The bookkeeping process involved classifying, recording, and summarizing the financial transactions of a business. Traditionally, this is maintained by the bookkeepers in the form of general ledgers, journals, and financial statements.
However, technological advancements have led to easy bookkeeping using https://dext.com/uk. Remember accounting softwares contains bookkeeping features too but bookkeeping software is majorly used for recording debit and credit transactions.
The bookkeeping software allows the small businesses to keep their daily account records up-to-date without much of a human effort. It simplifies the process of data entry, organizes the financial information, and provides reports with more access to crucial financial information about the business. There are other bookkeeping functions provided by the bookkeeping software:
- Invoice billing for the goods sold
- Recording and validating the invoices from the suppliers
- Recording receipts from the clients
- Processing payroll services like PF, EF, salary, etc.
- Recording depreciation entries
- Tracking individual accounts receivable
- Creating financial reports
But before you select which bookkeeping software to choose, you should understand what features will best suit your business needs. Therefore, you should know the must-have features for your bookkeeping software.
1. Automatic Customized Invoicing
The bookkeeping software allows you to send automated customized invoices to the clients at the same time when the purchase is done. This keeps the transparency with the clients and promotes timely payments. With this feature, your bookkeeping numbers get positive and reduce the mental stress of unpaid invoices.
2. Timely Reporting
Once you put in the data, the software calculates all the metrics required by the business and stores the data in the cloud storage. Whenever you need any report, with just a click the bookkeeping software prepares the report and presents it to you in a professional industry standard format.
Also, the reports are prepared in a simplified manner with an option of customizing the details in seconds. This builds the trust of the clients and allows them to verify the numbers without any physical hassle.
3. Inventory Monitoring
It is always a cumbersome process to move around the warehouse area with a ledger and record every inventory detail physically.
With the bookkeeping software, this task becomes easy and time-saving. The software tracks the inventory stock and updates whenever the stock is moved in and out of the warehouse. This way you can keep real-time updation of inventory stock transactions and make the strategic inventory management decisions with complete information on a screen.
4. Banking Connectivity
The bookkeeping software goes ahead and solves the banking connectivity efforts too. You don’t need to update the banking statements daily by yourself. The software allows you to track the financial transactions and get the real-time bank feeds on the cash flows.
It basically connects the bookkeeping transactions with the business’s bank account and all the online banking facilities like credit card, debit card, paypal, etc.
5. Remote Access
The usual bookkeeping methods keep you dependent on the physical records which restricts your movement. But with bookkeeping software, you don’t need to carry any books.
The software allows the company/ bookkeeper to access the important business reports at any location and at any time through an internet connection. This way you can present your reports from any place around the world without the hassle of physical books.
6. Payment Alerts
Once the customers purchase the services, the bookkeeping software sends the invoice along with it. But sometimes the clients may forget to make the payments, for which you need to send them emails of reminders which again is a useless human effort.
The bookkeeping software sends automated payment reminders to the clients as per the schedule decided by the company. This way you don’t need to keep track of the unpaid bills every time.
7. Payroll Services
You can also record the working hours of the employees with the bookkeeping software. Also, you can make automatic payroll filing and tax estimation, which saves a lot of physical bookkeeping time and human resources.
This way you can automatically send the salaries on time and be updated with the books for any sudden audits.
8. Tax Compliant
With the changing tax brackets, the government keeps on revising various tax compliances and commodities with the amendments.
With the bookkeeping software, you don’t need to update your system with the new tax slabs or compliance laws. The software automatically updates itself by the software provider, which helps the businesses automatically calculate the updated sales and other tax rates on every transaction.
These are the important features that matter for a bookkeeping software. But also remember to compare the prices with the alternatives.
Conclusion
Bookkeeping is no more a physical ledger work. With digitization, the businesses have started adopting smart bookkeeping software for automated and easy bookkeeping operations.
There are many features like automated invoicing and billing, real-time virtual inventory management, remote access to the records, automatic payment reminders, etc. which make the bookkeeping software a smart business choice.
