Accounting is an inevitable part of the business. It helps in managing daily invoices, tracking sales activities, generating audit reports, and much more.
Managing all these activities with the traditional approach is confusing, time-consuming, and prone to errors. Therefore, businesses are embracing modern accounting systems.
Such a scenario is instigating rapid development of smart innovations, raising the expected market value of accounting software to USD 19.59 billion by 2025.
Modern accounting software offers a plethora of benefits. From managing billing to generating financial reports to managing compliances from the common backend, the businesses gain 360-degree visibility of their financial health. It powers them to make wiser business decisions.
Advantages Of Advanced Accounting Software
- Hassle-free billing: Automated software makes invoicing easy for recurring orders. Also, payment gateways alert customers for pending payments, generate transaction records, and update them under the corresponding invoices in the system.
- Efficient Tracking of expense: The accounting software scans expense receipts and records the details eliminating the paper clutter.
- Easy bank reconciliation: Bank account integration keep the businesses audit-ready. It also streamlines the reconciliation process by importing & matching the financial transactions automatically.
- Improved inventory management: It keeps businesses updated on their inventory & stocks, transaction flow, product details, as well as automated emails.
- Efficient tax management: It improves the operations of complying with multiple tax rates and laws, accelerates calculation, and generates tax summary reports with ease.
- Efficient audit trail: The software enables the hassle-free management of financial documents bringing the physical cost to zero. This encourages a smooth audit trail.
While there is a lot of accounting software in the market, businesses often struggle to pick the best fit for their needs. Here are five things that will help in making the right decision.
Things To Keep In Mind Before Investing In Accounting Software
Acquiring a financial management tool is an important investment. However, many businesses take rapid decisions without considering the long-term financial goals and suffer loss.
Conducting thorough research around regular financial activities and identifying business needs is the best way to go ahead. Below are some other factors that businesses must acknowledge before making the final decision.
Contemplate The Business Needs
Identifying the purpose of the adoption of accounting software should be the first step. Ask questions such as-
- Is it needed for automating tax filing operations? or monitoring sales activities? or both?
- Do the accounting operations demand on-premises desktop-based software or cloud-based application?
The software that can be accessed online helps in accessing the financial activities on the go with any device or platform. This enables the business to manage the business finances remotely with ease.
Safeguard The Business Data
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This spike in security breaches compels businesses to tighten their security belt and choose the accounting software embedded with stringent security features.
Things to check –
- Is the business data hosted on the vendor’s server or other trusted hosting service provider?
- Is the vendor using an HTTPS connection?
Intuitive User Interface
The comprehensive mechanism of the software must offer a simpler & convenient user interface for everyday operations. It must not be bloated with unnecessary features enabling the professionals to focus on priorities.
Hence, prior to purchasing a business accounting software, ensure that the operating system should augment the efficacy of the concerning professionals.
Inspect For Scalability
Many times, the decision of tech adoption is solely based on the present scenario and not the future. Such a scenario gives rise to future situations where the business must migrate the financial data to a new system. But it is certainly a complex and time-consuming process.
Businesses must realize their future expansion plans and invest in business software that can be scaled up as per the need. Choose the application that offers multiple versions of software-entry-level version and feature-rich advanced version.
Meeting Compliance Requirements
Businesses ensure that financial records comply with the laws. For instance- firms must report invoices in the standard format with e-invoicing. It helps the tax authorities to access the entire trail of invoices submitted by taxpayers in the GST portal. Similar is the case with the e-way bills.
However, adhering to such compliance guidelines manually is time-consuming for accountants. Therefore, the businesses must embrace the accounting software that can simplify such operations, automate the e-way bill & e-invoice generation and take care of other compliance requirements too.
Support Services
There are two types of software in the market-cheap and expensive. And the differential factor is the customer support service. While some vendors offer 24*7 support services like Cygnet Face, others do not provide any such service at all.
No matter how secure, feature-rich, and user friendly the software is, IT support is a must. Businesses must inspect the support services by messaging or calling them. They can be judged based on the time and quality of their response.
Summary
Modern accounting software boosts; brand visibility, improves customer experience and facilitates business growth with its lucrative features and benefits.
However, choosing the right accounting software is a daunting task. Acknowledge key factors to make the process easier, such as analysing the business needs and considering data security requirements, necessary support services, scalability factors & user navigation.
Cygnet FACE – a GSTN approved accounting software that enables the business to practice all the necessary financial operations such as automatic journal entries to comply with GST challenges, payment for products in different currencies, automatic generation of e-invoicing, and e-way bill, among others. For further details, get in touch: mail.