Control Your Business Finances – Here’s How
Control Your Business Finances – Here’s How
Having proper control of your business finances is a big advantage. It helps you make well-informed business decisions and keeps your organisation profitable.
With so many digital tools for managing your bookkeeping, accounting, and management reporting, it’s never been easier to manage, track and forecast your financial position.
But what are the primary tools you need? And how do you set up your financial systems, apps, processes and reporting to put yourself back in the finance driving seat?
1. Bring your bookkeeping into the digital age
Digital bookkeeping apps are a great way to digitise your receipts, records, and source documents. This saves a lot of time at year-end and makes it much easier for you to keep track of your company’s finances and accounting. Keeping your receipts in a box to manually enter at period-end is no longer enough. Take the next step and digitise your receipts at the source, so you have up-to-date digital records and copies of source documents.
Optical character recognition (OCR) software, like Dext Prepare or Auto Entry, scans the receipt, converts it into a digital format, and stores it in the cloud.
2. Do your accounting in the cloud
Cloud accounting is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that helps you carry out all your main accounting and financial management online without installing any software.
Cloud accounting providers, like Xero, QuickBooks, MYOB, or Sage, design their accounting platforms to take the pain and hassle of business accounting. You get all the tools and features you need to work on your accounting tasks. And your platform provider will also take care of all the data storage, backups, and security of your data.
A good cloud accounting platform does more than just save your hard drive space. It also provides you with tools and dashboards that improve your access to management information, financial reporting, forecasting and projections, performance tracking, and more.
3. Use the latest in expense management tools
Expense management can be a time-consuming and tedious job. But it’s also a vital task that helps you ensure you’re spending company money wisely and not overspending. If employees start exceeding their budget limits, this can be a costly mistake for the company and your cash flow.
Expense management tools, such as Soldo, Weel, or Pleo, help you manage staff spending by giving employees virtual cards linked to a specific budget, account, and code. This lets you track their expenses easily and ensure they stay within their budgeted limits. These platforms also give you detailed reporting and analytics to see where money is being spent and where savings can be made.
4. Make it easy to accept digital payments
Slow payment is one of the most frustrating things for small businesses. If your customers don’t pay on time, this can result in a loss of revenue, poor cash flow, and an inability to cover your basic costs and overheads. To resolve this issue, many companies have begun to switch to digital payment platforms that make it simpler, faster, and easier to collect payments.
Payment platforms like PayPal, Square, or Stripe offer faster payment times and more control over the customer experience. Some platforms even integrate with your cloud accounting, so you get automatic bank reconciliations.
5. Embrace the latest in digital reporting and forecasting
With digital accounting changing so rapidly in recent years, there’s never been a better time to embrace the benefits of the latest in digital reporting and forecasting.
Economic conditions are hard to predict. So, it’s crucial to quickly analyse data, check your performance and make predictions about how your company will fare in the coming months. When you use cloud solutions for financial reporting and key metrics, you can monitor trends in real-time while accessing the data anytime, anywhere.
Having this information at your fingertips helps you make informed decisions faster than ever before, which translates into more sales, increased business growth, and bigger profits.
Talk to us about updating your financial systems
If you want to give your finances a touch of digital magic, please come and talk to us.
We can walk you through the best cloud platforms, fintech apps, and business tools to add to your app stack – so you’re ready to make the most of a digital approach to your finances.
Get in touch to supercharge your finances.