Reasons to Have Automated Bookkeeping in 2021. Do you think an entirely automated bookkeeping process is possible? Well, maybe sometime in the future. But, as of now, some amount of human intervention is required. Even though bookkeeping and accounting are crucial processes that shouldn’t be procrastinated, many business owners admit it is a draining process. That’s the reason tax seasons see small businesses frantically searching for bookkeepers to balance their books.
You don’t have to face such situations. There are many accounting software your business can use to automate the majority of tasks related to financial administration, or you can use just one: Quickbooks. Read through to find out how your business can save a tremendous amount of time and energy through bookkeeping automation.
How Much Time Do Small Business Owners Spend on Bookkeeping?
A survey conducted by Sage found out that small and medium business owners around the world spend about 120 working days per year on average on administrative tasks, including payment and generation of invoices, chasing delayed payments, tax preparation, and managing payroll.
According to the survey, SMBs of the United States lose 4.9% of their time to these tasks, which accounts for a productivity loss costing USD 335.3 billion.
Advantages of Automating Bookkeeping and Accounting
Did you go through the survey above? If you did, you would have understood that you are not alone. But business owners all around the world are adopting automated bookkeeping, and it’s time for you to jump on the bandwagon.
Automatic Collection of Financial Documents
Quickbooks let you connect your bank feed or an app that receives bank statements, receipts, and more. The financial document generated for you in your bank feed or the document that reaches your app will automatically get uploaded to Quickbooks under the category you pre-selected. The pain of chasing your clients every month for bank statements will become a thing of the past as the bank statements automatically get attached to bank reconciliation.
Automate Recurring Actions
If you are somebody else’s regular customer or if others make use of your services or products regularly, you will have to send and receive invoices every month. You can set Quickbooks to update your accounts payable and accounts receivable automatically. The software can even send email reminders to your customers automatically. You can set rules in the application to auto-generate and send reminder emails for overdue invoices too.
Automatic Report Generation
Do you want to know the financial status of your company anytime you want? If you are still using papers for keeping records, it will take hours or probably days to figure it out. Even if you have a bookkeeper in your office, you will have to consult them to find it out. If you have bookkeeping software like Quickbooks, that information is available to you 24/7. Do you know why? Because every financial transaction that ever took place will be recorded in it. Generate any report you want to analyze the performance of your company. This is extremely important if you want to prove to your investors that you are on the right track.
Some examples of reports that can be generated in Quickbooks are sales and purchasing reports, customer and seller reports, checking, assets, and liabilities reports, inventory, payroll, accounts payable, balance sheets, and income statements.
Integrate Third-Party Apps for Automation
Quickbooks let you integrate third-party apps to ease many time-consuming processes. Ask your clients to click a picture of an invoice; an app called ReceiptBank scans the information and updates your QuickBooks as a transaction. LedgerDocs let you schedule the pulling of bank statements and upload financial documents to create bills, invoices, and expenses in QuickBooks. You can use AutoEntry to record a transaction directly to QuickBooks by snapping a picture, scanning, or emailing a copy of the bill or expense.
Bookkeeping and accounting is an integral part of any business. It is wise not to postpone the processes for a later time. Little do most businesses know that bookkeeping is as important as any other aspect of a business. There are many firms that offer bookkeeping services for small businesses. Find out one, talk to them, and let them take care of the complexity.
Bookkeepers are trained for handling such processes. There is no shame in outsourcing your bookkeeping needs, and with remote bookkeeping becoming popular, you don’t even have to visit them in person. Outsource your bookkeeping needs and stay calm and focused on growing your business even during tax season.