Updated August 2024,
It’s critical for architecture and engineering firm owners to keep a close eye on cash flow and expenses. It's also vital that you are looking at work in progress, and projecting future revenue so you can make informed business decisions. With so many responsibilities weighing on you, you need an efficient way to manage accounts receivable, accounts payable, and payroll so you don’t have to do it all manually.
This is where cloud-based accounting software comes in. You should be utilizing software tools that can save you time, deliver accurate real time reports, and streamline your accounting processes so you can focus your time and effort on the work you love.
No firm owner started their practice to spend time accounting, instead they want to use their professional expertise to make an impact on the world. Investing in tools to take administrative tasks off your plate, or make them easier and less time consuming, opens the opportunity for you to work on higher value things like business development, design, or even having more time with family, outside the office.
Cloud-based accounting software with comprehensive financial reporting will help you build and maintain an accounting system that enables your firm to save time and prevent errors in your financial information. Further, the right software can help you set up repeatable and predictable processes and systems, allowing you to delegate more of the work, saving your time.
The best time and expense software for A/E and professional services industries includes features like automated billing and invoicing, project accounting, time tracking, expense tracking, inventory management, and automated reports. Read on to determine which features your firm needs, their benefits, and how to get started with accounting software.
What Accounting Software Features Do You Need at your architecture or engineering firm?
Automation
Online accounting solutions let you automate many of your accounting processes like bookkeeping, making it simple to organize receipts, reconcile a project’s financial data, and integrate with your bank account to send or receive payment. When your financial reporting is pulling data in real time, from all of your projects and company time sheets, rather than relying on manual entry, you can be sure the numbers are correct and up to date.
Automated reminders give your employees and clients a nudge when it’s time to submit a timecard, expense report, or payment for services — saving you from doing it yourself. Using an accounting platform like BQE CORE makes it easy to adopt repeat billing, which is perfect for when you frequently bill clients for a subscription or similar services regularly.
Accounting software also lets you create and send quotes and estimates to your clients and leads in minutes, and with professional-looking templates, there’s no need to start from scratch. Just customize the template with client and project specific information and it is ready to be sent through email, straight from your accounting software. There is no longer a need to do customized proposals in InDesign or other complicated and time consuming graphics software. By sending proposals electronically you save paper, printing and shipping costs, and know that your proposal arrives in your client's inbox immediately. Best of all, it enables your clients to make faster decisions, agree to your proposed scope of work and fees quicker, and we have seen payments come through 30% faster. This is a big win for your business's bottom line.
Categorization and Chart of Accounts
A digital accounting tool lets you organize and sort your financials in various ways and in great detail. The best part is: It’s done automatically with the option to change categorization yourself later.
Once you sync your company’s bank accounts and credit cards with your accounting software, expenses and payments will appear on the platform automatically. These can then be classified into the categories you’ve set in your chart of accounts (e.g., office expenses, marketing expenses, or travel expenses). The software will remember these settings and automatically categorize future expenses into the same categorization. Of course you still maintain control and can adjust these at a later time if needed, but if set up correctly this automation can save many hours of your time every month.
Categorized expenses will also appear in your reporting dashboard, so you can run financial reports in seconds that tell you how profitable a project or phase was, where expenses are higher than budgeted, show account balances, and predict future cash flow. Having this crucial data at your disposal in a centralized place, with up-to-date information, gives you and other project stakeholders the power to make informed decisions faster.
For additional insights, you can use your accounting software to categorize transactions by clients in specific industries and different client levels, as well as track clients across bank transactions and payment methods. This way you can see what clients or what projects are most profitable for your firm, and can adjust marketing and business development efforts to attract the right types of future projects. The goal is to find ways to make your business be more profitable and rewarding.
Data and Reporting
Accounting software gives you the in-depth financial reporting your organization needs and makes it instantly accessible. The right platform will help you collect, manage, report on, and analyze your revenue, expenses, and tax data, keeping you organized and compliant year-round.
With BQE CORE, instead of manually creating new reports every time you need to share cash flow updates at your leadership team or board meeting, or project expenses at a project management check-in, you can conveniently pull a polished report from your real-time dashboard. You can also set up the software to send you key reports on a regularly scheduled cadence - for example a weekly project budget report, or a monthly Profit & Loss Statement - automatically, so it shows up in your inbox or gets sent to a selected group of firm leaders. Auto-generated reports calculate KPIs faster than your team can and you can set up recurring reports to be emailed directly to the people who need to review specific figures. This empowers your team to make better decisions and be more effective when managing projects.
Some of the BQE CORE reports that business owners most commonly use include profit & loss statements, balance sheet, accounts receivable and accounts payable, trial balance, and general ledger. These reports help you understand the overall financial health of your business as well as if a particular project is more effective than another so that you can replicate that success in future projects.
24/7 Live Support
When you’re dealing with your business and need to make decisions on the fly, you need a platform that will keep up with you and deliver the information you need when you need it. Picking a platform with a responsive, readily available customer support team is crucial, especially if something goes wrong. If there’s a glitch with your accounting solution or your numbers aren’t making sense, you’ll want the provider to be able to give you an immediate response.
Within BQE CORE you have direct access to the BQE CORE Resource Center which provides a range of support options. There are articles covering best practices and tutorials of all the features of the app. There is a community forum to pose questions to other CORE users or give feedback to the development team. There are video tutorials to help you get the most out of the software. There is even an AI Chatbot that can help answer questions. Most importantly, our Technical Support team is available through phone or email so you can get help from a real human to solve any challenges you are facing. You can even call them directly from within the app to get immediate assistance.
Benefits of Time and Expense Software for A&E and Professional Services Firms
Capture all hours and dollars
21% of small business owners admit they don’t know enough about bookkeeping, which is why many would benefit from outsourcing their manual accounting to reliable accounting software. Your firm can’t afford to miss out on any revenue or fail to account for labor.
BQE CORE tracks everything in real time by connecting to your bank account and credit card provider, collecting all of your transactions, and categorizing them automatically. This saves you time each week in data entry and prevents any manual input errors.
The software doesn't stop at just tracking financial transactions. BQE CORE is a full firm management platform that also tracks time and expenses of your team, project consultants, and vendors. It can show you project fees and burn rates so you can project forward what you will be able to bill in the coming weeks or months. It also automatically can bring in billable hours into your invoices, so you don't miss any billable time and get paid for all the work you do for your clients.
When you use a powerful time and expense software for accountants with receipt capture, digital storage means your expenses are associated with the right projects, and you will never lose a receipt and not be able to expense it. These expenses attached to projects will also be easily added to each invoice you send. With the BQE CORE phone app, just take a picture of your receipt and the app turns it into a digital receipt, converting its details into an expense record, including sales tax and expense type.
Other BQE CORE features that ensure you track your firm’s money and employees’ time include overtime compliance, which makes it easy to automatically comply with hour/wage regulations, and budget forecasting, which helps track your spending and increase profits.
Organization
Every firm needs to shift from physical organization to digital tools and cloud based platforms that are more secure, backed up, and accessible from anywhere. Digital records are much more manageable as your company scales, hires, and adds more clients. On average, workers spend 50% of their time searching for information, taking up to 18 minutes to locate each document. Archiving, sorting through, reviewing, and sharing documents is quicker, more accurate, and more automatable when you keep cloud-based records. It’s also simpler to share with your collaborators and ensure they have access to what they need.
More than just storing information on the cloud, having an integrated platform that manages your firm operations from one place is the best way to run a firm. Combining project management tools, resource management, time and expense tracking, full accounting and bookkeeping services, and even features like a CRM and HR resources, an integrated platform will save you time, and save a significant amount of money compared to having separate tools for all of these items. It will also store your business information in a holistic database that can give you the most accurate reports and insights across all aspects of your business so you can make more informed decisions.
Tax compliant
Unlike doing your own tax preparation, with accounting software, you can always be sure it’s up to date on changes to tax laws and regulations. Filing taxes for your company is intimidating, especially if you haven’t kept 100% accurate records throughout the year.
With software that centralizes your financial history and prevents errors, you can ensure that your filing won’t include costly mistakes. For this alone, it’s worth making the move to digital bookkeeping and tax prep. You also save time on filing and have detailed, easily accessible records in case you’re audited.
Having accurate reports ready to go will also save cost for working with a tax accountant as they will have the reports they need to do their work faster.
Security
Accounting and financial software is encrypted to protect your company’s, employees’, and clients’ sensitive information and securely store your data. Centrally storing your firm’s accounting information is significantly safer than emailing documents back and forth between colleagues. With BQE CORE, you can schedule recurring reports automatically, so you offer your collaborators transparency but share data more securely than attaching an email file.
These digital solutions are designed to be extremely private and secure. In 88% of cases, human error is to blame for cloud breaches, not cloud providers.
With secured cloud storage and the option to turn on 2FA login security for all users of BQE CORE, you can be sure your data is secure.
BQE Firm Management and Accounting Solutions
Using accounting software for your firm syncs all of your financial records, automates detailed reporting, saves you time, and ensures data accuracy. With BQE CORE’s accounting software, firm owners can automate and add structure to processes for recording and categorizing transactions, reconciling accounts, and creating financial reports that help you increase profits and work more efficiently.
BQE CORE includes all of the accounting features you need and even more, including expense tracking, time tracking, project management tools, and automated billing. Handle all aspects of your business with flexibility when you work on the go using the CORE mobile app. Sign up for your free trial of BQE CORE or find more resources on our blog to learn more about how time and expense software can help your firm.
