Balancing the books for a small business can be a time-consuming and challenging task, but the right accounting software will revolutionize your processes through simplification and automation, allowing your team to focus on higher-value tasks.
Business accounting software keeps financial information organized, decreases the risk of human error, and, yes, reduces costs. It assists with budgeting, tax filing, and managing your general ledger, including accounts receivable and accounts payable.
Read on to learn about how this technology makes life easier for small business owners and their staff.
The Benefits of Accounting Software
Small businesses stand to benefit immensely from adopting an accounting software solution. With this technology, you have the power to ensure accuracy in your financial reporting, speed up your accounting department’s slow manual processes, save time, save money, and much more.
Save money
Everyone knows time is money, and software’s ability to add efficiency to your accounting processes reduces overall costs. It frees up your employees to do more in a given time period, so you can keep a smaller team and not worry about needing to hire more employees as you grow. This leads to a reduction in payroll and administrative costs.
We know what you’re thinking. Yes, you have to pay for this software, but an efficient accounting process is worth investing in. While these systems usually have costs related to purchase, installation, and training, you’ll find that your small business’ long-term gains in productivity and efficiency will more than offset the cost of the software.
Beyond reducing overhead, software can potentially help you make more money. For example, it may help you identify your most profitable clients and prevent you from putting time and resources toward less profitable clientele. With less time spent balancing your books, you’re free to evaluate other business processes and identify where you can save costs and boost profits.
Work faster (and smarter)
For small businesses that are spread thin, it’s not always about a lack of money, but instead, a lack of time. Time wasted on low-value, recurring tasks, such as updating Excel spreadsheets, creating new reports each week, and approving billing items, adds up significantly.
Computers can do certain things that humans simply cannot do. While they can’t replace the value that people bring to your organization, they can make quite a difference in your accounting. Implementing a cloud-based digital accounting system leverages automation to immediately improve your financial reporting’s organization and standardization.
With automated accounting, assembling reports and calculating KPIs is faster than using manual entry in Excel. It’s easy to access important financials any time, thanks to the system’s built-in reporting capabilities. Suppose you need cash flow figures right before a meeting. Instead of manually creating a brand new report, you can conveniently pull from your system’s dashboard and generate a polished, accurate report in seconds.
Improve accuracy
One of the most prominent benefits of accounting software is its ability to reduce or eliminate human error in data input and calculation. Traditional bookkeeping processes require you to do your own calculations, and getting one small thing wrong can lead to a wildly inaccurate end balance.
As you know, accuracy is crucial to accounting, so any method that helps you consistently produce error-free results is a significant advantage to your business. While you shouldn’t rely on software solely, it greatly improves your chances of producing the correct result, whether it’s for a client payment or tax filing.
Solve staffing issues
As we briefly mentioned earlier, accounting software eliminates the need to hire new accounting staff. It also helps your processes keep up with your company's growth — whether in size or complexity — without requiring new hires. You can even be able to transition some administrative staff who assisted with accounting to other roles that are more valuable.
Tax compliance
Filing business taxes is complex and daunting, especially if you struggle to keep track of your transactions. With accounting software, the process is made more accessible by centralizing all of your financial data.
Tax filing errors sometimes lead to thousands of dollars in fines and fixes and certainly results in a lot of stress for business owners. One seemingly minor mistake can be very costly. In this aspect alone, accounting software quickly pays for itself.
Filing your taxes can be confusing, especially if you don’t have all your financial information unified. Business accounting software eliminates this hassle by keeping all records, receipts, expenses, invoices, and transactions in one place. Software like BQE CORE integrates with QuickBooks for simple, automatic filing.
What to Look For in Accounting Software
As you research solutions, you’ll notice popular features included in the top accounting software systems. Every company has its preferences and priorities, but to get you started, we’ve rounded up some of the most powerful accounting software features to help you add efficiency to your small business.
Invoice management
Invoice management gives you a system for digitally generating, sending, and organizing your invoices. Effective invoice management encourages speedy cash flow, simplifies accounting tasks, and saves you time. Your accounting platform may offer automated invoicing, customizable invoice templates, recurring billing, invoice status tracking, and more. Paying employees and clients accurately and on time helps your company foster relationships and maintain its reputation, and you can’t put a price on that.
Cash flow tracking
Cash flow tracking handles the flow of incoming and outgoing funds, which enables you to maintain healthy cash flow and forecast future revenue. When you have a clear idea of where your business is, you know how to get where you want to go. Cash flow tracking empowers business owners by ensuring cash flow stays positive, helps you estimate expenditures, and lets you know where cash comes from and goes.
Sales tracking
Sales tracking built into accounting software supports managing, tracking, and guiding all aspects of your sales process. It allows you to collect data and track key metrics related to company sales, producing better reporting, analysis, and insights so that you can improve your sales efforts. You’re likely missing out on crucial information and follow-up actions to make money if you're not using digital sales tracking.
Payroll management
Payroll management allows you to maintain and automate payments to employees via direct deposit, check, or payment card, while remaining tax-compliant and following other necessary regulations. Payroll must be reliable, user-friendly, and flexible enough to handle payments for employees no matter their status (e.g., salaried vs. hourly) or location.
It’s smart to combine your payroll management and accounting software because it eliminates duplicate data entry and ensures your general ledger reflects the most up-to-date, accurate figures. The best payroll tooling makes it simple to create custom rules, workflows, and checklists that help your small business follow the rules, save time, and compensate staff promptly.
Tax reporting
Accounting and tax reporting are closely related. Your accounting platform should support the collection, management, reporting, and analysis of your company’s tax data so that when it’s time to file, it’s painless and there are no surprises. Accounting software can do a lot of the heavy lifting work to make filing more manageable, including generating the reports needed to finalize your return or estimate total taxes owed.
Budgeting tools
Budgeting tools in your accounting software allow you to create, record, monitor, and update your budget. This functionality makes it easier to create financial statements, build models, charts, and graphs, and forecast future revenue and profits. With it, you can track if your budget works for your business and is sustainable. If not, you have the opportunity to pivot before major issues emerge.
BQE Software for Small Businesses
BQE CORE offers small businesses accounting and project management software that helps you streamline and automate numerous critical workflows, saving you time and money. We provide all of the invoicing/billing, business forecasting, and team collaboration tools you need, the choice to work on desktop or mobile, and built-in integrations for RFIs and ASIs.
With more than 400,000 users, usability that users and critics have praised, and strong customer support, small business owners love CORE. In seconds, you can handle payments, access all of your company’s financial reporting, and forecast what the future holds.
If you’re looking to add both power and simplicity to your accounting, invoicing, billing, and more, start your 15-day free trial of BQE CORE today.