How to spend less time working on your business finances

Keeping track of your company’s accounts can become extremely time consuming. It starts off with a few invoices here, a couple of supplier payments there, but as your organization grows things can become rather complicated, and quickly.

Small businesses don’t exactly have the working capital to hire an accountant outright, while accountancy firms can be costly.

As a result, you’ll be the only person responsible for managing the business finances. In this article, we’ll explorea number of ways you can save time when managing the books.

Generate invoices through your accountancy software

If you aren’t using accountancy software to make your life easier, then you need to do so. Otherwise, if you are, we highly recommend you use the integrated invoicing feature. By doing so, you can set-up customer profiles where their details such as address, customer number, general rates of services etc. are saved, instead of manually filling them in each time. You’ll soon realize how much time you’re saving.

It may at one point have taken you several minutes to generate an invoice – with automatic invoicing you’ll shave this time in half. This might not sound much at first, but as your business grows, you’ll be glad of the time saved.

Use software to help with payments

There are a number of ways you can improve the efficiency of making payroll at the end of the month. You can set-up automatic payments through your business banking software, which will fire salaries out at a set time at the end of the month.

If you’re looking for an efficient way to generate pay-stubs, then we recommend you usea paystub generator. This way, you can enter your employee’s payment details and receive your paystubs almost instantly.

You can also think about streamlining your suppliers’ payments. Rather than paying invoices as and when they come in, think about when you have time in your calendar to devote to paying your invoices. Whether you choose to do this weekly or fortnightly, by delegating this time specifically to making payments you can speed up the process and complete all your out standing supplier payments in one go, quickly and efficiently – and you will reduce the risk of missing deadlines for payments.

Take advantage of bank feeds

Struggling to find the time to sync your transactions with your accounting software? Finding the process somewhat dull? Bank feeds will automatically sync transactions with the software you use, which means you don’t have to manually record every payment and receipt.

It also allows you to set-up automatic recognition for any regular payments you make. This includes your office lease, internet and phone bills, insurance etc.

Finally, if your client sends a payment that matches an invoice already in the system, it will suggest a connection between the two and ask you to verify. All this will certainly save you a lot of time in the long-run.

Accounting can be a time-consuming task, but with software solutions out there to make your life easier, you might be able to hold off on any accountancy fees for a while. Take advantage of the above today and start saving time and money.