Julie Abitbol is senior manager of finance and accounting for Livingly Media, Inc., a digital media company headquartered in Silicon Valley that reaches an audience of more than 15 million monthly readers across fashion, beauty, celebrity, home, lifestyle, and entertainment. Livingly owns and operates six web properties: Livingly, Mabel + Moxie, Lonny, It’s Rosy, StyleBistro and Zimbio. Livingly Media properties drive massive engagement through a variety of highly visual, interactive, and shareable content. Brands can connect with its audiences on multiple platforms: desktop, tablet, mobile, and social.
Livingly Media is owned by publicly traded French media company Aufeminin, the top publisher of women’s websites worldwide. Its editorial and community-based properties in the categories of parenting, food, health, fashion and beauty, and women’s lifestyle reach an audience of more than 100 million unique visitors. Since April 2018, Aufeminin has been owned by TF1 Group, the leading private-sector television broadcaster in France.
Q&A with Julie Abitbol
What type of work do you do?
I work on QuickBooks. That’s how I do my bookkeeping. I have to close the books every month, and I have very strict deadlines I can’t miss because Livingly Media is owned by a publicly traded media company.
How do you use Transaction Pro?
I do my accounting on Excel spreadsheets, and then I can transfer everything to QuickBooks using Transaction Pro. That’s very helpful. I use it for everything, all the expenses, revenue, credit card transactions—everything in accounting. I transfer maybe 1000 transactions per month. The only thing we still do manually is bank transactions. I use Bill.com for those, which helps me to get the bank transactions directly into QuickBooks.
How has Transaction Pro helped you do your job better?
Without Transaction Pro, I would have to manually type out all my transactions in QuickBooks. That would take a lot of time. It saves me days of work. I can close the books in a couple of days. Without Transaction Pro, it would take twice as long. Revenue figures have to be done on the first of the following month, and I have to close the books on the second. I wouldn’t be able to do that without Transaction Pro, either.
Have you discovered any other benefits?
The imports from Excel to QuickBooks are a kind of a check to make sure that my transaction, the balance is zero. It’s good to do before importing everything into QuickBooks so that everything is accurate and our books aren’t a mess. I make mistakes sometimes in Excel. With Transaction Pro, I can check my work.