Managing your accounts is often the last thing small business owners want to have to contend with.
When you are starting up, you want to be focusing on developing your business; whether that be through marketing, developing products, or finding customers.
Dealing with the numbers isn’t the most glamorous of roles, but online bookkeeping can be a helpful option.
Many small business owners take on the accounts task themselves. Some hire an accountant to to the books for them.
It takes time to get the accounts right, particularly if you are not a numbers person, but if done correctly your business will be in a great position.
It is imperative to do your bookkeeping accurately, otherwise you won’t be able to ascertain any useful information about your business, and also your accountant’s bill will be much higher because of the extra effort they have to spend to unjumble the mess.
Some business owners may think they have a great way of collating your finances, but are you sure you categorise all of your expenses properly?
Is your system more outdated and confusing than it needs to be? And, even if you use a dedicated piece of software for your bookkeeping, perhaps you’ve been inputting your invoices and bills incorrectly, and giving your accountant a headache because they have to tidy the data up for you.
How online bookkeeping software can help
Using modern accounting software online is a great option if you don’t want to do the books yourself but you also don’t want to take on the expense of hiring an accountant. Various tasks like dealing with invoices, recording expenses, monitoring outgoings and paying employees can be very time consuming. If you haven’t got the time to do it all yourself, just find a service, to do it for you.
One such company that took on accountancy software to make life easier is Crawford Warnock, managing director of Firstname Communications.
Warnock knew of the name Kashflow already and, from a quick bit of research, he found he liked the speed at which he could sort out invoices and basic paperwork.
‘It is both easy to use and comprehensive,’ he says. ‘I am currently deepening my use of it a bit with new codes and looking at reports. It suits my way of thinking; especially the search capabilities.’
Warnock says he has spoken to the customer service team quite a bit, finding them really helpful. ‘For one day I practically monopolised a guy on the phone all day and it was no problem,’ he adds.
It is an ideal platform when you are starting up and seems to scale pretty well, he also notes. ‘It enables you to cover off all the basics; purchases, invoices, bank reconciliation etc without needing much in the way of training.’
In fact, Crawford doesn’t think he had any, having just applied a small amount of common sense, with the intuitiveness of the software getting him through it.
‘I would recommend that you learn from my early mistakes though and get some training or an idea of the further functionality as I have had to spend a day or so catching up here and there,’ he adds.
Working in tech PR, Warnock has been hearing the hype on cloud for years. ‘It now seems to be paying off for smaller/ medium businesses that want to pick and choose the capability of software and tools that previously were only around for the bigger companies,’ he says.
‘Businesses are moving to the cloud at an accelerated pace and a lot of those are small businesses that are using cloud without even knowing it.
Here are always going to be one or two moments that cause a wobble – internet access on the move is the main one – but overall it is clear that cloud is here to stay for small businesses.’
KashFlow Software helps managing your books online, thereby saving you time and money. Trial KashFlow Software for free or call us on 0800 133 7529 for a free demo of the software.
Further reading on accounting software
