Accounting is one of the cornerstones of running any business. You can say that it provides the most important indicator of how your business is really performing. Unfortunately, running your accounting department is usually the most exhausting and time-consuming task you have to face. If you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself drowning in all of the receipts, invoices, payroll, and taxes!
The good news is that you can devise a good system to take care of all of your troubles. If you’re able to find a pattern in your work in accounting, you’ll soon be able to cut down countless repetitive processes. In the long run, this means cutting down your time and effort in half or even a quarter.
Here are six great ways to help you make your business accounting process go much easier:
The biggest issue we all face in accounting is the huge amount of data we need to log in, over and over again. Thanks to technology, you can make good use of many available tools to turn your accounting process into a breeze. With the right tool, you can automate all of the data entry to take this hassle off your shoulders for good. Imagine having all of your receipts and invoices logged on the system only by scanning them!
Choosing the right software can be tricky, but there are a few features you should focus on. Some of the features are linking all of your accounts together, automating data (obviously), maintaining all of your records, generating reports, and having search capability.
We all know that keeping track of your receipts is Accounting 101, but we still suffer anyway. That’s mostly due to the fact that we’re not consistent in sorting out the receipts on a regular basis. It’s either you log them one by one as they come in, which is extremely time-consuming and takes away your focus from another task, or you let them pile up until you need to submit a report.
Instead of leaving the task at the mercy of chaos, how about you designate a specific time to sort out and log your receipts? You can schedule an hour every two days for that task, for instance.
Simplifying your accounting process is all about making your work more organized, and there’s no doubt that invoices consume a lot of your effort. So, if you create a strong, comprehensive, and organized invoicing system, or if you find software to take care of that, you’ll be able to resolve that headache for good.
One of the daunting tasks in the invoicing system is to actually create the invoice and customize it every time for your clients. But as explained in Digital Lessons in 90 Seconds, most of the available templates to download online are just too clunky and filled with bugs. This is all the more reason to find the software you can depend on to create your invoice templates, such as digital-invoice-template.com; it can all be just a click of a button away. No more spending hours looking for the right template—or even worse, creating it from scratch.
Even though it may look easy at first glance, payroll can be really complicated. First of all, you need to make sure all of the paychecks are accurate; you need to devise your records beforehand to check if there are any changes in the paychecks this month around, and you calculate taxes and withholdings. Then, it can become even more complicated if you have multiple delivery systems for different employees, which reaches a whole other level if your employees are working remotely in different countries or states.
What you can do to make it a lot easier is to find a secure software that takes care of all of these factors. The other option available to you is to hire a payroll company to do the job, which will only make sense if your business is huge and payroll is extremely complicated.
You surely know that keeping track of your profits and losses is critical, but you might not realize how critical it is to keep a record at all times. Most of us fall into the mistake of creating our reports after each quarter, but then it’s usually too late to save the situation if it needs saving. By keeping your records updated at the end of every week, you’ll be able to act quickly when you need to. On the positive side, this will make your accounting process much easier, too. You won’t have a huge load to document, calculate, and analyze all at the same time; you’ll be significantly dividing the load. At the end of the quarter, you’ll just need to put all of your records together.
Lastly, we’ve all experienced at one point or another the devastation of losing all of our work due to a crash or our laptop deciding to restart at the most inconvenient time. You should never leave it to chance; always remember to back up your work at any given time. Your risk of losing your work without any backup is even more serious if you’re using an outdated version. Most of the updated applications already save your work instantly, whether it’s on the cloud or internal short memory, so you can rest assured, you won’t lose your work suddenly.
For most businesses, accounting can be a drowning pit that just consumes too much time and effort—but it doesn’t have to be. By organizing your workflow and finding the repetitive patterns, you won’t have to dread this task anymore. Organizing your accounting process can be done by taking some smart steps, such as automating your data entry, making a habit of tracking your receipts periodically, creating a strong and comprehensive invoicing system, smoothing out your payroll process, and preparing weekly reports. The most important of all, always remember to back up your work!
