Running a business keeps entrepreneurs on their toes constantly as they battle various work pressures. A recently conducted survey on SME owners revealed that over 40% of the owners haven’t taken a vacation since commencing their business, while another 40% reported they rarely spend quality time with their family and friends. While increasing the number of hours in a day to enjoy leisure time isn’t a viable option, reducing the amount of precious hours spent on certain tasks is certainly doable; and accounting just happens to be one of them!
Understanding the fact that it is almost impossible for business owners to stay on top of things at all times, we’ve put together a list of the simple things you can do with respect to accounting, that will not just save you ample time, but will also help you ease some pressure in the process.
Use Accounting Softwares
There are various softwares that exist to ease the tasks of employers, and luckily enough, accounting softwares have been tried and tested with proven results. These time saving tools import data, make calculations, and keep a tab on all the incoming and outgoing finances. Additionally, it also lets employers add tasks and review deadlines, thus saving ample time and effort by utilizing the tools’ multitasking features. Apart from making use of specific account softwares, one can also choose from various automation apps in order to generate invoice and expense reports. This will not just save you ample data entry time, but will also give you a more efficient report without ever letting any invoice get lost in the shuffle!
Hire a Bookkeeper/Accountant
While softwares and automations help ease the process, it is only a bookkeeper or an accountant that take the accounting pressure off your shoulders. Hire an accountant to ease out payroll tasks and give you the maximum tax breaks. However, hiring a bookkeeper or an accountant in-house can be expensive for a small-time business owner. In such cases, looking for options such as a virtual assistant, or, moving the task overseas can be considered. To curb the expenses even further, you can opt for outsourcing accounting services to India or China, where agencies provide you with virtual accounting assistants at less than half the usual costs. So rather than making the grave mistake of not consulting an accounting expert, explore options that’ll fair cheaper in your budget.
Review Reports and Clean the Books
When business owners take up the task of handling accounts by themselves, the end result is often a messy logbook that fail to fill in the missing gaps. Since entrepreneurs are no pro-accountants and have a zillion other tasks to tend to, the easiest way to reduce stress is by maintaining an up-to-date clean record. Setting aside a fixed time each week is the best way to ensure you maintain a complete and accurate report. On the other hand, your one-stop solution yet again is to hire an accountant or choose outsourcing accounting services in India, China, or any other Asian country that focuses on providing outsourced services. If you do hire an accountant, always make sure that you review the financial reports produced by the accountant on a monthly basis. Give a thorough check on the cash flow statements and cross-check the same with the balance sheet, check the income statement of each department, the budget, and the inventory listing, among other elements.
Maintain Separate Accounts
Separating your personal and business accounts, credit cards, and finances is of essence to ensure that you do not waste unnecessary time segregating the two. By doing so, you’ll not just maintain a cleaner logbook, but will also smoothen out the entire process of accounting, thus saving you ample time and money (that you would otherwise be spending for your accountant’s extra time)!
Avoid Cash Transactions and Organize Receipts
Using cash to make any business payment results in making the entire process of accounting far more complicated. This not only requires either you or your accountant to manually go through every transaction made from the account, but also gives way to human errors which could have otherwise been easily avoided. Thus, always ensure that every business transaction is made through dedicated business accounts or cards; one that can be easily cross-checked at any given point of time. Once payments are made, keep a record of all the receipts to avoid the hassle of having to go through your account transactions in the last minute.
To conclude, accounting is the core part of any business. The easiest way to tackle accounting troubles is by implementing a combination of software tools and accounting expertise. Maintaining a clean record each month will ensure that you have no enormous mountain to climb at the end of the year.
