Accounting for All Small Businesses

Accounting is a crucial task for every business, but it can quickly become complex and frustrating. Many small business owners get overwhelmed trying to manage their finances properly on top of handling day-to-day operations and growth initiatives.

Luckily, there are several easy ways to simplify your accounting so it doesn’t hold your business back. This 4-step guide outlines key strategies leveraging technology, organization methods, and expert help to streamline processes. With these accounting hacks, you’ll save hours of time and headaches. Even better, you’ll free up mental bandwidth to focus on your customers and core offerings.

Let’s explore these 4 accounting simplification tips:

Automate Everything Possible with Software

For most entrepreneurs, accounting involves lots of manual work in spreadsheets to track income, expenses, profit and loss statements, taxes, and more. This tedious data entry work eats up hours without providing much business insight.

The easier approach is to use a cloud-based accounting solution like QuickBooks Online or Xero. These platforms connect directly to your business bank accounts and automatically import your latest transactions without any copying and pasting.

The software apps provide a centralized dashboard to see your real-time cash flow, income sources, expense categories, account reconciliations, and key financial statements. This gives you an accurate high-level view of your business’s financial health whenever you need it.

Advanced accounting software programs also help automate critical back-office tasks like:

• Recurring invoicing and late payment reminders
• Payroll tax payments and form filings
• Digital receipt capture and reporting
• Inventory management
• Budgeting and forecasting to plan smarter

The right solution grows alongside your evolving needs too. For example, QuickBooks offers customizable versions tailored for solopreneneurs, small teams, ecommerce stores, professional services firms, and complex mid-market companies.

In short, accounting software eliminates most manual processes so you can focus on big picture strategy and serving customers.

Go Mobile with Expense Tracking

For small business owners and solopreneurs, tracking various expenses can be a real pain. From mileage logs to conference trips to supply runs, important paper receipts are easily misplaced and expense reports fall by the wayside.

Luckily, mobile expense tracker apps solve this problem by digitizing everything instantly from your phone’s camera. Platforms like Expensify let you photograph receipts right when you receive them and compile all expenses into reports for accounting and taxes.

Beyond snapping photos, you can also:

• Log expense details like amount, category, location, etc
• Sync credit card expenses automatically
• Create shareable reports
• Receive payments and reimbursements
• Integrate expense data with accounting systems
• Manage bills and invoices from one place

With a streamlined mobile expense system, you’ll stay organized for tax season. Even better, you’ll have up-to-date visibility into exactly where your money is going so you can make strategic spending decisions.

Declutter Your Office by Going Paperless

Between receipts, invoices, contracts, and financial statements, accounting generates massive amounts of sensitive paperwork. Piles of physical documents clutter your workspace, hide important details, and complicate audits and tax prep.

Transitioning to digital-only processes alleviates this while keeping data secure and accessible. The first step is choosing reliable scanning hardware and software. Compact mobile scanners like the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX100 provide portable convenience for small businesses. Meanwhile, more powerful desktop scanners from vendors like Epson offer speed and higher duty cycles.

Scanner apps like Adobe Scan, Microsoft Office Lens, and Evernote Scannable enable easy digitization from iOS and Android devices. Most connect directly to cloud storage platforms like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and accounting tools like QuickBooks to organize scans.

Sophisticated options even perform optical character recognition (OCR) to extract text data or expense amounts automatically from scans to eliminate manual data entry.

Once your system is set up, route every document you touch to the digital realm:

• Client contracts → Cloud storage
• Receipts → Expense software
• Invoices → Accounting system
• Tax documents → Online filing accounts
• Pay stubs → Payroll system

A paperless environment cuts out storage costs and physical hassles while keeping data more secure and accessible for your team.

Know When to Call In an Expert

Here’s the reality – you can’t be an accounting expert running complex reports and reconciliations while simultaneously growing your business. Outsourcing specialized finance tasks allows you to focus on your true core competencies.

Most small businesses benefit from partnering with experienced bookkeepers or CPAs on a regular or project basis. These experts handle critical functions like:

• Complex account reconciliations
• Fixed asset depreciations
• Tax strategy optimization
• Payroll processing
• Monthly financial statements
• Complex regulatory filings

You provide the raw data from your accounting system and experts handle the heavy number crunching. This lifts massive burdens while granting you on-demand access to strategic finance advice.

For greatest efficiency, define which baseline tasks your team handles internally versus outsourcing. Tools like QuickBase make it easy to seamlessly collaborate with external partners.

Conclusion

There’s no need to let accounting complexity hold your business back. Small tweaks to leverage software, mobile apps, digitization, and outsourced help can simplify your financial processes immensely.

Implement even one or two of these accounting hacks, and you’ll recapture hours of time each week. Even better, you’ll gain data-driven clarity into your profitability and strategic decisions.

FAQ’s