Do you calculate the time you invest in running the accounts department of your business? Accounting for small businesses can ultimately become complex and a time-taking process. With the growth of the businesses accounting standards have also become difficult and tiresome. Like other business operators, you must have maintained a spreadsheet to track down your finances and accounting transactions. That is a good thing to start with, but as your business develops, this becomes a challenge as manual accounting can be inaccurate and time-consuming.
Understanding accounting software
Accounting software helps you automate the steps of the accounting cycle while you can invest your time on more important things. The software is capable of categorizing final transactions and recording them. It also lets you pay bills at times, share customer invoices, operate standard reports through the platform, and manage payrolls.
There are various accounting software depending on the types of business you run. Large companies or businesses use customized software or ERP (enterprise resource planning) software, while others may use modern finance services or info-tech system integrators. They keep the accounting procedure smoothly running. In the world of digitization, software development became a critical part of modern-day businesses. These businesses are invariably looking for renewed ways to acquire custom-based software development solutions.
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Top advantages of using an online accounting software
Cloud accounting software or customized accounting software is an online tool for helping bookkeepers, accountants, or business managers to automate or manage accounting transactions for any business. Accounting software assists you in automating tasks within the accounting procedure. Considering startups, the price of accounting software packages and the process required to set them up can be haunting.
If you are making a data or journal entry, the process can be automated by using the software. Every time you make a payment by your business’s bank account, it can be easily automated by software. While you follow these, you must know there are certain advantages associated with accounting software. Among these, the top ones are listed below.
1. Easy collaboration
With cloud accounting, your collaborations become easier. Do you remember when you had to make edits to your spreadsheet more often, how difficult manual accounting was? After this, you needed to save this on a USB external drive and then pass it on to your respective colleagues. Such a time-consuming, hectic, and outdated method of tracking financial transactions. Well, these times are gone now.
With cloud accounting software, it has become easier and more convenient for everyone to access real-time accounting and process financial data. This just needs your employees to log in to their computers and perform their duties then and there. This saves both time and effort and allows multiple users to operate on similar accounting data. Also, online accounting software allows you to operate with various levels at different users. You can tailor permissions in this way by setting an accounting standard or bookkeeping features that a user has to carry out.
2. Automation saves time
Just like the installation of any other software, accounting software setup also requires time and effort. But again, this becomes a one-time investment as it saves your time on a long-term notion. Think of the workload of an accountant or a bookkeeper, the time and energy they invest in manual accounting is really hectic and cumbersome. Some of the work even becomes repetitive. For example, making invoices for sales, sending delayed payment reminders, and tracking transactions are all repetitive work that has to be performed manually.
All this labor can be eliminated by incorporating accounting software. It not only eradicates manual labor but also saves a lot of time as most of the steps involved in an accounting cycle can be covered by the software.
“For beginners, you can start with creating journal entries, followed by integrating your bank account with your software directly. This will help you with maintaining a timely record of every payment done or received as it would be automatically updated in the journal.” – as suggested by Peter Lee in one of his recent press releases. Peter is the current CEO of Info-Tech and is vastly experienced in enterprise software.
You can also enjoy things like automatic financial reporting, not downloading CSV files, or setting up automated trader payments. But you need to keep in mind that not all software provides the same level of automation. Do proper market research and then get the best accounting software for your business that suits your preferences.
3. Universal accessibility of data
This is the most obvious advantage of using online accounting software over a traditional or manual accounting method. It lets you access your data anywhere, anytime, and from whichever medium you wish to operate. Your online accounting software can be used from any mobile device, PC, laptop, or tablet. All that you will need is a device connected to the internet.
A business has tons of upsides, be it of any size. For instance, invoices can be created and sent directly from the device. Generating, reviewing, or downloading reports and financial statements is possible with a click. Your accountant will be relieved as he/she need not prepare the record three days prior from their desk, they can make it instantly with computerized systems, just log in to the platform and navigate to find the financial section and download the statement you are looking for.
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4. Improved accuracy in the accounting
Accounting software lets you wish goodbye to the errors that you usually commit while doing manual accounting. Online accounting makes sure that all your records are properly organized and maintained with accuracy. Do you remember how you wasted your time calculating your financial transactions and not understanding why the balance sheet didn’t match? Herein, the accuracy is duly taken care of, and your tough times are eliminated.
The cloud accounting software balances your new journal entries and in case something goes wrong, it will highlight the potential error and rectify it. The best thing is you get notified about all the actions that the accounting software takes for you. This is a live example of how accounting software helps you in maintaining accuracy in data and keeps your financial records properly updated.
Any error associated with the freshness of the data can also be avoided by accounting software. If you are working on a spreadsheet that was changed way before but the updated version never appeared on your sheet, what a waste of time and energy that would be. With accounting software, this gets eliminated. To sum it up, it ensures that all your financial records and transactions are maintained accurately and properly organized.
5. Improved security
Online platforms are related to insecurities and unwanted cyber threats, but cloud accounting is one such software that ensures all your data is protected and secured. Your information is covered and protected with high-end encryptions and algorithms that are nearly impossible to crack. Storing your records online with the software is way safer than storing them on office shelves.
One of the best things is the data is not only kept safe and secure but is also synced regularly so that you don’t miss out on any fresh data. Desktop-based accounting systems needed regular backups unlike a cloud accounting system, which never stores data on a hard drive. Hard drives can be delicate and are easily destroyed or corrupted, making them unusable. This results in disaster recovery plans which are highly expensive and time-consuming.
The online accounting system takes all responsibilities from you and performs them with diligence. You don’t have to back up your data here, the system does that for you.
6. Economic and cost-saving
The first question that arises after reading the heading is how is paid software economic and cost-saving? You have the answer to this. Online accounting software saves you time and energy, as mentioned earlier. On average, it saves 300 regular hours for your business in a year. To be precise, time wastage of things including repetitive work, creating financial records and reports manually, fixing accounting errors, and many more.
If you watch the costs effectively, an accounting software costs between $10 to $50 per month, so it pays for itself by saving even more. If you compare online accounting software to ERP, you see the cost-effectiveness yourself. It is one of the best ways to save your business’s funds and utilize them for better purposes.
7. Improved professionalism
Once your business starts progressing, you start receiving requests for financial responses externally. To meet these requests, you need professionalism in your approach. While trading with investors, you cannot offer them an unprofessional financial statement. Accounting software does that for you, it computerizes your financial records and prepares a well-drafted, properly formatted, and professional statement for you. These formats are standardized and are presented in an easy-to-download format.
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Conclusion
In conclusion, to eliminate financial and accounting problems, businesses incorporate accounting software to make their data more accurate and transform it into an easier approach. That’s where the importance of accounting software steps in. As the business progresses you find a need to build more invoices, create financial statements, and construct new journal entries. Therefore, to improvise and act, modern-day businesses start using accounting software as a means to manage their accounting. There are many advantages associated with accounting software, some of which are covered in the article.
Web Developer & SEO Specialist with 15+ years of experience in Open Source Web Development specialized in Joomla & WordPress development. He is also the moderator of this blog "RS Web Solutions".