Here’s a startling fact: Nearly half of today’s small businesses don’t use modern automated technology to do their accounting, according to Yodle’s Small Business Sentiment Survey. From tax preparation to expense reports, employees and owners alike spend hundreds of hours doing tasks they’d rather not.
Here are four tasks you should automate in 2016 so you can spend time running your business instead of babysitting your books.
Invoicing
It’s easy to lose track of who’s paid you and who hasn’t. Oversights happen all the time. This can create bookkeeping headaches as well as serious cash flow problems that threaten a company’s credit and court the risk of bankruptcy. To alleviate this problem, QuickBooks accounting software lets you automatically generate invoices, which you can email or print.
Meanwhile, as you’re waiting for the payment to come in, Fundbox provides an automated system for sustaining sufficient cash flow. Working in conjunction with QuickBooks, Fundbox lets you select an outstanding invoice and request corresponding funds to repay within 12 weeks. The money is deposited into your bank account automatically as early as the next day. You pay a small fee per invoice for borrowing the amount, and if you repay early, the remainder of the fee is waived.
Inventory
Taking inventory can consume days of labor from your workforce. Fishbowl helps you cut back on this wasted time by automating your inventory management. Fishbowl integrates with your accounting and barcode scanning software, which means you can scan, automatically create sales reports, generates invoices and packing lists, reduce inventory errors and speed up the reorder process.
Expense Reporting
Forty percent of employees fail to submit expense reports on time, and 20 percent of expenses are in violation of company policy, a Certify survey found. These variables cost you money and create bookkeeping and tax problems. Certify streamlines the expense reporting process. Employees use their mobile devices to automatically snap pictures of receipts. It automatically generates reports for you and integrates with your travel booking to make sure travel expenses comply with company policy. Expense report data can be automatically integrated into your bookkeeping system.
Payroll
Payroll taxes are the biggest administrative burden for small business owners, according to the National Small Business Association’s 2015 taxation survey. Among businesses that handle payroll internally, 1 in 10 spend 10 hours or more per month managing payroll, which comes out to 120 hours or more a year. Intuit’s Payroll cuts down your administrative load by creating instant paychecks, automatically calculating payroll taxes, and avoiding tax penalties. You can set Payroll up to automatically integrate with your QuickBooks accounts.
