How Accounting Software Cuts Costs And Saves Time
For business owners, time really is money. This being said, while you shouldn’t cut corners when it comes to running your business, you should take advantage of every cost-cutting and time-saving opportunity available. Therefore, when it comes to business accounting, you can save both money and time by investing in software that automates many of your processes. This, in turn, frees up you or your staff to work on higher-level projects, rather than focusing on the complicated, time-consuming (and yet, essential) paperwork often involved with accounting. Here are a few of the ways accounting software can help your business reach new levels of efficiency.
For business owners, time really is money. This being said, while you shouldn’t cut corners when it comes to running your business, you should take advantage of every cost-cutting and time-saving opportunity available.
Therefore, when it comes to business accounting, you can save both money and time by investing in software that automates many of your processes. This, in turn, frees up you or your staff to work on higher-level projects, rather than focusing on the complicated, time-consuming (and yet, essential) paperwork often involved with accounting.
Here are a few of the ways accounting software can help your business reach new levels of efficiency.
Automate Invoicing
A recent survey of 896 organizations found that the worst-performing organizations spend an average of $9 to invoice a customer. The best-performing? They spend $2 per invoice.
Many businesses, regardless of industry, create an enormous number of invoices. If you have a single accountant in charge of manually processing those invoices, you’re spending too much on getting paid—and using up that accountant’s valuable time.
With accounting software, you can easily create invoices and statements, and set them to send to customers automatically. If a customer lags on payment, you can schedule follow up reminders—with interest added, if that’s in your contract with customers.
For small and growing companies, invoicing and processing payments is an essential business operation. You need every dollar you can get. Automation software reduces the need to hire more employees while streamlining the invoicing and collections process, so no dollar goes overlooked or wasted.
Manage Margins and Budgets
Margins impact your company’s profitability—that’s why ensuring you have the best margins possible is crucial to business growth. When your accounting or sales staff are negotiating, monitoring, and adjusting the margins on your company’s various raw materials, it requires a significant personnel and financial investment. Not to mention, they may not ultimately score the best margins.
Modern accounting software can provide team members with real-time insights into your organization’s margin goals, keeping everybody in the loop. If your goals change, everyone will know instantly and can reach out to vendors to restart the negotiation process to improve margins.
Likewise, accounting software can play a vital role in budgeting. When your team negotiates better margins, your bottom line will increase, thus boosting your budget.
With accounting software, you can upload all your margin and budgeting data and let the system automatically adjust your budgetary needs on the fly. This way, you’ll have a clear picture of how your business is performing and understand where you can send more of your resources.
Measure KPIs
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are valuable metrics by which you measure success. You can use KPIs for individuals, teams, and your organization as a whole. They’re how you know that what you’re doing is working.
Accounting software helps measure KPIs—but it can also take some of the stress out of setting them as well. With powerful dashboards, accounting software tracks and visualizes your company’s finances and budgets. From there, you can sort by quarter, by year, by month, or any other time frame to determine ambitious yet attainable goals for the future.
Additionally, you can dig further into the company’s finances by exploring invoices, timesheets, expenses, and projects to help you understand what staffing and resources you’ll need to achieve your KPIs.
Once KPIs are set, your software can track organizational and individual goals in real-time, keeping you up-to-date on the status of different goals. This way, employees can spend less time logging their work and more time actually doing it.
Make Projections
Forecasting your business’s financial future is both crucial and difficult. This process can take a full team of accountants weeks to complete. But with accounting software, you can make accurate predictions in minutes. Of course, if you anticipate any processes or expenditures changing over the projected time period, your in-house team can adjust accordingly.
Accounting software uses budget numbers or recent actuals to identify trends based on historical data. You can then use those numbers to project forward. You can also create profit-and-loss forecasts or balance sheet forecasts, invoice forecasts, and forecast for business growth. Again, your in-house team will always be able to make any necessary adjustments or draw any actionable insights from the data.
With painless forecasting, you can help grow your client accounts as well as your own. Accounting software makes it easy to share your internal forecasting with clients so they can clearly see the benefits of working with you—that saves your salespeople’s time and cuts down the costs of retaining customers (or acquiring new ones).
When you’re running a growing business, every dollar counts. Implementing quality accounting software into your operations can help your business save significant time and money. From electronic invoicing to forecasting future growth, accounting software offers a variety of solutions to improve your bottom line without cutting any corners.
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