Frequently Asked Questions

Pronto is a word that has been used by several cultures with varying meanings, but each translation of the word felt appropriate for the services that we are offering:

In North American culture, the word Pronto means promptly or immediately. This was fitting as our goal is to provide prompt, timely financial information to our clients.

In Italian culture, instead of answering a phone and responding “Hello?”, it is typical to answer the phone with “Pronto”. In this instance, Pronto means “Ready”. This was perfect for us, as we strive to become a consistently dependable service that is there and ready for you whenever you need us.

In Spanish, Pronto translates to “soon”, but is typically used as part of the phrase ¡hasta pronto!, which can be roughly translated to “see you soon”. This embodies our goal to be considered a part of your team. We may be remote bookkeepers, but we absolutely realize the importance of having a personal relationship with the people we actively work with. Whenever practical, we like to have in-person meetings with you and your team because we understand how important it is to know and trust the people that you are relying upon to help guide your business. We may be a remote based bookkeeping service, but we will always “see you soon”!

Running a business and managing your cash flow is hard and we get that! So why would we contribute to that stress by issuing you fluctuating, periodic bills that you have no way to budget for? Value pricing is the solution to that.

Your external bookkeeper should not be rewarded with an hourly billing rate that earns them more money for being inefficient at their job.

Similarly, a bookkeeper on payroll is incentivized to inflate time spent on bookkeeping duties in order to justify a higher pay-cheque with overtime.

With our value pricing model, you are agreeing to a monthly fee that aligns our incentives: We price our services based on the value we are adding to your company, and you are enabled to spend your limited time on the things that matter to you. Whether that means more time at the lake with the family, more time on research and development improving your products and services, or more time to pick up a new hobby; you are able to shift the burden of generating reliable financial data from yourself, to professionals who are dedicated to adding value to your business beyond the other alternatives available at comparable price points.

Long story short: We provide the benefits of an on-staff CPA, but at a lower or comparable cost of a non-designated on-staff bookkeeper.

Typically, the first month or two will involve a lot of communication and gathering of information. During the on-boarding process we are trying to accomplish several things all at once:

Learn how your existing bookkeeping processes work and insert ourselves into these processes.

Identify areas in your processes that could be improved or more efficient.

Gain as much information and understanding about your business as possible.

After that initial learning period, we will have a much clearer definition of what duties we will be performing and which will need to remain in-house. The goal by month two to three is to be able to provide you with timely, accurate reporting and having minimal questions for you and your team so that you can focus on your business.

For most business owners, it comes down to one thing: Price. What does an internal CPA, CA cost an established company? Easily $80,000 (plus benefits) as a minimum for a full-time employee.

What does a CPA, CA for-hire cost from Pronto? Significantly less! Even with the Large bookkeeping package combined with VCFO service reporting, you’re looking at roughly 25% of the cost that you’d incur by hiring a designated CPA full-time.

The deficiency that we hope to address is that many businesses don’t require a full-time CPA, CA at their current size; and most CPA, CA’s aren’t looking for 4-6 part-time jobs to make up their salary expectations. This leaves business owners who want the assistance of a designated CPA, CA, paying public accounting firm prices which can range anywhere from $150-$400 per hour depending on the services being requested.

The Pronto Books mission is to serve this niche of small businesses. We leverage the ever-improving technology available to minimize the time spent on low-level data entry tasks so that we can spend our time on high-level value-added services. This encouraged us to create a model where business owners can hire us for the higher-level professional opinions they are seeking, while also reaping the benefits of having lower-level data entry tasks being automated. Our highly experienced professional staff is here to help you and your team bring your accounting processes into the 21st century so that you can obtain the most reliable financial data for your business decisions at a minimal cost. The Pronto team measures their success by the success that we are able to achieve for our clients.

An internal accountant/bookkeeper has a physical presence in your office. They can answer phone calls, follow up on receivables and gain inside knowledge of your business. They can bring in donuts to the office to boost morale, which to be honest; we know can be an absolute game-changer on the toughest of days for some businesses and their teams.

We do not pretend that we can do all of these same things.

What won’t we do? Handle customer relationships via receivables collection calls and emails. Physically sit in your office and greet customers/vendors all day.

What will we do? The things we excel at. Ensure that your bookkeeping is current, accurate, and reliable. Provide business advisory services (at your request) to help you take your company to that next level of growth. Help redesign your bookkeeping/accounting processes so that you and your staff spend minimal time on these tasks while also creating a system that protects your company from errors and fraud.

The services we are offering are those that we are exceptional at. We strive to seek that perfect balance between automating the low-value data entry tasks and having the oversight, knowledge and expertise of a highly experienced CPA, CA on-hand to maximize your investment in our services. Unfortunately, tasks such as answering phones and following up on receivables aren’t tasks that we can make more efficient. And since we don’t feel that we can improve these areas of your business, we want to be open and honest that those aren’t our areas of expertise.

Our goal is to earn the majority of our fees doing the things we are good at, that impact your company. Unfortunately, while this may mean we aren’t the all-encompassing solution you may be looking for to replace traditional internal office staff, we also hope that you, as business owners see this as assurance that we aren’t attempting to sell you on a promise that we are not able to deliver on. We aren’t here to convince you with a sleazy sales pitch or sell you on a service that we aren’t prepared to fully stand behind. Pronto is here to be 100% up-front and honest about what our strengths and weaknesses are. Nobody wins if we sell our services based on empty promises. We want the lines of communication to be completely open and honest right from the beginning so that all parties involved can deliver upon their expectations to help improve your business. We don’t consider our business successful unless we are contributing to your businesses success.

…And every once in a while, maybe we can still bring by some donuts for your team for that always welcome morale boost too ;)

Pronto does NOT outsource any of their work to foreign countries. While outsourced labour is a huge advantage to our competitors at this point in time, we understand that a lot of our clients value their privacy and security and are uncomfortable with the use of discounted overseas labour. As a result, we may not be able to offer our services at the same prices as some of our competition, but we can proudly say that you will be working with an entirely Canadian team of professionals at all times!

Traditional bookkeeping services are heavily focused on the past. You drop off your most recent quarter of paperwork and by the end of December, you might be able to see how your company did from July to October. And in our experience, there is a wide range of quality out there…

Pronto thinks you deserve better. It’s hard to make the right business decisions without timely, accurate reporting. So we leverage technology to make that possible. With our suite of applications, we can have nearly real-time reporting available to you. And as certified CPA, CA’s you can be assured that your books are professionally prepared and accurate. This allows you to make the best decisions for your business!

As a professional accountant who has worked with a variety of different accounting software, we can wholeheartedly say that we have seen no better combination of products. While cloud accounting solutions definitely do not suit every single type of business (manufacturing companies, we are referring to you here!), there have been leaps in the capabilities of cloud applications over the past decade. Simply stated, we live in the age of information. And cloud accounting solutions leverage this data to make the bookkeeping process easier and more timely. In our experience, no cloud based accounting product has the same level of dedication and support as QuickBooks Online. They want to be the go-to accounting platform for business owners and they are heavily invested in producing a constantly evolving product that is consistently cutting-edge. This means that they maintain a product that is constantly improving for both the business owners and bookkeepers that utilize their products. We support QuickBooks Online because QuickBooks Online supports small businesses and bookkeepers.

As for Dext (formerly known as Receipt Bank), there is no solution out there that can outperform this application. Similar to QuickBooks Online, they have a phenomenal product that works well, yet they constantly seek feedback from users on how to continuously improve their product.

You can tell a lot about a company from the services it uses. By working with a top-tier suite of applications that constantly look for feedback on how to further improve their services, we hope that our clients feel the same way about Pronto. We want to be the best that we can be so that you have no doubts that we are the optimal choice for your business. We want your experience with us to be nothing but positive, so we’ve partnered with the top tools that help us provide that top-tier experience that you and your business deserve.

A lot of people assume that by using a cloud accounting software solution, their data is fully backed up at all times and cannot be corrupted. WRONG! While these cloud providers retain backups of your most current data at all times, your data is not protected from any sort of corruption induced by hackers, server failures or data entry errors by your staff.

How do we protect you from these issues? Rewind! Every Pronto Books subscription service includes the Rewind.io backup service. What does this mean? It means that we maintain live backups of your data daily. If a server goes down: We have you covered. Rogue accounts receivable clerk trying to wreck your books after a tough layoff? We can remove their entries for an entire day or designated period of time so that your books are back to being correct in no time at all.

Basically, no matter what unforeseen issues may arise, Pronto has your back!

Yes. Safer than ever. Some people are worried that by backing up data to the cloud, they lose ownership rights to their documents. Not with Pronto. We understand that as business of the information age, your business activities are entirely private and of nobody else’s business. The applications that we work with use top-tier security measures to ensure the safety and confidentiality of your data.