Are you are spending more time resolving your day-to-day bookkeeping operations than you are in growing your business? Let’s review how we can resolve those trouble spots and regain focus on your business.
1. Manual Payment Processing
If your business accepts credit card or other payment processing receipts; you most-likely manually process the payment, enter it into your accounting software, and reconcile it with your AR and GL at the end of the day. This process can be tedious, time-consuming, and prone to errors and duplications.
An integrated payment processing solution can ease each of these problems. Integrated payment solutions are third-party applications that plug directly into your accounting software and automate the payment acceptance process. Instead of entering data multiple times or toggling through several programs, you simply enter the transaction, run it, and it’s automatically applied back to the invoice. No more double data entry—which means no data reconciliation, fewer errors, and more time back in your day. And more time means more opportunity to build your business and expand.
2. Accounts Receivable Payment Collection Lags
Payment collections is an essential part of doing business, but many businesses struggle with maintaining effective collections. It’s difficult and time-consuming to reach out to customers and ask for payment, especially if you track down each customer one by one. Unfortunately, if a business has inefficient collections, its cash flow—and growth—will suffer.
QuickBooks Online allows for payment processing directly in the program, resulting in automatic receivable posting, bank deposit and matching. Third party payment portals are another option to process receivables and automate the collections process.
3. Failing to Use Your Accounting Software to Its Full Potential
When a business is fully aware of their accounting software capabilities, it can facilitate efficiency and growth. Unfortunately, many businesses are unaware of the features of their accounting software, such direct bank account linking and transaction rule recognition for automatic posting, which are huge time savers. Many businesses take a “same old, same old” approach, while missing every opportunity to embrace technology innovation.
All businesses should do regular assessments of accounting software performance and bookkeeping efficiencies. If you are hearing the same complaint that certain processes take too long, there is probably a fix for that, which your accounting professionals should bring to your attention.
4. Unsecure Data and Internal Accounting Practices
For many businesses, the most vulnerable data they’ll handle is customer credit card information. This information is vulnerable to breech, which will jeopardize your customer relationships and your business integrity.
The best way to protect this data is employing PCI-compliant payment integration. QuickBooks Online and Xero are examples of PCI-compliant platforms, in which payment integration will automatically tokenize and encrypt customer data and store it off-site in a secure e-vault. This helps to ensure the data is safe, along with your reputation, as a payment processor.
Please contact our bookkeeping professionals at BrightBooks, LLC to discuss ways to streamline, automate and secure your business accounting needs. We are happy to get you started on the path to progression and use the time-savings to grow your business.