Do you know that 60% of small business owner feels that they are not competent enough to handle accounts?
Still, they do. Now, the burning question here is:
How appropriate is to handle accounts in the lack of appropriate accounting knowledge?
Well, it’s not at all acceptable as accounting is one of the most crucial operations of a business that can’t be missed out. A few errors at this front can crash down your entire business infrastructure. The most feared fact is that errors in accounts are hard to find out in the initial stage. When they start coming on the surface, it’s too late.
In the wake of technology, we have some of the advanced accounting management tools that make accounting everyone’s cup of tea. By offering you a user-friendly interface, ground-breaking automation, and impeccable accuracy, these tools have managed to keep accounting free from errors.
Accounting management tools are often a suite of software/tools/applications that allows an accounting professional to handle accounts in the best possible manner. They help you do hassle-free account payable and payroll handing, track financial transactions, initiate transactions, and do various other accounting operations with the least possible human intervention.
Some of the key examples of accounting management tools are payroll software, invoicing and billing software, tax management apps and software. At the time, you can find more than one accounting management assistance in single accounting software.
Key features of accounting management tools
In general, you get a bunch of features with your accounting management tools that streamline operations and help you improve your ROI. Some of the key features of accounting software can be explained as:
- Invoicing & Billing – This is the key feature of any accounting software and takes care of the invoice & billing generation process. Other than invoice generation, this feature also helps you add a custom note or billing clause in particular invoices.
- Notification & Alerts – With this facility, you will be notified about every single accounting activity. For example, you will get timely notifications about which payment is pending, when the taxes are due, and various other important things.
- Reporting & Analysis – Create even the most complex accounting reports automatically and analyse the various market trends using the AI-based reporting & analysis feature. This feature has proved to improve your sales figure one used diligently.
- General Ledger – Maintain all the accounts records and update the database.
- Estimation & Budgeting – Learn about your estimated operational cost and create a company budget with this feature. You can also make sales predictions and proceed accordingly.
- Payroll – Handle the operations related to employees’ salaries, funds, and, deductions without any errors and delays with this feature. It can make automatic reports on overtime and leave deductions and help you generate error-free payslips.
- GST & VAT – Some of the high-end tools help you calculate your GST and VAT and make you ready to meet all the legal compliance.
Once implemented right, these accounting management tools not only reduce your operational burden but also managed to pump-up your sales figures. Here is how it happens.
There is no compromise on accuracy
Accuracy and account go hand-in-hand. Accounting management without accuracy holds no significance. The more accurate would be your accounting operations, the better would be your chances of success. However, manual account management always comes with a certain level of inaccuracy. To avoid this inaccuracy, your accounting team has to do a lot of manual cross-checking.
But with accounting software, you can enjoy reliable accuracy without making any extra efforts. For example, it comes with auto data capturing facility. Some of the high-end accounting software can scan important things like barcode, invoice, and documents over a single click.
With such type of real-time scanning, odds of inaccurate entry are very bleak. Other than data entry, you can experience cut-above accuracy in other operations like forecasting, reporting, and analysis. When all these areas will have accurate operations in your business ecosystem, there would be no looking back for you.
This is not the bookkeeping where accuracy matters. Auditing and forecasting are the other two crucial areas where you can’t afford to have inaccurate information. Accuracy at these two fronts will decide the future of your firm.
Accounting management tools have managed to bring best-of-breed accuracy at this front as well. With them, your accounting professionals don’t have to go through file-by-file and spreadsheet-by-spreadsheet in auditing. Every calculation and analysis would be in its accurate form over a single click.
Better cost management
Running a business is not always making good sales. One has to make sure that the operational cost is also on the lower side and you are getting better ROI. If you neglect this part then you are likely to decline despite having better sales.
With AI-driven accountings tools like accounting software, you can operate with less human manpower as it comes with ground-breaking automation. Starting from bookkeeping to report generation, various things can be done automatically.
Some of the advanced accounting tools come with a tax handling facility as well. So, you don’t have to hire designated professionals for various accounting tasks. A lot can be handled on its own.
Moving forward, cloud-based accounting tools demand very less set-up and can reduce labor cost by 50%, says Forbes. In cloud-based accounting tools, a small business can enjoy enterprise-level services without making a big investment as the components are deployed and managed by the service provider.
Cloud computing has managed to increase revenue-per-year growth by 15% in all business ecosystem. It’s because the cloud-based accounting tools can be managed from anywhere and everywhere. It allows you to keep on working even if you are out of your workspace. You can handle various key operations simultaneously.
Improved productivity
We already mentioned that one of the key traits of accounting management tools is automation. This automation is a blessing in disguise for accounting professionals. We all know that accounting is a very time consuming and tedious work profile.
Accounting professionals have to go on multiple invoicing, billing generations, calculations processes throughout the day. It makes accounting nothing but drudgery. When this happens, innovation and productivity reduce automatically.
When menial operations like invoicing, bill processing, and reporting are automated, your accounting professionals are relieved big time from doing repetitive tasks. They have an opportunity to focus on something which is more important like making accounting and sales strategies. They utilize the work hours in the best possible manner.
Also, the impeccable automation allows your accounting professionals to perform more tasks in less time. They can do long and tedious calculations in a fraction of a second and create lengthy reports in the blink of any eye.
Make data-driven decisions
Your accounting professionals have to make various kinds of decisions like when you should initiate a new investment, where you should cut down the expenses, and so on. These decisions pave the path of your future and help you grow at a constant rate.
If you want your every accounting decision should be proved right and help you in moving forward, you must make data-driven decisions.
By using accounting management tools, you can collect best-of-breed business data and include it in your decisions.
Some of the tools like the payroll software come with powerful integrations. These integrations allow you to get information related to various departments in no time. For example, you can collect customer information from CRM software while sales history can be gathered by accounting & sales software.
To collect different kinds of information, you need not switch between various platforms. This makes a huge difference when it comes to data integrity and reliability. It also ensures that when you are making business-related decisions, no business aspects get overlooked.
Never miss important stuff
When it comes to accounting, there is a lot to handle. You have to pay the taxes on time, check for pending payments, update the employee payment payroll detail, and so on. Missing out any single thing in accounting can create goof-ups that can go out of your hands in no time.
Sometime, you may have to pay a huge cost for this. But, this is not going to happen if you have accounting management tools. They will keep you notified about every single detail.
Whether it’s a pending payment or due tax payment, you will be notified before time. You can set the alerts based upon your requirements. You can also set a notification for vendors and customers and remind them about a pending payment. This way you can be sure that nothing goes missing.
Data safety of highest grade
No business can afford to lose any business data. And if the data is accounting related then you must call for Z-level security for it.
Manual bookkeeping always remains defenceless. Any natural calamity or accident on-site can damage it once and for all. If it happens with you then consider your business dead.
Using accounting management tools, you digitize all your crucial business data. It saves the data on cloud space where it stays forever. No natural calamity to an on-site accident can damage it. However, you should never ignore the danger of data theft.
To avoid this, make sure you are using the high-end security encryption for your software. This prevents the occurrence of any cyber fraud and protects your accounting data by all means.
To improve data safety further, some of the advanced accounting management tools offer you a role-based facility. With this facility, you can decide which data you should have access to. You can also make the database password protected. In this way, you can avoid unnecessary access to your data and cut down the chances of data theft or mishandling.
Gist of all
Handling accounts is a tough job at every front. You can’t afford a mistake/delay/error while handling accounts. While the occurrence of such events is imperative in manual account management, AI-driven accounting software brings great relief.
Reducing the human intervention up to a great extent, it keeps errors/delays at bay from your accounting operations. Along with this, you can set your accounting professionals from the burden of menial workload and allow them to invest work hours in something important. You can witness a sheer hike in revenue and productivity after bringing accounting tools into action.
