Automated Accounting Platforms Can Reshape Lead Generation Businesses

Once you start scaling your calls, leads, and clicks tracking strategy, accounting processes and tabulating financial data could become mind bogglingly cumbersome if you’re still depending on the archaic methods of manual accounting.

Did you know Phonexa is the only company to have the first-of-its-kind proprietary automated accounting platform built to complement its lead generation software, and available for no additional cost as part of an all-in-one digital marketing solution? 

I take great pleasure in sharing that fact because I strongly believe we’ve built the best accounting automation software and technology on the market to deal with the dearth of different sources for your calls, leads, and clicks.

As the Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President for Phonexa, I currently oversee the company’s business development, supervise on questions of compliance and internal finances, and maintain relationships with key clients.

Before growing into my current position, I oversaw a significant modus operandi that became what I like to call “my work baby.”

I joined Phonexa as one of its first hires in 2016 and soon leveraged my background in the accounting industry as a Certified Public Account with the company’s vast artificial intelligence capabilities to create the automated accounting technology currently known as Books360.

The computerized accounting software was built solely for the reason to simplify accounting processes for those who are in the business of generating and purchasing leads, and for those who are selling to a pool of potential buyers. 

Why Accounting Automation Makes A Difference

Books360 is a product integrated inside Phonexa’s all-in-one suite. 

The cloud-based, accounting automation arm is the connective tissue to the other six products for Phonexa’s turnkey digital marketing solution. 

I like to think of Books360 as the ultimate add-on that seamlessly works hand-in-hand with Call Logic, LMS SYNC, E-Delivery, Cloud PBX, Lynx and Opt-Intel. In fact, you can’t use Books360 unless you are powering your calls, leads, and clicks marketing with at least one of Phonexa’s sister products. 

Books360 was built with customizable accounting features, full automation and history, exportable reporting and automated invoicing and payment tracking so that it could put all of the critical cash flow reports for your clients into one accessible platform.

As the accounting hub for Phonexa’s all-in-one marketing suite, it’s designed to work seamlessly with your current tech stack with API integrations that connect to the solutions that keep your business running.

Automated accounting technology gives you more control over your finances with access permissions and lead details, and allows you to save time by streamlining and automating your accounting tasks so that you and your team are able to focus on growth opportunities in other areas and verticals.

Why In-House Accounting Automation Is Imperative For Your Financial Data

If you’ve had yearslong skin in the game for calls, leads, and clicks tracking, you know very well by now that you can have thousands of vendors sending you traffic, and hundreds or perhaps even thousands buying that traffic source.

It’s common to have an automated invoicing and payout system in the lead generation industry, but it can quickly become problematic if you’re using a third party.

The environment that we find our potential customers in is that they’re using our competitors, which in turn gives them a completely fractured and segmented manual accounting process outside of that service.

If you’re using, say, QuickBooks, you would have to take that software and integrate it with every part of your system individually with other platforms — and hope that there are no mistakes. At the end of the day, your data is going to live on a third-party server.

That’s not ideal by any means. One mistake could cost a plethora of issues in your financial picture. As a partner, it’s imperative that you quell any concerns for your clients’ accounting tasks.

An in-house accounting software automation solution alleviates any potential debilitating hits to your bottom line with synchronization, and less time allocated for reporting.

If you don’t have everything in one place to pay lead generators, you’d literally need to sit and go through each system, do the same calculation for each, then combine everything into one payment, and then verify with the affiliates where they want all of the payments to be sent.

I’ve seen it done before, and it’s simply a time waster. As we all know, time equals money, and time is the one thing nobody can ever purchase. 

Paying one affiliate could take up to one hour if you go through the steps of verifying the amount, making sure it hasn’t already been paid, verifying payment details with the affiliate, and separating the task of initiation and approval of payment within. With accounting software automation, you could pay up to thousands of affiliates in that same time span. 

There are definitely ways you can do it outside of Books360.

Whoever hasn’t been using Phonexa till this day has obviously figured out an alternative way of doing things. But it requires more manual work and tracking, and the margin of error highly increases. Books360 eliminates those concerns.

I like to consider that accounting is a cornerstone of a company. Can you blame the bias?!

For finance-minded executives, you can’t call a support center and cross your fingers and hope for a solution once a problem surfaces. It needs to be resolved immediately, efficiently and accurately. 

That’s why we house 24/7 support to solve any and all technical questions. A dedicated customer success representative is also always ready to help clients achieve their goals.

From my personal experience, the larger the corporation, the more red tape you’ll come across regarding protocol. I’m sure we’ve all experienced this by now, and how difficult it could be to get approvals in order to solve problems.

But that shouldn’t be an excuse. As the issues get escalated and laddered up, banks are waiting for financial information. The clock is ticking. Time doesn’t stop for anyone. 

Sure, it’s not the end of the world, but why go through rocky roads, disappoint decision makers and stakeholders when it could be completely avoided altogether? 

That’s why I made it my mission to have Books360 serve as the end-all be-all, user-friendly management destination that accurately keeps track of all payables and receivables from your vendors and customers. 

How Does Automated Accounting Technology Work?

I always like to share use cases so that Books360’s functionality resonates a bit better with the audiences and potential clients that we’re trying to reach.

Let’s say you’re a client of Phonexa. You’re using Call Logic, which means you have affiliates generating calls for you. You’re using LMS SYNC, which means you have affiliates generating web leads for you. You’re using E-Delivery, which means a marketing department is generating leads through emails and SMS marketing efforts.

Books360 goes into the respective Phonexa platform that you’re using and pulls information where it accounts for every publisher’s accounting settings, only tabulating based on the requirements.

It’s not efficient to have an accountant manually go throughout a third-party system and say, ‘this affiliate, vendor or marketer wants to get paid on these terms for these dates … and only for PPC.’”

That’s not how it should work. There is no simpler way to say it. 

Books360’s in-system cross-checking eliminates the potential for any error. This also eliminates the probability for paying double for any prior pay periods. There are also no issues around API integrations because it’s built in-house and lives on the same server.

Accounting Automation Allows You To Set It And Forget It

I can’t think of a client who wants to hire a team of accountants and manually invoice traffic buyers at weekly, bi-weekly or even monthly cycles — all while manually tracking on an outside platform, and then going back into another Enterprise Resource Planning system to figure out how to tie the financials back to the original sources.

Mitigating misconceptions between two parties with a hands-off approach is paramount. 

With Books360, I made it a point to actually set the days that you want to invoice your clients. This way, every client has its own net days. Whether it’s Automated Clearing House or PayPal or general credit card processing, it integrates with all of them.

Some clients might have 30 days to pay, some might have seven. Books360 goes into each of the buyer settings, pulls out all of that information, and automatically invoices each buyer based on the settings. Plus, it sends notifications when a client’s due date is passed.

The invoices are broken down based on the buyers and campaigns. Is it the number of leads the clients care about? Or the price per lead? What about the credits? If clients get credit for certain leads that didn’t convert and are seeking a credit, the system also calculates the credit. This way, the platform is optimized for client needs. 

The settings also allow you to iterate invoicing.

I sometimes don’t have the traditional role of a CFO because I work directly with our development and tech teams, becoming an accountant, designer, writer and tester all at once. 

I’ve heard countless times throughout the years from clients that my background and experience as a CPA has helped shape Books360 into the industry standard that it’s become today.

I take great pride in hearing that kind of feedback. It makes the job more fulfilling. 

We sweated the details, all the way down to designing where the buttons should be, what they should look like, and what color. The free whiteapproach we’ve created allows clients to send branded invoices that further build brand affinity.

Building your brand and resonating with new audiences is imperative, and the white label approach is sometimes the missing touch clients may need. 

Manual Accounting Is Old News: It’s Time To Evolve Your Accounting Processes

My goal with Books360 from day one has been to eliminate the busy work from the day-to-day, all while saving money for partners and creating added value and higher retention rates for their customers. 

I hate to say that computerized accounting software is replacing the need for humans to do their jobs, but an average client can save the budget required to staff additional accountants by switching to automation without a third party. 

“The death of the accountant” is an unfair description that is sometimes dished around. I like to think of leveraging accounting automation more as an evolution across the industry rather than a sign and path toward extinction. 

But also consider this: 92% of accountants have admitted they are not future-ready, while 78% think they should prepare their clients for the complex challenges of the future marketplace, according to the “Insights into the CPA of the Future Study” published by CPA.com.

It’s clear as day that the accounting industry has some significant work to do and catch-up with present times around automation, cloud computing, predictive analytics, and big data. In order to get ahead of the curve for the future, we must join together to embrace emerging technologies and platforms that enhance automation. 

The same “Insights into the CPA of the Future Study” study, published by Dr. James Canton, a leading global futurist and advisor to Fortune 100 companies and government, as well as the CEO & Chairman of the San Francisco-based think tank Institute for Global Futures, states the following: “New business models, globalized markets, new asset classes, and new risk factors make this a fast future of both great challenge, but even greater opportunity … The changing role of the CPA requires professionals to be more intimate with clients and … develop insights into business processes that create value.”

Evolving the workforce, management and innovation in the calls, leads, and clicks tracking and distribution industries with accounting automation will foster a path for future readiness.

Just think about it for a second — how much money are you spending on your accounting staff right now? 

With the monetary savings, you can allocate newfound funds back into marketing to drive more traffic that can eventually sell more leads. 

It also equates to less time on tracking, saving hundreds of work hours per year, and more time focusing on new business. 

Sometimes you have to think outside of the box to slim your company infrastructure, all while creating additional avenues for growth with a safe, convenient and completely accurate alternative.

We implemented this strategy and it allowed us to scale our operations.

Increasing productivity and expanding profitability is the name of the game, right?

As organized and accurate as your data entry processes may be, it’s a waste of time when it can be automated instead. 

Implementing Books360 has in turn made training so simple because the platform is so easy to understand. Quite frankly, you don’t even need to be an accountant to master it. 

Rather than having your accountants toil in data entry and tracking, evolve your department into becoming the high-level thinkers they’re capable of being. 

Have them start thinking about how invoices look on financial statements, how balance sheets are affected, and where financial projections may lead to. Suddenly, their day to day becomes a bit more stimulating, and they become reinvested into the company. It also puts them on a growth trajectory that could perhaps shape them into becoming your company’s future leaders. 

You don’t understand the immense value of the Books360 platform until you try it, which is why we made it available as one part of the seven solutions Phonexa offers in its all-in-one digital marketing platform.