It is pivotal for every type of business to ensure that all business-related transactions are up-to-date and recorded as accurate. The financial success of many organizations depends on how their accountants handle the bookkeeping activity. If companies organize their finances; both on the revenue and payments sides, they can’t be deprived of high profits.
According to one of the recent studies, 40% of the business owners of small & medium enterprises take the bookkeeping and tax filing activity to be monotonous. Bookkeeping is considered as a never-ending and a time-consuming job that always appears in the task to-do list of many business owners. Since the bookkeeping deals with money matters, business owners should therefore exercise greater caution when dealing with confidential financial information.
To spend less time on bookkeeping and more on other business functions, business owners need to do the following:
1) What Bookkeepers Encourage You to do?
A financial transaction carried out via a business credit or debit card has two advantages. The transaction will be immediately displayed on a bank statement, and then it will allow business owners to quickly record the transaction in their accounting software. It is, therefore, encouraged to use credit and debit cards to make business payments, as it is a much more efficient way of recording business expenses than cash or checks.
2) What Bookkeepers Discourage You to do?
It is widely accepted worldwide that reducing the use of cash and checks in the execution of business transactions can bring peace of mind to many business owners. A receipt is the only way to record a cash transaction and there is no guarantee when a check will be deposited or cashed out. If receipts are scattered and checks remain unpresented or uncleared, they may be overlooked or forgotten to record any such transactions during the bookkeeping activity. Therefore, it is recommended to discourage cash and check related transactions as much as possible.
In doing so, business owners can spend less time on bookkeeping and more time on other business functions.
3) Software Integration with Bank Statements
In today's business world, we have many accounting software applications that offer software integration with the company's checking and credit card accounts. This will allow business owners to import transactions into their software directly from bank feeds. The bank feeds service has reduced so much time on bookkeeping activity and simplified the bank reconciliation process. Integrating bank statements with accounting software is one of the remarkable developments that has put less pressure on business owners to cater to huge volume of business transactions.
4) Automatic Bill Payment Service
Instead of writing payment checks, printing them via accounting software, business owners do have the option of issuing standing orders to the banker for an automatic bill payment service. Most banks offer this automatic bill payment service, but if a bank does not offer this service, we may still be able to connect our business to Bill.com. Bill.com works with all banks and has an excellent workflow approval process that can send paper checks & electronic transactions, also integrates directly with QuickBooks Online.
5) Separate Business Spending from Personal Payments
All business owners need to understand what pain it brings to bookkeepers if business and personal transactions are being carried out from the same bank account. Bookkeeping tasks may get prolonged if they are not taken into account that all payments are made from the same bank account.
6) Use Industry Best Software
For bookkeeping, always use accounting software that can deliver both financial intelligence and greater efficiency. QuickBooks can relieve many business owners as the software provides a powerful and complete bookkeeping solution that can finish a huge volume of transactions in less time with greater efficiency.
7) Knowledge of Important Accounting Functions
The bookkeepers must know the following accounting functions in order to perform the error-free accounting function:
- General Journal Entries
- Accounts Payable
- Accounts Receivable
- Payroll Processing
- Tax Calculations and Filings
- Monthly Reconciliations
Understanding these functions will help bookkeepers to accelerate their bookkeeping pace and also reduce the processing time of complex accounting entries.
Conclusion
The more business owners can leverage technology to automate administrative tasks, the more they will be able to increase the profitability of their business. Cloud technology is changing the way bookkeeping is done. The processes and tasks that used to take hours to complete, now take a few minutes. There are only a few real ways to spend less time on bookkeeping and they all depend on the volume and complexity of the transactions.
Accurate bookkeeping is very important to ensure that all transaction records are correct and to make future business decisions. Most business owners spend a lot of time on bookkeeping and can lose many business opportunities because they don’t have time to envisage what their competitors are doing.
If you are spending too much time looking into all the above things and you are unable to accelerate the pace of your company’s bookkeeping, then please contact us at GTA Accounting. There will come a point when you realize that outsourcing the bookkeeping activity will make more sense and you can then focus on more valuable activities.