The accounting workflow is a multi-step one that involves multiple people other than the accountants themselves. It can be convoluted, especially when there are no tools to ease the completion of tasks and the collaboration of the different parties that need to work together.

In that case, it would be high time for a business to look at a list of accounting software solutions that can streamline their number crunching. This would be a huge benefit to the accounting and finance teams, as IT Chronicles reported that 67% of employees would prefer that their business implemented digital solutions. That is not surprising.

Reasons Your Business Should Use Accounting Software

    1. To automate your workflows.
    2. To standardize processes.
    3. To track your team’s progress
    4. To collaborate where you work
    5. To create tasks from emails.

Software programs are designed to assist users in being efficient in their duties, accounting processes included. If you are not convinced, we have listed five reasons that can help solidify your decision to invest in an accounting program.

1. Use Accounting Software to automate your workflows

Did you know that employees spend up to 69 days annually doing administrative tasks? On top of that, Frevvo cites in an article that companies suffer losses of up to $5 trillion per year.

Accounting is not exempt from those because it involves repetitive tasks. It is easy to get lost in those redundancies that administration becomes the focus and not the actual accounting.

This is something you can mitigate easily, however, as numerous accounting software, such as accounting workflow software are now equipped with workflow automation capabilities. Users can recreate the tasks they do on a regular basis, whether those are daily, weekly, monthly, and so on. This relieves accountants of the administrative burden so that they can spend more time on accounting work.

2. To Standardize Processes

Creating the same documents from scratch each time you need them is costly, both in time and money. Hence, it is imperative that a business standardizes its templates. These documents can show that a business, even if it is small, is professional since it can present a uniform front.

More than appearances, accounting workflow templates offer a productivity boost. In a white paper shared by M-Files, it is shown that people spend 30% of their day just searching for the information they need.

On top of that, respondents said that some kinds of information are difficult to deal with, wherein Office documents come in with 44% saying they are unmanaged. This could affect the productivity of an employee and can impact the rest of the workflow or project, too.

stats of accounting software

However, with templates, accountants and other individuals can simply retrieve the documents they need from the repository and edit them with relevant data. With this, they can better focus on critical duties.

Though any cloud based accounting software has this capability, it is only the more robust products that enables users to create standards even for the most niche task. As such, businesses have to keep in mind the ability to create the templates they need for the most specific duty when shopping for an accounting solution.

3. Track Your Team’s Progress

The most common types of accounting software are those that focus solely on completing accounting tasks. Since you need to have visibility into the progress of your team members, you will need another tool that can do the job.

Fortunately, there are also those that offer task tracking within the application. This means you no longer have to send emails, instant messages, and SMS to workers to get them to update you on their progress. After all, those communication tools are also a source of distraction that can hinder the productivity of your accountants.

With an integrated team tracking view, you can ensure that no task is falling behind. And in case some employees need a helping hand, you can extend assistance or assign others to aid them in completing their duties.

4. To Collaborate Where You Work

With the increasing popularity of telecommuting, being able to collaborate effectively has become more important as well. Unfortunately, there are organizations that have little to no tools to promote teamwork.

In fact, 39% of respondents in a Queens University of Charlotte survey expressed that their workplace does not collaborate often despite 75% of employers rating teamwork and collaboration as of great importance.

An accounting software in the cloud with a social tool can resolve this divide. This streamlines the flow of information within the team because everyone has access to the same set of data.

Plus, colleagues can talk about tasks in the same interface of their work. This can also reduce the friction in the workplace because of unclear instructions and comments. Additionally, this can promote accountability since members of the team have visibility into the discussions.

5. To Create Tasks From Emails

In marketing, email remains relevant because there are still plenty of people who use this channel for business and for receiving marketing communications from brands. While this can be considered a distraction, you can still elevate work emails and ensure that they make the workplace productive.

This is one of the SMB accounting software benefits that you can realize. Modern examples of accounting applications integrate email-to-task features. This means that whenever clients send a request via email, users can transform them into a task by following a short series of steps. In the same process, they can assign this responsibility to any member of the team.

Productive accounting

Accounting requires serious number crunching and time commitment. However, businesses can ease the burden on their accountants using a dedicated accounting software. It would bring multiple benefits such as standardized processes and documents, automated and fast-moving workflows, team progress visibility, collaboration, and email productivity.

While companies may not feel the positive impact of an accounting software immediately, they would be able to see the differences between the way they operated and the current pace when they generate reports (something that an accounting application can also do). Thus, they would realize the ROI that such a digital solution brings to their organization.