Dawit
Accountants all over the UK upgrade to accounting software daily in a bid to improve productivity and profitability (of their own accounting/ bookkeeping firms and their clients or else of the companies they work for). More than one in every 10 accountants in the UK already uses the popular brand, Dext, and this number is set to double by the end of this year at the current rate of uptake.
If you have recently adopted UK accounting software, or intend to migrate to accounting software soon, here are 7 tips that can help improve the efficiency of accountants using accounting software.
- Link your business bank account
Your account might be spending several hours a day or a week (depending on your transaction volume) simply filling in data from your balance sheet. This is a painstaking task that is burdensome and extremely prone to the element of human error. Data can instead flow seamlessly from your business bank account to your books when linked to your UK accounting software.
- Allow access to data entry heavy departments
The accounting department, sales, marketing, procurement and payroll are examples of departments that spend company capital regularly and heavily. Additionally, people who travel on company funds (or their assistants or whoever creates their reimbursement statements) must be given access to the UK accounting software because of its amazing ability to scan receipts instantly using optical character recognition technology. This tech extracts accounting-relevant information from any bill, receipt or invoice snapped and uploaded to the UK accounting software.
- Create hard deadlines for expenditure and reimbursement reporting
With data entry made both automatic and instant, any excuses about submitting expenses and reimbursement requests weeks or months after these have been incurred, are just that: excuses. Dis-incentivise tardiness in reporting or incentivise immediate submissions, depending on whether the carrot approach or stick approach works better.
- Spend time together on dashboard and insights.
Popular UK accounting software brands will usually provide you with spontaneous business insights and an accounting dashboard that lets one keep track of KPIs. Make time for departmental heads and company bosses to put their heads together with the accountant’s to use the insights and KPI tracking to come up with ideas, priorities and processes that can support better cash flow and improved profitability.
- Choose accounting software that is UK complaint
You must choose UK accounting software that can help you comply with UK tax laws and other compliance around how you sort and manage your data. For example, the popular UK accounting software brand, Dext, saves your data for 7 years in compliance with UK tax laws.
- Choose software that integrates with popularly used accounting platforms
It is a bit pointless for your accountant to enter data into your UK accounting software and then re-enter it into their accounting platform of choice, such as Xero QBO, sage and so on. It would be a duplication of labour and is, therefore, the opposite of efficiency. This can be best avoided by checking the software’s integration capabilities beforehand.
- Avoid free software
Free software brands, too, have a product model and in the absence of fair payment from users, they have no choice but to bombard the user with advertisements, sell the user’s data or place features that accountants would use behind a paywall. Avoid having your accountant plagued by advertisements when they are trying to focus and avoid giving them software that isn’t useful. Accounting software is highly affordable.
Conclusion: If you’re still on the lookout for the right brand of accounting software, how about one that gives you everything that we discussed in this post, and for a starting price of only GBP 20 per month (for 5 login IDs and full access).
Want to know other benefits of the UK accounting software? Know more here.
