It’s difficult to run a business, no matter how experienced you are with it. After all, it comes with many aspects you need to take into consideration to ensure it continues thriving. And one such aspect is automating accounting processes that can help you save time and money. Wondering how this is achieved? Keep on reading to find out.
How Automating Your Accounting Processes Can Save You Time and Money: 14 Tasks You Can Automate
1. Bookkeeping
The first main area where accounting automation will help you is bookkeeping. The right software will allow you to automate tasks like recording transactions, creating financial statements, and reconciling accounts. All of which can free up a lot of your time so that you can focus on other important tasks.
2. Invoicing and Billing
Invoicing and billing are other key areas you don’t have to worry about anymore because they’ll be efficiently automated. You’ll be able to quickly and easily create and send invoices, as well as track overdue bills and payments.
You can also use invoice capture apps to instantly convert all incoming invoices to electronic processing data rather than spend a lot of your time and money on processing them manually.
Another great strategy is to use automated invoice processing software that can streamline your invoice approval process and help you track all the invoices.
3. Tax Preparation
Accountants usually prepare income taxes for businesses and individuals, which can be time-consuming.
But automating the accounting processes means that you’ll be able to automate the tax preparation process as well.
This includes gathering data, printing returns, and calculating figures, allowing you to save your valuable time and spend it on something else.
4. Regulatory Compliance
Accountants must keep up with all the latest changes to stay compliant with government regulations. But this can be complex and may take a lot of time.
Fortunately, automating accounting processes means you’ll be able to automate a process of tracking all the regulatory changes while ensuring that your records are up to date. And the bonus is all the extra time you’ll get as a result.
5. Client Management
Business owners usually keep track of the contact information of their clients and billing history so they can provide them with the best possible service.
But this process can take time and may even feel like an unpleasant chore. So to avoid this task, you can use accounting automation software that can handle it for you, allowing you to improve your service while increasing client satisfaction.
6. Employee Management
Employee management is just as important as client management. After all, both are connected to the success of your business. So it’s crucial to keep track of wages paid, hours worked, and deductions taken.
But all these things can take a lot of your time and energy. So the best way to prevent this is to use the automation tool that can help you get these done quickly and easily.
7. Accounts Payable and Account Receivable
You can automate tasks like creating invoices, issuing payments, and tracking payments to make things much easier for you. You’ll also be able to pay bills more easily and quickly.
8. Gathering Business Intelligence
Gathering valuable data plays an important role in the growth of your business. And it’s the job of an accountant to take care of this crucial task. But gathering such valuable business intelligence can take many hours of hard work.
So to save time, you can automate the data-gathering process, allowing you to retrieve valuable data from invoices, financial statements, as well as other documents.
9. Backup and Recovery
Accidents can happen, and in the case of a disaster, you may lose all your gathered data and important documents.
But automating accounting processes allows you to avoid this by providing you with a backup and recovery option. This will ensure your data will be safe and secure no matter what happens.
10. Document Management
Managing documents can be difficult, especially if it’s a large number of them. But you can save a lot of your time and energy by automating the document management process.
This will help you find and track documents more quickly and easily, allowing you to give your attention to other tasks that can’t be automated.
11. Financial Reporting
Financial reporting is one of the key aspects of accounting. But compiling financial reports often takes a lot of time and there may be errors involved as well. But automating the financial report creation will help you compile reports faster and more easily, saving you both money and time.
12. Training
If you decide to hire accountants, you may need to train them to make sure they’ll perform at their best. But this can cost a lot of time and money; valuable resources that are scarce for a business.
But automating accounting processes means you don’t have to worry about this anymore because all the important tasks will be automatically handled by software.
All you need to do is to teach the employees how to use it and that’s all the training they’ll need.
13. Budget Management
Automating accounting processes help you more efficiently manage and control your budget. It’s not uncommon to feel “budget stuck”, waiting on the data in order to decide if the purchase is feasible.
But this may cause you to waste time,
which is something you should avoid. Fortunately, automation helps you with budget control and management by keeping your data up-to-date.
For instance, traditional accounting can make you waste a lot of time while waiting on reports to decide if you’ll be able to afford purchasing that newly needed item.
But accounting automation cuts time down, particularly when it is aligned with payment processing. Such a change can give you immediate insight into your purchasing decisions.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, there are many ways you can save time and money by automating accounting processes. Using the automation software will allow you to focus on other tasks that need your time and attention while it’ll be handling various tasks simultaneously.
