Accounting Software – How It Has Become The Need Of The Hour
Today’s business environment is defined by many successful startups and the remote working environment that emerged due to the ongoing pandemic.
In this evolved corporate landscape, businesses of all denominations could derive tremendous use from app-based accounting software.
If you’re wondering whether it is worth investing in streamlining your business in today’s admittedly uncertain environment, you are asking the right question. Any investments – or changes – being implemented at this point must provide some immediate cost benefit to the business, besides offering long-term benefits. Additionally, the new solution must be easy to deploy; it must simplify and secure the business’s work.
Accounting software meets all of these criteria – or at least it should if you choose correctly. The best accounting software must bring to the table a relevant bundle of benefits in the current context.
Here are some reasons why your business could probably perform better with accounting software – this also doubles up as a checklist of must-haves that you could use when zeroing in on a solution.
9 reasons why businesses need accounting software in 2021
Cost control
What do a startup with limited funding, a startup with excellent funding (where private equity investors need to be impressed), and a well-established brand have in common?
All three businesses typically need to control costs. Overall, pandemic or not, companies can improve their bottom line with ease by lowering costs where their product quality will not suffer.
Using accounting software does away with the need for expensive external consultants. For startups, accounting software can help keep teams lean and functional.
Moreover, using accounting software that automates record-keeping allows business owners and accounting departments to track expenditure and – if need be – curtail unnecessary capital outgo.
Financial control
Especially with employees scattered all over the United Kingdom – and beyond, retaining financial control over all expenditure could become tedious in some cases. Add to that the need to keep track of cash flow into the company, not to mention payables and billables. How does a business owner maintain control?
The recipe to retain control in today’s business environment is to ensure that you can access your company’s financial data anytime, anywhere, and independently.
Moreover, you should be able to access all the data in a single place. A business owner can only devote a portion of his or her day to checking company finances – after all, he or she also needs to run the business.
At a glance reports
Accounting software providers automatically sort your company’s financial data by tax, supplier, and region to give you a real-time, anytime-anywhere view of your business finances.
Additionally, you can have your data presented in various formats – graphs, tables, charts, whatever is easiest for the reader to understand. This can be impressive and add a professional touch, especially when forwarding financial data to external investors.
Being a digital platform, it is easy to observe various areas of spending using filters.
Time saved
Your employees most likely spend a lot of time manually entering various office expenses that either need to be reimbursed or else recorded.
What if they could scan invoices, bills, and payment slips in a single click, and extract data from these? They might have incremental time to devote to their core business competencies and duties. Also – given that data entry isn’t very often a favourite on most employees’ task lists – you might also end up with happier, and therefore more motivated, employees.
Accuracy
Data entry is not only time-consuming, but because it is monotonous, it is also more prone to human error. Accounting software can do away with entry errors and communication errors. Options like Dext Accounting Software offer solutions that can also do away with duplication of entries or duplication of document uploads and all the confusion that arises with duplicates.
Synchronisation
You can often sync existing accounting software with new app-based accounting software solutions.
Additionally, some accounting software solutions can go the extra mile – for example, for users of Dext accounting software, if your business collaborates with Amazon for retail and distribution of products, this can be synchronised so that all your order transactions are automatically uploaded and processed.
Easy invoicing
You can also get ready, at-a-click sales invoices from your accounting software app. This ensures accuracy, a professional feel to your invoicing, and consistency in the appearance of the invoice.
Security
Especially when compared to physical ledgers and paper-based accounting, accounting software is far more secure. Access can be granted exclusively to relevant stakeholders.
Moreover, all data is secured by firewalls to prevent any third party from accessing sensitive financial information.
Digital accounting in a digital world
Appearances are everything today – startup or industry veteran companies across the board want to look contemporary and Avante Garde. As a result, everything from office doors to employee attendance is being automated and digitised. For internal customers (employees) and external customers, a company comes across as far more sophisticated and polished when it uses accounting software.
Moreover, the running of the business comes together more seamlessly when everything goes digital.
Seamless handovers
Across sectors and occupations, people move on from one job to another to pursue growth, to follow their dreams (or spouses to other locations), and for various other reasons. While this is easily managed for most departments, an accountant’s handover might be tricky – accounting software, by being intuitive, consistent, and self-explanatory, can enable smooth handovers and transition.
Accounting software – particularly the kind that can be accessed from a smartphone – is the need of the hour because it centralizes a company’s finances when employees are scattered. Moreover, it gives the company’s stakeholders secure and convenient access to up-to-date, accurate, and effectively presented financial data.