Accounting Frontier Blog

Bookkeeping automation facilitates a structure in which financial management, controls, and oversight are centralized, but the data entry is decentralized.  In our wagon wheel example, the applications on the edge of the wagon wheel serve as entry points for your data.  Users are granted access to each application based on their needs in that function and they submit data (i.e. expense reports, purchase orders, or timesheets) which then funnel to approval checkpoints and into accounting software (such as Xero or QuickBooks Online). 

By pushing data entry down to the person who initiated the accounting transaction, you accomplish a few important things. 

Most people are familiar with the online bill pay feature included with their bank, but did you know there are bill payment platforms specially designed for small businesses?  These systems not only print and mail checks for you, but they can do direct electronic payments with your vendors as well. The banking profile of the vendor can be managed by the vendor without you ever being involved with it. Wires, domestic and international, can all be handled within this system. And perhaps the best feature is the interaction with the bill payment system and your accounting system. Bills automatically sync between both systems for a seamless experience. This drastically reduces the amount of time for data entry. In this article, we’re going to discuss why you should consider moving away from hand-written checks and move toward a bill payment platform.

Now that you have a company credit card, it’s time to implement a system to oversee it. The two big players in the industry are Abacus and Expensify, and both would meet the needs of most businesses. These accounting applications are designed to solve three problems: (1) data entry and efficiency, (2) recordkeeping, and (3) oversight.

So you’ve made the decision to move from a desktop accounting application to the cloud. The next question is, which vendor will you choose? There are many worthy choices out there that will serve most businesses. However, we’re looking for the most optimized solution and there are certain factors that need to be considered. QuickBooks Online is the most widely used and recognized player in the industry.

Our firm reviewed QuickBooks Online and Xero, another major player in the could accounting space.  After reviewing both QuickBooks Online and Xero, we settled on Xero for these four reasons.

The future of accounting is in the cloud and the future is here. Before we dive into this topic, you must understand that your approach to accounting needs to change. Gone are the days where you use one accounting system. Cloud accounting applications are designed to be narrower than your traditional “one-size-fits-all” model. Each application has one primary function and they do it with excellence. If you just tried to use that one application, you would have an incomplete system. But if you combine these applications into one single system, you can customize it to meet your needs and still see the benefits we will discuss later. Today, I want to share three reasons why you should consider a move to cloud accounting.