If you’re a startup or have just began running a new business, you may not have the budget that affords you an opportunity to hire an accountant to look over your books. However, every business must be ready to produce payroll and comply with tax season deadlines. Accounting software can help your small business stay on top of its finances while saving you time and money. Bookkeeping is an essential part of any businesses. Accounting software can streamline the process to help you protect two of your most valuable resources, time and money.
Skip Bookkeeping Basics
As a startup or new business, you often just want a solution that will take care of bookkeeping basics. When looking for new accounting software, make sure you can do all the basics without much training from the software provider. While you may need to outsource to a tax professional as tax seasons comes around, a software solution that handles the basics can keep your financial data up-to-date so you don’t have to scramble your numbers together in the early year. Avoid the stress and penalty fees with a basic accounting software system. You can save money from running to a professional regularly, especially if you don’t have significant bookkeeping needs.
Easily Generate Payroll
If you’re looking to move past the basic bookkeeping tasks that every business owner encounters, consider a more robust accounting software system. Accounting software programs often track more than receipts and expenses. Using accounting software to generate payroll, track and pay corporate tax and employer tax liabilities, and track bills will save you time in the takes to complete these as well as money from errors that could occur from manual entry. If you choose a cloud-based accounting system, you’ll have the ability to make necessary changes from anywhere you can connect to the internet. The flexibility is a great feature for those who have a lot to manage.
Integrate with Inventory
Managing inventory is another job in itself. Product-based companies with e-Commerce sites have to have real-time data about their inventory levels in order to provide customers with the best service possible. Often, other software systems can easily integrate with your accounting software, but you’ll need to do some research rather than assuming this is the case. You can break down profits, losses, project expenses and more all in one place with an integrated accounting system. Advanced features such as this one are usually part of paid options. Paid software has the advantage of accountability and updates, while free, open-source programs tend to have more add-ons, extensions and helpful communities.
Not every business will need specialized software options to fit their accounting needs. Accounting software can streamline processes that would have taken a greater amount of time to do manually. Not only that, different solutions offer up features that can help you reduce payroll or tax errors. Accounting software comes in all shapes and sizes so you’ll need to do some research to determine which solution is the best for your business. With all these options at your fingertips, your startup or small businesses should consider investing in an accounting software solution.
Author Bio: Erica Bell is an online copywriter for small business resource Business.com Media, Inc. She writes on a number of topics including small business technology and social media marketing. Connect with Business.com on Facebook!
