He may be a software whiz, but for Matt Wieler it’s still all about the people – and their businesses.
“Coming from a banking background, I really enjoyed that moment where I could hit the ‘approved’ button and watch the joy in someone’s face,” says Wieler, now the owner-operator of Steinbach-based Books in Balance. “I’d be in the numbers, in the credit scores, and doing all the math. But it was wonderful watching a human’s light switch go on. They’d go from maybe not having a house to having a house, and it would be life-changing.”
Wieler’s experience in personal finance is something he continues to draw on, whether he finds himself helping a business streamline their balance sheets and month-to-month reconciling or showing a client how to leverage payroll software.
“The excitement with small businesses comes when I can help them with their books and they tell me, ‘This has been overwhelming and scary for a long time, but now it’s simple and not something to worry about anymore’,” he says.
Wieler points out that while most local small businesses use INTUIT QuickBooks for their financial tasks, many of them need a bit of help to fully leverage the capability of the software. This is especially true for enterprises that might not have the capacity to hire a full-time bookkeeper.
“A lot of people have QuickBooks but don’t know how to use it well,” says Wieler. “We specialize in using QuickBooks Online. There are a lot of tools inside that a business just hasn’t turned on or hasn’t explored, and they need a little bit of guidance to use the software better.”
Books in Balance is often faced with questions about turning on credit cards, processing payments, charting accounts and automating expenses. Small business operators may simply not have time for data entry, but the overarching theme of their needs has to do with using technology to make their lives easier.
This is where Wieler and his team step in.
As an example, Wieler cites a client with roughly $56,000 in monthly revenue – and lots of data to work through. They’d been entering it manually, but after some help from Books in Balance they were able to use software tools to quickly and accurately perform the task. They also learned how they could match payments to invoices and bank statements in a matter of seconds.
“You can go ahead and spend hours making a whole ton of invoices and doing data entry,” Wielder remarks. “But if you can do it in a matter of seconds, it’s just better.”
With this month’s Small Business Week, October 20-26, there’s never been a better time to call on the QuickBooks experts at Books in Balance. Wieler makes his calendar publicly available and encourages people to book online.
Located at 316 Main St in Steinbach, Books in Balance can also be reached by calling (204) 326-6947 or emailing accounting@bookbalance.ca. Additional information about their services is available on their website.
