My 10 Favorite Apps: Week 4 – Bento for Business

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Continuing with my mission to create synergy and utilize time saving technology, my fourth favorite app is Bento. Remember, my "Top 10 Favorite Apps" are in no particular order of ranking, they just happen to be the apps we love to work with at my firm.

So, you may be asking, "What is Bento?" The answer: It's exactly what small business owners’ need and accountants want. Bento is a full feature pre-paid employee expense card that provides:

  • Transparent spending
  • Ease of management in terms of how much, when and where employees can make purchases
  • Time savings by allowing expenses to be imported into QBO
  • Multiple price levels ranging from FREE (2 cards) to Enterprise (more than 20).

Just ask yourself, How does your small business handle cash expenses? Do you have a petty cash box that constantly needs to be counted, balanced, replenished, reconciled and on-and-on? Do you issue company credit cards to your employees with hardly any controls in place over what they buy or how they use them?

Do you write checks for the least little thing, and then wonder why you're spending so much on check stock? And how about them spending within the constraints of your budget or a project budget?

Even big businesses have a hard time managing expenses of this type. Small business owners can be overwhelmed both in financial and time constraints with such activities. At the same time, businesses must ensure ease of spending within the limits of their pocketbooks.

This is where Bento comes in. By providing small businesses with prepaid debit cards that can be used like any other debit card, business owners and employees can make essential purchases ranging from gasoline to construction materials. Each expense is tracked and can be allocated to the appropriate budget or job.

Bento prepaid cards can be easily loaded from the Bento dashboard, allowing owners to securely manage how much or how little employees have access to and where they can spend those dollars.

One of the benefits of Bento that has earned it a spot on my "Top 10 Favorite Apps" list is its ability to import all expenses into QBO within just a few clicks. As part of this process you can not only manage and account for the expenditures, but you can associate them with expense details, job costing and class tracking.

So, let's start by looking at just how easy it is to sign up for and connect Bento to QBO:

1. From within QBOA, select Apps

2. Search for Bento, then select "learn more" to sign up for the App at the Bento website

Once you are signed up, it's time to sync Bento with QuickBooks Online:

3. Within Bento select Transactions

4. Select "connect to QuickBooks;" when prompted enter your QBO credentials

(5) Authorize Bento to connect to QuickBooks, and then select "OK, let's sync"

By default, Bento will create a new bank account within QBO for use by Bento. If you have already created a Bento bank account, you can choose it from your chart of accounts during the initial sync.

6. Select the date range you want to sync between Bento and QBO. You have the option of "all past transactions," "past six months," "past three months," "past month" and a custom date range. In my example (shown below) I have selected the "all past transaction" option.

7. You will also choose the frequency with which each future sync between Bento and QBO will occur. I recommend you select the option to "automatically (sync) on a daily basis," (This also happens to be Bento's recommended sync frequency). You can choose to sync on a "manual basis" if you're the kind of person who still prefers a stick shift rather than an automatic. (That's a car joke, get it?)

Currently the "machine logic" doesn't exist to map Bento transactions to the appropriate categories within QBO, but who knows perhaps Artificial Intelligence to do this is just around the corner. In the meantime:

8. Go to the QBO Expense Transactions List to code your Bento expenses to the appropriate categorizations.

What else I love about Bento...

Bento has a ProAdvisor program that offers an Account with two cards. This account is "free for life." As part of signing up for this special program, it offers onboarding instruction to help you get ready to assist your clients with setting up Bento for their businesses.

Bento is a win for small businesses. Not only is it easy to set up and control, but it provides real time tracking of how much, who and where expenses are incurred. That data flows directly into QBO with each sync.

The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune and others have awarded high marks to Bento. Their website provides a variety of reviews and comments.