Henke Bookkeeping | Erika Henk

Empowering businesses with accurate eCommerce accounting

Read how US bookkeeping business, Henke Bookkeeping, discovered A2X and is using it to simplify and automate processes for its clients, eliminating the guesswork and uncovering reliable financial data. Founder Erika Henke combines A2X with QuickBooks Online, Google Docs and LastPass to deliver bookkeeping services that empower her eCommerce clients to reach their growth goals.

Entrepreneurial spirit and desire to expand

Erika Henke knows her numbers. She’s been running the books for her husband’s electrical business and their shared farm for 15 years. That’s on top of a full-time investment job and wrangling two kids! Now that her children have grown up (and caught the entrepreneurial bug too), Erika decided it was time to start her own bookkeeping business.

“I didn’t want to be stuck with a full-time job forever. I want to be able to be more flexible with my time – and not have an income ceiling!”

Henke Bookkeeping was launched in May 2021. Erika wanted to promise her clients lower payroll costs and less stress at tax time, but she soon found that eCommerce businesses demanded a little more.

Growing list of bookkeeping clients

Though Erika’s business is new, she’s already amassed a broad range of clients: non-profit, house of worship, farming, rental property, construction industry, law and eCommerce.

Located in the southwest corner of Iowa, Erika works with many local businesses, but being digital, she can pretty much work with anyone. She recently signed her first eCommerce client – a retail store that had jumped on the eCommerce train. That’s when she came across A2X for Shopify.

Before: manually breaking down sales ‘a nightmare’

Looking through her client’s accounts, Erika saw there was more to just recording the deposits paid by Shopify than she initially thought.

“I knew I had to figure out and break down [the sales], but when I jumped into Shopify and tried to break those down manually, it was a nightmare.”

The further Erika dived into Shopify, the more she realised the work and time involved.

“It is a lot of work. Shopify does not make it easy to break those sales down.”

Erika realised she’d have to charge her client for hours of time and effort to reconcile his Shopify sales manually – and that did not sit well with her.

“He probably wouldn’t keep me as his bookkeeper. I’d lose him as a client because he wouldn’t want to pay me to do that.”

After: saving time, money and empowering her clients

Knowing in her bookkeeping gut that something wasn’t adding up, Erika quickly started searching for ways to correctly reconcile her client’s books.

“A2X was highly recommended to me by another bookkeeper. It’s pretty well known in the community,” Erika says.

After trialling A2X with one transaction, Erika immediately purchased the app. Not only did using A2X save her time, but it also saved her client thousands of dollars on manually reconciling over 350 transactions a month.

“A2X was so easy to set up and it makes doing my client’s books a snap. I mean, he’s getting deposits almost daily into his bank account,” she says.

To add to the list of A2X benefits, Erika says the tool is ‘extremely accurate’, which gives her client confidence in his financials. Her favourite thing about A2X is the simplicity – “Anyone can use it” – which empowers people to run their businesses with confidence.

“A2X has just been a godsend – I won’t ever use anything else. I like it so much and it is so simple to use!”

A2X is Erika’s go-to digital tool

Though many of her clients are local, Erika is fully set up to work remotely. Alongside A2X, she uses QuickBooks Online, Google Docs and LastPass (for secure password storage). Erika is slowly but surely growing her digital kit and as a new business, is taking the time to carefully research the tools that will be most valuable to her clients – both current and prospective.

She says A2X’s free trial was what helped her decide it was the app for her.

“A2X makes it so simple. It lets you try it out even before it’s paid for, so you can see how it works for your business.”

Erika says that there is “nothing I don’t like about A2X – I love it all” and highly recommends other bookkeepers working in – or moving into – the eCommerce arena to give it a go.

“Why do things the hard way? Why spend so much time and effort doing it manually, if someone else has figured out there’s a better, easier, simpler way? A2X really does simplify so much and is a huge advantage for bookkeepers.”