Having automated bookkeeping/accounting systems can make or break a business. Too often business pay CPA's a large sum of money to do their bookkeeping at the end of the year. By the time business owners learn about what happened in their business, its way too late to use that information for any relevant decision making."Its best to pay for bookkeeping on a hourly basis"False! Paying your bookkeeper by the hour is a terrible mistake! The skills of bookkeepers vary, and this payment arrangement gives an incentive for the bookkeeper to work slower.Solution: Fixed price monthly contracts with the scope discussed beforehand is the best way to go about paying a bookkeeper. This way, if anything comes up that may take the bookkeeper more time, the onus is on them to hustle and the get the work done on time and under budget."the only systems that I should use for my business is Quickbooks or Simply Accounting"False! Accounting systems such as Quickbooks and Simply Accounting (Sage) are often recommended to business owners by traditional old school Accountants. This advice is not based on the business owner's best interest, but rather to make the life easier for the Accountant. These systems are very complicated to use, clunky, and take a lot of time, money, and resources to operate.Solution: The software that you should be using should be specific to your Industry. The only thing you should be doing as a business owner is operating your industry specific software. The accounting software should have a seamless link, and you should never have to operate it, or at the least spend time populating it manually."Bookkeeping requires a lot of data entry, I should hire a data entry person to help with the entry"False! In the past, bookkeeping was a very labour intensive task requiring humans to enter in bank statement transaction data, invoices, receipts and bills. This is the most frustrating task that even Accountants don't like to touch.Solution: There have been many advanced in technology and most of these tasks have been automated. Imagine a system where all your transactions that happen through your bank or credits cards get downloaded into the accounting system automatically on a daily basis. It gets even better, imagine just having to take a picture or being able to email off a bill or receipt and have all that data get automatically entered into the system and matched with the corresponding transaction. Bank reconciliations that happen by themselves, Yes! Welcome to the future!