The business database consists of crucial documents and other data that should be secured against theft and unauthorized access. Particularly, businesses should keep track of their financial transactions data securely to ensure nothing goes wrong. But, handling accounts data with the traditional processes and spreadsheets can be confusing and prone to errors. As the business expands, financial data grows and makes it more complicated for financial teams to handle. Growing data has made it imperative for companies to think beyond spreadsheet accounting and invest in advanced Accounts Payable (AP) software solutions.
From basic invoicing and billing to bank reconciliation, tax calculations, project management, and more, accounting software provides many features to optimize your business accounting processes. It enables you to generate real-time financial reports that help you analyze your business performance and enhance productivity.
Here we’ve discussed a few areas where accounting software can make a difference.
Invoicing and Billing
Enterprises should manage invoice and billing functions effectively to ensure proper cash flow into the organization. But, managing billing and other tasks with the traditional, paper-based processes is tedious and time-consuming. For instance, when you have recurring orders from the same client, it is not feasible to generate physical invoices for every purchase the client makes. It is also difficult to track invoices and remind clients about the pending invoices.
However, accounting software provides enhanced features that help you address most of these issues and make invoicing easy. With the software, you can create invoices for recurring orders made by clients and automatically remind customers about the pending invoices every time they place an order. The software solutions also allow you to include payment terms to the invoices to remind your customers about the T&C of payments.
A few advanced solutions come with mobile apps that will enable you to send payment reminders to the customers automatically. If you configure automated reminders based on billing dates and invoice due dates or expected payment dates, the software automatically sends push notifications to the customers. You can also track your unpaid invoices and remind your customers about pending payments, thereby preventing missing payment.
Online Payments
Once the invoices are submitted, businesses need to collect payments from the clients. The process of collecting payments for invoices can be overwhelming if you fail to offer them a proper system for making payments. The software that integrates with various online payment gateways offers your clients a secure means for making payments. All the payments made by your customers will be automatically recorded in payment gateways. Also, make sure that the payment gateway you choose offers various payment options to your customers, including credit cards, debit cards, online bank transfers, and more.
The multi-national companies must be ready to accept payments in all kinds of currencies. Make sure that the payment gateways you have integrated with your accounting system will be able to accept multiple currencies and allows you to accept payments in your client’s preferred currency. This removes discrepancies while receiving payments in foreign currencies.
Expense Tracking
The finance team should keep track of the business expenses to improve the productivity of the organization. But, keeping track of the paper-based expense reports submitted by employees and verifying them against the receipts manually can be tedious, and can delay the reimbursement process. This can impact employees’ productivity. The accounting software solutions allow employees to scan expense rceeipts through smartphones and tablets and store the data digitally until the report submission date. So, employees are not required to save paper-receipts until the report submission date. This removes the need to store paper receipts and the risk of losing them.
Some advanced solutions also capture crucial details from the scanned expense receipts with OCR technology, making it easier for account teams to verify invoices against POs. The AP software provides real-time analytics on all the expenses, giving you a clear picture of where your money is going.
Bank Reconciliation
Accounting software streamlines the bank reconciliation process. If you connect your bank accounts to an accounting solution, you can directly fetch transaction statements from bank feeds into your accounts. You can also automate the process of matching imported bank transactions by configuring your custom criteria and bank rules in your software to AP software. As the transaction matching process is automated, you need to just confirm them and reconcile your accounts easily. The accurate audit reports generated by the software ensures your business is audit-ready throughout the year.
Timesheets and Project Management
Most of the robust accounts payable solutions come with a timesheets module that helps you charge customers based on the effort and time you have to spend on a project. From project budgeting to logging time and invoicing customers, timesheets module allows you to manage all the complicated tasks involved in managing customer’s projects effectively. As the time spent on the projects will be recorded accurately, there is less scope for overbilling and underbilling your customers. These accurate timesheets help you evaluate the performance of your employees and enhance overall productivity.
Inventory management
Good inventory management is crucial for businesses to ensure sufficient stock is available to provide better customer service. Accounting solutions include an inventory module that helps to record product information, including Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) codes and product images, and allows them to create bundles and track the movement of items by serial or batch number. The software automatically generates reports to give you a clear idea of product stock levels. When a customer places an order, you can create sales orders with the accounting app and convert it into an invoice after the approval. You can also track stock levels and set reorders for your goods to receive automated emails about the stocks so that you don’t run out of stock.
Tax Compliance
Tax calculations are complicated to handle and take more time. An ideal AP solution is designed to adhere to the local tax rules and regulations and makes it easier for employees to work with taxes. You are allowed to configure tax regulations of multiple countries, which help you make your tax calculations accurately in less time. The software also gives you a better understanding of the complicated terms of tax regulations. It allows you to generate tax summary reports to stay organized and ready for tax season.
Report Generation
Every organization plans to grow in the long-run. So, you need to check your business’ growth periodically to ensure everything is going as planned. To generate reports, you need to consolidate data and manually enter formulas to create each report, which is tedious. Advanced accounting software solutions automatically generates reports, saving you time and effort involved in analyzing the data. The reports provided by the AP software help you understand your financial business growth and analyze growth patterns.
There are three crucial financial statements that an organization must analyze to ensure improvement in business’ financial growth – cash flow statement, balance sheet, and profit and loss statement. The in-built reporting features of the SutiAP software analyzes cash flow and helps you to stay on top of it. You can also generate balance sheets and profit and loss statements that help you understand the key financial aspects and make informed decisions to steer your business in the right direction. Besides these reports, the software compiles information on other key aspects of the business, including purchases, projects, inventory, sales, and more, which helps you generate instant reports to make quick decisions.
To Sum Up
Businesses should keep track of financial transactions and maintain accurate records at all times. For maintaining accurate reports, you need a system that eliminates the drawbacks involved in spreadsheets. With the traditional processes, it is challenging to handle invoicing and payments. Fortunately, advanced accounts payable software solutions help you manage your accounting processes effectively. It minimizes paperwork and manual effort involved in organizing paper documents and prevents data loss due to missing or damaged documents. When you are working with spreadsheets, it is quite difficult to log the accurate time you have spent on the client’s project. AP software automatically records hours spent on the client’s project in the timesheets and convert approved time entries into invoices. The software also helps to manage inventory, reconcile bank accounts, and stay tax compliant while reducing paperwork involved. You can also generate accurate reports, which allows you to draw conclusions and allows you to steer your business forward. You can also try depreciation software to calculate taxes on fixed assets to maximize tax benefits by accurately depreciating your fixed assets.
