads).
• Vendors and payables. Be able to quickly see vendor history and get an aged payables report.
• Inventory. Track quantities and costs with simple to interpret reports. Also, you’ll find a report that shows you profitability by each item you sell.
• Source documents. This is where you print out all your journals.
• Taxes. This is where you create your 1099’s, see your sales tax codes and print out your sales tax reports.
• Lists. Print out your master files here.
• Packages. Do you have a package of reports that need to go out on a routine basis, like to management or bankers? This is where you can set up multiple reports to run at the same time. This is a real time-saver.

Software Features: Driving Revenue (your CRM)

Our CRM is a dynamic system to drive your leads through your sales pipeline. You’ll use it for a number of activities.

• Leads to Client. This is one of your 7 Key Numbers. It tracks how long and how successful your sales pipeline is.
• Opportunities. When, where, and how much is an opportunity worth? This helps you identify which opportunities to pursue most vigorously.
• Activities. An infinite list of “to do” items you customize, assign, and track.
• Client Lists. Because we have a dynamic system, you can sort your customers by a variety of parameters.
• Campaigns. Combine activities (such as phone calls and other to-do’s) and emails into a set schedule to reach out to potential or existing customers. What makes this powerful is you can set up emails, set up scripts, assign the scripts to an activity which is a “to do”, you can combine activities and emails into a campaign. These campaigns can straddle years if you want to – they’re based on your sales cycle.
• Administration. An infinite way to group customers or opportunities by attributes that you define. User-defined features allow you to create campaigns, activities, scripts (for use with phone calls or meetings), email templates, customer sources, customer attributes (custom create a list without any programming knowledge) and opportunity attributes (drop down menus to help you follow a customer through the sales pipeline).
• Reports. Follow your pipeline through reports based on potential close dates and weighted averages.

Software Features: Controlling Costs (Job Costing)

Most accounting systems do not do a good job of tracking costs. But imagine the decisions you could make if you knew the trajectory of every single job. That’s what our cost controlling and job costing features provide.

• Estimating. Know how much a job will cost (and earn!) so you can build a profitable quote. Put in the items, the g/l account, the job cost code, and then sort by job cost code. The software automatically subtotals. When you create the job it, the software automatically creates the budget for this job. You can mark up by dollars or by percent.
  • Allowance lets you put in the amount you expect to spend. This will carry over when you create your budget. You can structure what your quotes look like, what your invoices look like, what your invoices should have on them.
• Scheduling. Know where your crews and vendors are scheduled, and what your workload looks like in the days, weeks, and months ahead.
• Job cost codes can be defined for every step of the process you need to monitor.
• Exceptions. Shows you immediately when you’re running over budget so you can get your project back in line quickly. When you’re in a job. you look at the estimate, the change orders, the revised amount. If you go over budget it creates an exception
• Job details. Have up-to-the-moment costs and make good decisions based on real data.
• Change orders. Document changes to the scope of the project that affect costs and profits.
• Billing. Set up progressive billing right through the Job Cost module.
• Job Profitability Report. Your first stop to see if a job is on track. Don’t like what you see? Drill down in the Job Details to find out what’s really happening. You will know if there’s going to be a cash crunch because you can look at how much they’ve billed, how much you have left to spend, and how much left to do.
• Purchases. Track the what, when, and how much you spend by tracking job codes.
• Scheduling Report. If you want to know who’s responsible for doing what and when, this report segregate assignments by employees, project name, task name, and due date.

Software Features: Controlling Time (Time Management)

Time management is exactly like the job cost system, except it monitors hours instead of jobs or dollars. This includes scheduling and change orders (to monitor scope creep). You can input time with traditional time slips or through the time clock. You can go by customer, matter, or subtask. You can monitor every task in real time to improve profitability.

• Task Codes define every element of your projects.
• Scheduling shows you when and where your team is committed.
• Change Orders document the changes to the scope of the project.
• Exceptions show you immediately when a project goes over its time budget so you can analyze who and why.
• Timesheets give your team members the ability to enter their time from anywhere.
• Time clocks keep track of time automatically, so you can charge time to a customer, customer project, and task within the project.
• Billing. Bill directly from the timesheets and get the income into your pipeline
• Reports. Our standard reports include employee profitability and customer profitability.

Software Features: Other Tools

• Account groups. The ability to create financial statement subtotals by ranges of accounts.
• Accountant’s workpapers. Your accountants can do their workpapers right in the system. And their journal entries are held in abeyance until the client and accountant agree on it. Accountants can run a package and just print work papers in Excel or PDF.
• Breakeven analysis. How many units do you need to sell in order to recover the costs in a project? This is a key management tool for making decisions.
• Customer fields. Create customized customer fields to run your business based on your requirements. Don’t let the software limit the amount of information you want to collect.
• Email messages. Create a library of email messages to attach to your invoices, workorders, quotes, etc.
• Inventory attributes. Create customize fields that make your inventory management simpler.
• Renumber accounts. Change your mind on how you want your chart of accounts to appear or how the order of your accounts? You can easily just renumber accounts with this tool.
• Sales taxes. This tool lets you create sales tax authorities groupings and authorities.
• Vendor fields. Create customized vendor fields to track those items not already in the system. Our objective is to give you (the user) as much flexibility as we can.

Why these features matter: the 7 Key Numbers

All the features in our software are designed to help you execute the day-to-day requirements necessary to run your business. But most importantly, they’re here to create the data you need to monitor your 7 Key Numbers.

Why is this important? Because this is how you get back to focusing on your core competency—which is the one thing people will actually pay you to perform. The 7 Key Numbers can reduce the time it takes to manage the trajectory of your business to just five minutes a day. This frees you up to do what’s really important.