When you make business recommendations to your clients, it not only helps them transform their businesses, but also makes your relationship with them stronger. As an accounting professional and business consultant, I have seen my clients become more organized and eliminate hours of redundant office work every week by connecting the right apps to QuickBooks Online.

How can you find the right app for the right client? Here, I’ll outline my favorite apps for specific tasks and solutions. These apps address common pain points with solutions that were honed over time. Connecting apps is easier than ever before and won’t mess up your books. In fact, it will make your work life simpler, too.

There are three task-based app categories that will be covered here:

1. Data Import and Automation Apps: These apps are generally designed to significantly reduce double data entry when there is a digital version of the data you desire to enter into QuickBooks.
2. Time-Tracking Apps: These apps track time spent by employees doing a specific set of tasks or working on customer projects. Timesheets can be used to process payroll or create invoices from billable time.
3. Expense Management Apps: With these apps, you can improve your expense management workflows for tracking expenses and managing accounts payable.

Data Import and Automation Apps

Pain points these apps can help solve include the following:

• Entering sales transactions into QuickBooks that are already recorded via another system that processes sales, such as a point of sale or e-commerce system.
• Creating new vendors and customers (with their contact information) that already exists on other databases.
• Manual transcription of receipts, bills and invoices that have the potential to be scanned and read by software to be automated into QuickBooks.
• Accuracy/errors due to transcription of large amounts of data.

To tackle these pain points, I reviewed and recommend three apps within the data import and automation category:

SaasAnt Excel Transaction Importer: Ideal for importing any type of QuickBooks transaction that is already in a flat Excel or CSV file. Similar apps: Transaction Pro Importer and Business Transaction Importer

MoneyThumb SlickConnect: Designed to read bank and credit card statements uploaded via PDF format or scanned to be imported into QuickBooks automatically as uncategorized transactions that the user can reclassify within QuickBooks. Similar apps: AutoEntry, Receipt Bank and HubDoc

AutoEntry: Allows for uploading receipts, bills, invoices and bank/credit card statements to be read via OCR (optical character recognition) and converted into an importable format for QuickBooks. Similar apps: Receipt Bank, Expensify and HubDoc

Here is a video that explains how these three apps work in more detail:

Time-Tracking Apps

Time-tracking apps will automate the entry of timesheets into QuickBooks. Timesheets are generally used for payroll processing, invoicing of billable time and labor job costing.

Apps I reviewed and recommend within the time-tracking category:

QuickBooks Time: This is the most comprehensive time–tracking solution and has a fully integrated timesheet approval app for QuickBooks, as well as the QB Workforce mobile app. It works as a standalone tracking system as well as supports third-party payroll systems like ADP, Paychex and Gusto. Similar apps: ClockShark, eBility, BigTime and Aero Workflow

Harvest: an all-in-one solution for time tracking and streamlined invoicing. Similar apps: BigTime and BQE Core

Here is a video that explains how these two apps work:

Expense Management Apps

Expense management apps help solve the following pain points:

• Capturing bills and receipts incurred by team members that require reimbursement.
• Capturing receipts and other financial documents from team members working from the field.
• Managing different amount thresholds and authority-based rules to allow certain team members to process payments to vendors or reimbursements to employees.

I reviewed and recommend three apps within the expense management category:

Expensify: Expensify is one of the most popular solutions for expense reports, typically for team members recording travel and other expenses, but also to organize company paid expenses — capturing receipts and preparing easy-to-read reports. Similar apps: Abacus, Concur and Zoho Expense

Bill.com (Full app): is a fully controllable accounts payable management tool with user permission structure for management to control which team members can approve bills to be paid. This app can also make electronic payments to vendors and suppliers. Similar apps: Beanworks and Mineral Tree

Bill Pay for QuickBooks Online: This is built in to the interface within QuickBooks Online to make bill payments electronically. Similar apps: Veem and PayPal

To learn more, here is a video that explains how these three apps work:

The videos included in this article will help you gain a perspective on the key pain points your clients might face and the apps that can provide solutions for them. Choosing the apps that can best automate the tasks you want to make more efficient can transform your clients’ businesses. Creating mutual business success with your clients means you will have long and happy customer relationships.