Video meetings and screen-shared bookkeeping reviews

The idea

Looking at the same screen instead of describing it

For most of the practice's history, a review meeting meant one of us driving to a client's premises with a folder of printouts, or the client driving to Marchbank House. Either way somebody lost half a day, and the meeting itself was often spent turning pages and saying "the figure I am looking at is near the bottom of the third page".

Since 2018 we have run most reviews as a video call with the ledger shared on screen. Your manager opens your bookkeeping system, or the working schedules behind your accounts, and shares that window with you. You see exactly what they see, live, including the cursor. When you ask what is inside the £6,318 of materials, they click into it and you both watch the transactions appear.

That sounds like a small change. In practice it changes the character of the meeting entirely. Questions get answered while they are still being asked, corrections are made in front of you rather than noted for later, and the meeting ends with both parties agreeing about the same numbers rather than about their recollection of the same numbers.

It also means the meetings are longer and more demanding of your internet connection than an ordinary telephone call, which is the practical point of this page. A quarterly review is a working session, not a catch-up, and a year-end sign-off can occupy most of a morning with the screen share running continuously throughout.

In short

It runs in an ordinary web browser. There is nothing to install and no account to create.
A quarterly review takes 45 to 90 minutes; a year-end sign-off commonly runs two and a half to four hours, with breaks.
HD video plus a continuous high-resolution screen share uses a few megabits per second in each direction, sustained for the whole session.
A wired office connection with at least 20 Mbit/s down and 10 Mbit/s up gives a comfortable session. Less will usually work; a lot less will not.
If your connection is not up to it, we will come to you or send the pack in advance and work through it by telephone. Nobody is penalised for a poor line.

The sessions

What each kind of meeting involves

There are four meetings in a typical client year that we would normally run this way. They differ mainly in length, and length is the thing clients under-estimate.

Typical video sessions across a client year. Durations are what we actually book, not optimistic estimates.
Session	Frequency	Typical length	Screen sharing
Quarterly bookkeeping review	Four times a year	45 – 90 minutes	Continuous, ledger open throughout
Management pack walk-through	Monthly, where taken	20 – 30 minutes	Continuous, four-page pack
Pre-year-end planning	Once, about two months out	60 – 75 minutes	Intermittent, forecast and schedules
Year-end accounts sign-off	Once a year	2½ – 4 hours	Continuous, draft accounts and full schedules

Session

Monthly pack walk-throughs

Clients on the Managed package receive a four-page management pack on the seventh working day after the month closes. Where a client wants it talked through, we book twenty to thirty minutes on the day the pack lands and go through it on screen: results against last year and against plan, cash and commitments, the operational measures that matter in your trade, and the decisions carried forward from the previous month.

These are short and light. A quarter of an hour of HD video and a shared four-page document is the least demanding thing on this page, and most clients take these from a laptop wherever they happen to be.

Session

Pre-year-end planning

Held roughly two months before your year end, this session is about decisions that can still be made rather than results that are already fixed. We share the forecast outturn, work through the assumptions with you live, and change them on screen as you tell us what has actually been committed.

It runs about an hour and involves a good deal of scrolling through a spreadsheet, which is bandwidth-hungry in a way a static slide is not. If your connection is marginal, this is the meeting to take from the office rather than from a site cabin.

The practical bit

What a screen-shared session asks of your connection

We are not being coy about this: a video meeting with a continuous, high-resolution screen share is one of the more demanding things an ordinary office does with its internet connection, and it does it for an hour or more without a pause.

Two things are happening at once. The video itself — your camera to us, our cameras to you — runs at something like 1.5 to 2.5 Mbit/s per stream at HD quality. On top of that sits the screen share, which is a second video stream carrying a detailed, text-heavy image. A spreadsheet being scrolled changes almost every pixel on screen, so the share cannot be compressed the way a talking head can. In practice a legible ledger share sits between 2 and 4 Mbit/s.

Add those together, allow for two or three people on the call, and a typical review consumes roughly 4 to 6 Mbit/s downstream and 3 to 4 Mbit/s upstream, continuously, for as long as the meeting lasts. That is not a large number in isolation. It is a large number to sustain for three hours on a connection that is also carrying the rest of the office.

Indicative connection guidance. Figures are sustained rates for the whole session, not peak speeds from a one-off speed test.
Connection	Download	Upload	What to expect
Minimum workable	6 Mbit/s	2 Mbit/s	Audio stays clear; the shared screen may lag a second or two behind and small figures can blur while scrolling. Adequate for a short pack walk-through.
Comfortable	20 Mbit/s	10 Mbit/s	Ledger text stays sharp, scrolling keeps up, and the call tolerates somebody else in the office sending a large email. This is what we suggest for a quarterly review.
Recommended for year-end	40 Mbit/s or better	20 Mbit/s or better	Three or four hours of continuous sharing with several participants, screen swapping in both directions, and no need to think about it once.
Mobile tethering	Variable	Variable	Usually works for short sessions but consumes a great deal of data and is prone to dropping. Not something we would rely on for a year-end morning.

A speed test tells you what your line managed for eight seconds when nothing else was happening. It does not tell you what it will hold for three hours on a Tuesday morning with the rest of the office working. If your connection is shared with a workshop, a shop floor, a busy office or a backup that runs during the day, that matters more than the headline figure on your bill.

Before your meeting

What you need, and what to do the day before

Five minutes of preparation removes almost every problem we have ever had with these sessions. Nothing here needs an IT department.

What you need

A current web browser. The meeting runs in the browser. There is nothing to download, no plug-in, and no account to create. The link we send opens straight into the call.
A working camera and microphone. A laptop's built-in pair is fine. A cheap headset is noticeably better than a room speaker if more than one person is on your end.
A reasonable connection, held for the whole session. Around 5 Mbit/s in each direction is the working figure; 20 Mbit/s down and 10 Mbit/s up is comfortable. Year-end mornings want more headroom than a quarterly review.
A wired connection if you can manage one. An ethernet cable is the single most effective thing you can do. Wi-Fi is usually fine near the router and unreliable at the far end of an old building.
The largest screen available to you. A ledger shared onto a thirteen-inch laptop is legible but tiring for two hours. A monitor, or a laptop plugged into the meeting-room television, makes a long session much easier.
Somewhere quiet, with the door shut. These meetings cover your figures. A shared office or a café is not the place for them.

The day before

Check the meeting length in your calendar and make sure the whole of it is free. If we have booked three hours, we expect to use most of them.
Test the link we sent. It opens a short check page that shows your camera, your microphone and your measured connection speed. It takes under a minute and costs nothing.
Ask whoever handles large uploads, backups or media transfers in your office to hold off during the session, or to schedule them for the evening.
Make sure your bookkeeping records for the period are complete and posted. We can review what is in the ledger; we cannot review what is still in a folder on somebody's desk.
Have your questions written down. Everybody remembers them afterwards otherwise.

On the day

Join five minutes early. If something is wrong with the audio, five minutes is enough to fix it and no minutes is not.
Close anything else that is using the connection heavily — cloud sync, video, a large file transfer.
If the picture starts to break up, say so immediately. We will turn the cameras off and keep the screen share, which is the half of the meeting that matters.
Tell us if you need a break. Nobody concentrates on a balance sheet for three hours without one, and we would much rather stop for ten minutes than lose your attention for the last hour.

If your connection is not up to it

Some of our clients work from farms, workshops, site offices and buildings where the line is what it is. That is not a problem and it is certainly not a judgement on the business. We will drive out to you, or send the pack and the schedules in advance and work through them by telephone with both of us looking at the same printed pages. The meeting is about the numbers, not the medium.

Detail

How the sessions actually run

A few notes on the mechanics, for people who like to know before they agree to something.

Who joins

From our side, your named manager, and for a year-end meeting usually the partner who reviewed the file as well. From your side, whoever needs to be there: the directors, the office manager, the person who raises the invoices, a co-owner joining from somewhere else entirely.

Each additional participant adds another video stream in both directions, so a six-person year-end call is meaningfully heavier than a two-person quarterly review. If your connection is marginal, ask the people who only need part of the meeting to join for that part and drop off afterwards.

Recording and notes

We do not record these meetings by default. Somebody on our side takes notes and you receive a short written summary within one working day: what was discussed, what we agreed to change, what you agreed to send, and any figures that moved.

If you would like a session recorded — some clients do, particularly where a co-owner could not attend — ask beforehand and we will arrange it, with everybody on the call told at the start. Recordings are held for three months and then deleted. Bear in mind that a three-hour recording is a large file, and that we will send it as a download link rather than by email.

Joining from a phone or tablet

It works, and for a twenty-minute pack walk-through it is perfectly reasonable. For a quarterly review it is a compromise, and for a year-end sign-off we would gently discourage it: a shared spreadsheet on a six-inch screen is not something anyone can read for three hours, and you will end up agreeing to figures you have not really examined.

If a phone is genuinely your only option, join on wi-fi rather than mobile data where you can, and tell us in advance so we can enlarge the figures on the share and work through the schedules more slowly.

When the connection struggles

The usual sequence is that the video degrades first, then the screen share starts arriving in steps, then the audio breaks. If we get as far as the second stage we will stop and switch off the cameras, which frees up two or three megabits immediately and almost always restores a legible share.

If that does not work, we abandon the video entirely, telephone you, and carry on with the screen share alone or with a set of schedules emailed across. In eight years we have had to give up completely and rebook perhaps a dozen times, mostly during storms.

Confidentiality on a call

What appears on the shared screen is your ledger, and it will often include employee costs, director drawings, customer names and margins. We take these calls from a meeting room with the door closed and we ask you to do the same. Headphones are worth a great deal in an open-plan office.

We do not share your screen with anybody who is not on the call, and we will always tell you who is present on our side at the start. If somebody unexpected needs to join — a specialist we have brought in on a question — we ask first.

Accessibility and adjustments

Tell us what would help and we will do it. We can enlarge the figures on the shared screen throughout, send the schedules in large print in advance so you are reading paper rather than a screen, slow the pace, or split a long year-end session into two shorter mornings.

If a video call is simply not how you want to work, that is a complete answer and no explanation is needed. Plenty of our clients prefer to sit at a table with a folder, and we still keep two meeting rooms for exactly that reason.

What it does not replace

A screen share is a poor substitute for walking round a business. We still offer to visit every new client's premises at least once in the first year, whatever the distance, because half an hour on a factory floor or in a stockroom explains things that no ledger ever will.

Stock counts, first meetings and any conversation about the future of the business are better done in person, and we will say so rather than default to a call because it is convenient for us.

Questions

Common questions about video reviews

Is an hour and a half really necessary for a quarterly review?

For most clients, yes, and the businesses that need it least are the ones already reporting monthly. The session covers a full quarter of transactions, the bank reconciliations, the aged debtors and the control accounts, and it stops every time you have a question — which is the entire value of doing it live rather than sending you a report.

Clients with very tidy records and low transaction volumes sometimes finish in forty-five minutes. We still book ninety, because finishing early is pleasant and running out of time is not.

Our broadband is not very good. Will this work?

Probably, and if it does not we have alternatives. The audio is the last thing to fail, so even a poor connection generally sustains a conversation. What suffers is the screen share, which is the part that makes the meeting worth having.

Open the check link the day before and tell us what it reports. If your sustained upload is below about 2 Mbit/s we will plan around it: schedules sent in advance, cameras off from the start, or a visit instead. It is a five-minute conversation and it saves an awkward morning.

Can more of my team join for part of the meeting?

Yes, and it is often a good idea. The office manager who codes the purchase invoices frequently gets more out of the bookkeeping section than the director does, and can answer questions in thirty seconds that would otherwise take a week of email.

Tell us in advance who is joining and for which part, and we will structure the session so that nobody sits through an hour that does not concern them. Remember that each extra participant adds to the demand on your connection.

What happens if we run out of time?

We finish the section we are in, write up what has been covered, and book a second session for the remainder — usually within the same week, because a year-end conversation left hanging for a fortnight has to be started again from the beginning.

There is no additional charge for a session that overruns into a second sitting. If it happens repeatedly for a particular client, that is a signal that we have scheduled the meeting badly, and we lengthen the booking the following year.

Booking a session

Existing clients: your quarterly reviews and your year-end meeting are already in the timetable attached to your engagement letter, and James will confirm each one about a fortnight beforehand with the link and the expected length. If you would like to change the format, the timing or the length, tell him and it will be changed.

Prospective clients: the introductory meeting can be held this way too, though it is shorter — forty-five minutes, no screen sharing, and no obligation of any kind. Details of how to reach us are on the contact page, or telephone 01632 960 118 and ask for James, who keeps the diary.