As a small business owner, one of the most cost-saving decisions that you can make is to simplify your business accounting process. Keeping track of your business expenses, collecting payments from your customers, monitoring and evaluating financial reports, and these are all accounting tasks, that you may need to handle for your business. It can be overwhelming to handle countless responsibilities of accounts, taxes, and invoices. Here are some useful tips to assist and make your accounting easier-
Payment Collection
The cash flow to your business can only be maintained if you are receiving invoice payments on time. For which one needs to have a branded digital invoice created, send to the supplier via SMS, email, or Whatsapp with a payment link. The vendor can make the payment via multiple payment options like Netbanking, Credit/Debit Card, and wallets.
The Software updates the dashboard offering you a real-time view of your receivables.
In case, the vendor missed the payment, you can schedule reminders and bid goodbye to manual chasing via calls to remind you about timely payments.
In case your vendor is keen to hand over cash/cheque to the Collection Agent, the software could also help in real-time tracking of the collection agent offering transparency where your “payment” is.
By the end of the day, you can initiate a reconciliation process to balance the books and simplify bookkeeping.
Expense management
While liquidity is crucial for your business to run, you also need to be on top of your liabilities, debts, and other expenses.
Digitizing your employee payroll and reimbursements, bill payments like electricity, rent, loan EMI’s, and vendor payments are done via a digital platform could streamline your accounting tasks.
Once the payroll details are set, every month depending upon the various variables set, one could disperse the payouts. So is the case of bill payments and loan EMIs.
A platform that helps in managing all your payables and receivables would help in managing your financial portfolio and reduce the manual effort of accounting.
Taxes and Donation
Either you handle your taxes, file return by yourself, or due to lack of time or tax jargon you have a CA hired to take care of it. But for the CA as well you need to hand over bank statements and receipts to pay your tax and file returns.
This all-manual effort could be avoided by the use of an appropriate digital platform that is going to a destination for all your taxes and donation queries. Your invoice would indicate the sales tax or GST you have applied for a particular vendor. The Payouts with receipts would help in claiming the tax benefit for the donation made. And it would also help your CA/Accounting team to get all that information in one go.
Reports and Metrics
The ability to analyze your monthly revenues, dues, and expenses is a great way to make an informed decision. Some of the quick metrics that can help you in growing your business and could be exported/viewed via a digital solution are –
Vendors not paying within the invoice cycle
Getting a list of vendors who did not pay despite repetitive reminders making you short of your cash flow is an easy task for accounting software. You as a business owner can decide whether to continue business with them or send a legal notice to the supplier for payment.
Monthly Collection and Payouts, PnL statement
Are you making a profit or a loss? How can one be sure unless settlement, reconciliation, and merging of all statements of business bank accounts are done? This is where the digitized statements come in handy. You can have a real-time view of your monthly/quarterly or yearly collection. Can evaluate the expenses and take measures to cut them and also view a PnL statement to make decisions in favor of growth.
Adopt a Digital Solution
All of this could be achieved by adopting a digital platform that is feature-rich, secured, compliant, cloud-ready, accessible from anywhere software to get away with manual bookkeeping that is prone to errors and needs “more bandwidth” to manage. A digital solution could help your finance team and accountants in Payment Collection, Pay-outs, Employee reimbursements, tracking of payments, auto-reconciliation, and team collaboration
Also, evaluate if the data sent to this software is encrypted and protected via 256-SSL encryption, this would help you in keeping your data safe and secure.
Hylobiz can help small businesses in simplifying accounting
Hylobiz, a fintech offering SME-connected banking services could help your business in simplifying all payables receivables digitization. While Hylobiz Receivables helps you in collecting payment for the invoice in digital and cash/cheque mode, our customized reminders can send reminders instantaneously to the vendors.
Hylobiz comes pre-integrated with accounting software or ERPs like Marg, Tally, and Quickbook, offering your business a real-time view of your payables and receivables and automatic reconciliation.
You can create a customized branded invoice with fields of your choice and add charges that need to be passed onto your vendor or need to be paid by you.
If you want to make a bulk payout to your employees or a single payout to pay for your office supplies, all the expense management can also be handled by Hylobiz.
Reports and metrics can be accessed from anywhere and shared with your team members assisting your business in mailing informed decisions.