How Can You Simplify Your Small Business Accounting Process?

Every company needs a decent plan to handle its finances. You must be able to make the best business decisions for the company to succeed, but you can’t do that without making sure you have a healthy cash flow and accurate financial data.

Even with an experienced accountant, the accounting process can be hectic and complicated to handle. In this article, we will take a look at a few points that can simplify the process to make it easier for you.

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Why Is It Important To Have An Accountant?

Your business cannot operate well without someone to handle the finances of your company; you can’t make every statement or figure out all your expenses and cash flow all alone. That’s why you need a highly trained and reliable accountant to work for you. You need someone to look at the bigger picture—someone that can monitor and record every transaction.

It’s essential to have this person verify and analyze your financial data; prepare report records, income statements, balance sheets; perform audits; revise your tax submission and returns, and many more. It’s the person you listen to attentively whenever he/she decides on whether you should lower your expenditure or not. Managing your cash flow is the priority.

Simplifying The Procedures With Templates

If you want to increase productivity and make everything run entirely and smoothly, then you need to make some changes in your transaction, billing, and reporting methods. For this purpose, you could use these helpful downloads that are found online to give you simple and effective templates of how the documentation for these processes should be, and you get various opportunities to customize and automate different invoices and form statements. Also, they give owners, and their senior accountants access to their financial data wherever they are, and this saves time and effort tremendously.

Expense Receipt Tracking Process

It’s imperative that you stay consistent with tracking and sorting your expense receipts, and it can be done quickly and smoothly thanks to technology. You have the power to take pictures of all your receipts and have them recorded automatically. It lowers the chances of misplacing any of the receipts, so using digital and straightforward methods of storage can mean a lot to the process, and you won’t fall behind.

Also, you shouldn’t discard any of your donation or contribution receipts; they are 100% tax-deductible and can be used to get your claims. But remember to keep them in a different category and not mixed with your other expenses—it makes things much easier to handle and monitor for your accountant, and lowers the risk of mistakes.

Utilizing Software Programs

Technology makes things run quicker and more correctly. There is no room for error when it comes to money and finances, so investing in accounting software can make a massive difference in productivity, for example from this list of business software.

These programs are encrypted and automated, and they have different protection systems to scan any potential drawbacks or problems. They help keep your data secured safely in a remote server that can only be accessed by personnel with proper clearance, and they make things run smoothly with automated calculations and reports.

Cut Out Any Unnecessary Expenses

A professional who manages your cash flow and monitors your finances would know how to differentiate between necessary and redundant expenses—tracking everything from labor costs to benefits, petty cash, overtime, and much more. When everything is clear and mentioned in reports, you might find some things that are causing your business to overspend; it’s a drawback that every company should look out for. In the future, it might accumulate to significant figures and lead to different financial problems.

Keep Your Finances Separate

Many business owners forget the fact that they have both personal and business expenses, and that can lead to having more money on the reports that aren’t supposed to be there. Try not to mix things together, like using your business credit card for personal purposes; it’s such a hassle for the person in charge of your financial reports. So, if you want to know the accurate financial state of your business, then you should have separate bank accounts and never mix business with pleasure.

Figure Out Your Payroll Plan

This is another aspect of your finances that can complicate things if it’s not done correctly; you need to have a proper system that manages the process. Depending on how many employees you have, you have two options regarding their payroll.

The first method is to hire someone specifically to calculate everything for you and deposit everything to the staff under your employment; this makes your accountant’s life a lot easier because they already have a lot on their plate.

The second method you could go for is to invest in payroll software that can automate everything for you, and the accountant can oversee the process with ease. Whichever method you choose, you will reduce any possible setbacks in your accounting process.

Monthly P&L Statements

Most small businesses pay attention to their profit and loss metrics quarterly, and that’s not the right way at all if you want to keep things simple. In some cases, things can drag, and reports can be somewhat impossible. Your company might experience dips in sales for one month while having surges of profits or seasonal sales during another.

That’s why it’s crucial to prepare the P&L statements monthly to get an accurate result of what really happened with your sales; quarterly does not give a valid statement showing what went wrong and what can be fixed. So, if you want to have a better overview of your business’s health, you should monitor your revenue, operating income and expenses, net profits, gross margins, and total costs of goods sold every month.

There is a solution for everything; if you have difficulty in keeping up with your financial data and it’s too much for your accountant, then you should follow some of these steps to make it easier and smoother for everyone.  Keeping accurate financial statements and reports can mean a lot to your business; it helps you negate any possible obstacles in the future, so the overall growth of your business actually depends on it.

If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.

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