When it comes to accounting methods, many business owners and bookkeepers have a method that they’ve been using for years. Often, it’s the method that they were taught in school or one that they’ve developed over years of working in their industry. As a business grows and changes, however, filing finances the same way can have negative consequences. If your company is showing any of these warning signs, it might be time to switch to business accounting software.
1. Your clients aren’t being billed correctly. As you take on larger clients, you can’t rely on your customers to remember that they need to pay you. Large companies have hundreds of bills a day that they pay, and they typically have to have a printed invoice in order to keep their own bookkeeping correct. If you’ve been using a handwritten system of receipts and bills, business accounting software can upgrade your processes to compete with large clients.
2. Taxes are becoming a problem. Ideally, you shouldn’t be spending weeks gathering information together for your tax preparer. If you are spending too much time hunting down receipts and bills, or if you find yourself handing your tax preparer boxes of documents (and paying a small fortune for him or her to figure it out), it’s time to upgrade.
3. You don’t know if you’re making a profit. When you take on small jobs, it can be easy to price things so that you know you’ll make enough money from the job. These jobs can involve many below the surface expenses such as supply orders, employee labor, etc. Therefore, you’ll need to keep track of how much you’re spending in order to ensure that you’re making a profit. If you’ve done a job only to discover that you actually lost money after it was completed, you have to improve your accounting.
4. You can’t answer basic questions about your business finances. You should be able to tell someone how much money your business made last year, how much you paid in taxes, how many employees you have on payroll, and what your projected profit for this year is. Coming up with these numbers only takes a few seconds with business accounting software, but it can take weeks if you’re relying on traditional paper methods. Even if you use a spreadsheet to track everything, you need to upgrade to a system that can give you quick answers about your business at a glance.
5. You’re worried about expanding because you don’t think you can handle the paperwork. Things like paperwork and accounting shouldn’t prevent you from making your business the best it can possibly be. If a fear of accounting or tax preparation is holding you back from letting your business take the next step, upgrade your accounting software.
Upgrading to business accounting software is a relatively easy process, and today’s programs are designed so that even people with little to no financial background can jump right in and get their business paperwork under control. Click here to learn more about our financial conversion software and how it can help your company.
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