Want to manage your accounts and financial information effectively and efficiently!
There is nothing like a small business accounting software to manage all your accounts and financial affairs. However, many small business organizations hesitate to use them to save money over accounting software and accounting professionals.
Is there any way to reduce the overall accounting cost!
You must remember that small business accounting software will not only reduce the time of accounting, it may also reduce overall accounting expenditure. How?
Effective use of small business accounting software can make it possible for you to review all the data relevant to accounts payable, accounts receivable, invoices, and inventories easily. You can also use these software with other popular software such as Microsoft Office for better results.
Proper execution of the whole accounting process will not only reduce the number of accounting staff, it will also reduce recurring expenses along with manual accounting mistakes and time.
Outsourcing Accounting Jobs to Offshore Service Provider
Outsourcing accounting and financial related tasks to an offshore service provider can reduce accounting costs significantly. Small business owners can avoid hiring full-time or part-time accounting professionals; instead, they can use an offshore accounting services provider for all their accounting tasks.
Many small businesses houses have reported savings of thousands of dollars by outsourcing to a reliable and competent service provider capable of providing accounting services like bookkeeping, business taxes, accounts payable, accounts receivables, and account settlement.
One such example is of a real estate company in St. Paul, MN that benefited from the expertise and experience of Cybelink, an offshore service provider. Cybelink translated the company's accounts, which were mainly in Excel files and converted them into QuickBooks. This change in accounting allowed the client to review easily the weekly, monthly and yearly reports of financial transactions of the business. The accounting system set up by Cybelink allowed the client to communicate easily with their CPA and helped the real estate company to make informed business decisions.
Accounting Processes Standardization
Small business owners should see their entire accounting processes and standardize them within their company. The standardization should occur within their accounting processes and in their technology. For example, if two different employees engaged for accounts receivable and accounts payable and say if they use the customer list stored in two different computers, it is a problem. As a small business owner you should ask following questions:
* Can these two different processes be combined?
* Why the customer list stored in different computers?
If you look around the company you may see several inefficiencies in your accounting processes and how it is carried out. Fixing them will save you time and money.
Financial Controls
Financial controls are used to ensure that financial transactions are recorded accurately and the financial management system is not tampered with intentionally or unintentionally. Mere generation of accounting information is not enough, it is also important to make use of it for the growth of the business. All business owners should understand basic accounting and they should be able to read financial statements like balance sheet, profit and loss statement, and cash flow statement.
Indirect Expenses Related to Accounting
By creating a systematic and efficient accounting setup a small business can also lower the costs it would bear for tax return preparation or the fees to pay to the tax professionals. All the required information and data is easily found and well presented. For example, say you use QuickBooks for all your accounting and financial transactions, then with a click of a button you can export all the data to sent to you CPA for year-end tax purposes. If you are keeping your financial data in different software like Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word it is difficult to consolidate the data, it will be a time-consuming and error prone process for the staff to prepare the data to send to CPA.
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/small-business-articles/how-to-reduce-your-accounting-expenses-simple-effective-steps-195494.html
About the Author: Mani Malarvannan. Mani Malarvannan is cofounder of Cybelink, a company specializes in small business financial and accounting outsourcing like Bookkeeping, Tax, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, etc. For more info visit www.cybelink.com
