What can your trade business gain by automating bookkeeping? The answer is: a lot.
If you’re still manually managing your books you’re likely seeing plenty of errors, losing your own and your employees’ valuable time, and working with numbers that are several entries behind.
These can pose as major roadblocks for any growing business.
Instead of moving two steps forward with every move, manual bookkeeping takes you two steps forward and one step back. It gets the job done but lacks the accuracy and efficiency needed to grow a business.
Automating your bookkeeping eliminates these setbacks and offers plenty of additional benefits.
What Does it Mean to Automate Your Bookkeeping?
When you automate your bookkeeping, all of your data is collected for you, meaning you no longer have to make manual entries. It allows you to easily see your transactions, keeping them readily available when you need them.
There are a number of tools you can use to automate your bookkeeping, however, at Argento CPA, we rely on QuickBooks Online. It checks all of the boxes for strong bookkeeping automation. QBO is easy for any size business and provides the big picture view that’s needed to grow.
It also integrates well with a variety of other tools (Knowify, Wagepoint, Dext, Stripe, Plooto, and more). For trade businesses, the combination of Knowify and QBO can do wonders for your financial system. They sync together bi-directionally so that both systems are working off the same data, eliminating the need to duplicate entries that show up in both QBO and Knowify.
When you automate your bookkeeping with QBO (or another tool) and combine it with the right tech stack, you’ll unlock growth potential.
Automating Bookkeeping Saves Time and Improves Profitability
An automated system can not only do bookkeeping tasks faster and more accurately than people; it can also do them at a lower cost. You’ll no longer see costly mistakes that drain your time and money. Automation will improve profitability in this way.
Digging deeper into the profitability benefits of automating your bookkeeping: you’ll have more time to invest in your employees. This opportunity presents itself when you take repetitive manual bookkeeping tasks off your/their job descriptions and use the extra time to improve other skills.
Doing your bookkeeping manually is error-prone, costly and a waste of the time and talents of people who could be doing something more productive.
An automated bookkeeping system is a leverage tool that increases the value of every hour your staff spends at work.
Potentially one of the greatest benefits of automation is accurate job costing. You know better than anyone that insight into exactly what a job costs and how much you make from each job is essential for growth in your industry. Automation allows you to see these numbers in real-time so you know exactly where profit lies on each job.
Automating Bookkeeping Provides Financial Visibility
A well-automated bookkeeping system does more than simply take over manual tasks. It provides additional functionality, and reporting is one of the most effective areas in which it does so.
There’s no doubt your manual system produces useful reports, but often it’s not easy to get new, up-to-date information. That would take a ton of sorting through existing data and manipulating it to build new reports.
An effective automated solution contains a flexible reporting interface. Usually, there’s a dashboard where you can see the financial status at a glance, and you can dig deeper right from the interface.
This is useful for budgeting and forecasting future business performance – two essentials for a growing business.
Automating Bookkeeping Leads to Better Decision-Making
It’s easy to get so caught up in day-to-day operations that you don’t step back a take the big view of where your company could be going.
An automated bookkeeping system helps you do just that with clear, error-free, and well-kept books.
As we mentioned, budgeting is one of the primary places you’ll see improvements with the help of automation. Because all of your expenses will be tracked in real-time, you can be confident you have accurate data to serve as a foundation to build your budget.
However, the benefits extend far beyond budgeting. All of your financial reporting will be improved and will lead to stronger short and long-term planning.
Automating bookkeeping leads to effective decision-making that strives for and achieves company growth.
Automating Bookkeeping Prevents Burnout
You didn’t start your business with the thought of spending your working hours keeping your books straight. Your interest and expertise lie in delivering a service and delighting your customers.
An automated bookkeeping system saves you from getting bogged down in work that isn’t enjoyable and doesn’t give you the time you need to focus on what matters most for your business.
It takes away the busy backend work that steals you and your employees’ time and offers confidence that your books are being managed without your constant hand.
As your business grows, your time becomes more and more valuable and you need to be able to invest it in the right places – your employees and your customers. Automation makes this possible and lets your bookkeeping system work for you, rather than you working for it.
Maximize Business Growth with the Help of an Experienced Accountant
Even if you’re convinced that an automated bookkeeping system will help you grow, you may not have the time or the expertise to choose the right solution, put it in place, and mine all of the value you can bring to your business. Additionally, if you fail to set up your apps like Quickbooks and Knowify correctly, it can lead to major issues in your books that become extremely difficult to fix in the long run.
That’s why a trusted and experienced trade business accountant can be an invaluable aid to your business.
Argento CPA can not only show you how to automate your bookkeeping but also bring the advantages of automation to other aspects of your finances. With our help, your finances will be accurate and primed for growth. Why struggle with manual bookkeeping any longer? Contact us today to get started with growth-building automation.