Where to Start When You Want to Streamline Your Bookkeeping
Streamlining your bookkeeping process brings plenty of benefits. When you make this function more efficient, it leads to a better view of your business's financial standing. If you want to streamline your bookkeeping, here is where you could start.
Look at the Big Picture and Make a Strategy
Businesses are often cyclical. They have active seasons, and they also have moments when they slow down. Most days, though, executives’ attention will be on day-to-day concerns. From keeping track of assignments to managing the staff, battling fires, and obtaining new clients, many decision-makers think that they don’t have time to sit down and think strategy, much less draw up an action plan for increasing productivity.
If you want to increase your effectiveness, though, you need a strategy. This is not something you do in your spare time—you have to sit down and look at what you need to streamline your accounting and bookkeeping. Do you have proper procedures, the right clients, and the best team in place? Do you need to invest in bookkeeping services or hire an accountant? Learning your context is the first step toward improvement.
Are Your Clients Satisfied with Your Processes?
Productivity benefits both you and your clients. If you want to streamline your accounting processes, you need to use web-based tools. Choose ones that allow you to have remote face-to-face conferences and enable instant messaging to clients and co-workers. You also need remote and concurrent access to files and databases, so you can share and formulate reports even if you’re in different locations.
You can use free or low-cost solutions like Google Hangouts or software that you can access through affordable monthly memberships. If you have been finding accounting and bookkeeping challenging, you can hire online payroll services to organize your records for you.
The way you work and the processes you build will affect the types of clients you attract. For instance, newer businesses are more likely to go paperless and do without face-to-face interaction, choosing instead to transact and communicate digitally. As such, their clients will likely be people and companies comfortable with that type of setup.
Are You Maximizing Your Capabilities?
When streamlining your accounting and bookkeeping, one of the first things you should do is see which aspects of your operations can move online. If you use an online solution or hire bookkeeping services, finance-related data will not need double management; the information flows straight into the ledger from the bank instead of having to go through spreadsheets. This reduces the impact of clerical or system errors and keeps books clean.
Some of your customers will be old-school and prefer traditional processes, but make an effort to get modern businesses on board. When you do, you will be more efficient, complete more billable hours, and prove your credibility to companies that want more bang for their buck.
Start by choosing one progressive client to switch to cloud accounting. Once you’ve set them up and established a workflow, use your experiences as a case study for your other clients. When other companies see that it is viable, they will likely make the change.
Conclusion
Streamlining your bookkeeping processes will establish you as a reliable business partner. Being more productive today means maximizing the various online and cloud-based solutions available for firms. You would also benefit from hiring online bookkeeping services, especially if you’re only starting!
Focus on building your business and leave the accounting to Totally Booked. We provide bookkeeping services in New York, including QuickBooks setup and training, monthly reports and reconciliations, and other services for increasing business efficiency. Contact us today to learn more!