Proper accounting is crucial for the growth of any business. Not only does it help ensure statutory compliance by enabling you to file your taxes accurately and timely, but it also provides insights into your company’s financial health and identifies growth opportunities. However, accounting is often full of repetitive and manual tasks, from financial statement generation and invoice approvals to accounts payable journal entries. This can lead to costly delays and inaccuracies and even takes up your team’s valuable time.
Fortunately, there are many accounting solutions out there that can help automate most of these tasks, saving your team plenty of time and effort while also increasing efficiency and accuracy. The financial experts at Pherrus Financial can help you choose and implement the right accounting software and offer training to your team to make automation seamless. Here are a few important yet tedious and time-consuming tasks that you should consider automating for enhanced productivity and efficiency:
1. Invoicing
Invoicing and billing your customers is how your company gets the much-needed revenue to fuel its operations. However, creating and sending invoices manually can be time-consuming and could increase the risk of errors and delays. Paper invoices are more likely to get lost or misplaced. Besides that, lengthy approval times can lead to late payments, resulting in cash flow issues.
However, with accounting software, you can automate manual invoicing tasks, helping expedite the entire process and get paid faster. Most accounting solutions come with an automated invoicing feature that automatically converts quotes into invoices and sends them electronically to the respective customers. You can also send invoice reminders to clients and even save payment details.
2. Accounts Payable
Ensuring your company’s bills and invoices are paid accurately and on time is one of the core duties of any finance team. However, accounts payable activities can be tedious and time-consuming since they involve many steps, including verifying received invoices, then submitting the invoices to the ideal person for approval, and once approved, another person processes the payment.
Automating your accounts payable can help streamline and speed up the process by automatically capturing invoice details, notifying the right persons in every step to perform their part as needed, and finally recording the payment details in a ledger. This helps eliminate the hassle of approving and paying invoices manually and reduces the risk of bottlenecks and delays. Making timely and accurate payments helps build good relationships with suppliers and saves lots of money through early payment discounts and reduced staffing resources.
3. Tax Reporting and Compliance
Filing your business taxes can be stressful and laborious since it involves a lot of paperwork and dealing with complex tax rules and regulations. When done manually, this can lead to late, missed, or even wrong filing of taxes, resulting in hefty penalties and IRS audits. Automated accounting can help take care of all your tax matters to ensure compliance. Using accounting software, you can quickly and accurately generate financial reports that you need to file your taxes. You can also quickly and easily calculate tax obligations for all your transactions. This can help save your team lots of time when filing taxes and help you better understand your tax obligations to ensure compliance.
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Automating the tasks mentioned above can help streamline your accounting processes, save your team valuable time, and maximize productivity. On the other hand, you may also consider hiring an experienced and reliable accountant to handle your accounting tasks and put a suitable system in place to automate routine and mundane financial activities. This can help keep your books up-to-date, ensuring timely and correct filing of taxes, better resource utilization, and better decision making to move your business forward.
