Spring is upon us, and tidying up our spaces—and habits—is an annual trend. While removing other types of clutter from your personal and professional life, give your bookkeeping a spring cleaning, too. Updating your bookkeeping this spring will help:
· Improve cash flow
· Prepare your business for summer
· Add organization and efficiency
· Streamline payment processes to reduce late fees and wasted charges
Looking to update your bookkeeping for spring and summer? Some areas to work on to save you time and money and improve financial management:
While you are looking for ways to reduce clutter and add efficiency, don’t forget to look into newer ways to automate, standardize, and simplify. A plethora of applications and cloud-based software is available to businesses of all sizes to help simplify tasks and ease the burdens of financial management. If you are looking into adopting some new programs, consider ones that integrate with software you already use so that data can be entered once and synced and updated in real time across multiple channels.
Keeping meticulous records that document money coming in and going out is important, but it is also time-consuming and, oftentimes, space-consuming. When the bookkeeping starts to become neglected or hastily done, the documentation process can suffer, as well, and make later reconciling, expense tracking, and tax preparation more challenging and laborious than they need to be. While you are updating your financial management system, evaluate the system you use to record and store your financial documents, including your bank statements, receipts, contracts, expense records, check registries, credit card statements, and proof of paid invoices, among other important financial records pertinent to your business, to make sure that you have easy and secure access to documents when you need them. When space and storage start to becoming an issue, many people look to cloud-based storage options that allow digital uploading of records for easy, instant, universal access on demand.
Business owners who take on a lot of work by themselves don’t always have enough hours in the day or week to attend to every demand, and some tasks necessarily get put off for another time. If managing the books is one of those tasks that often has to “wait until later,” this spring may be a good time to adopt a workflow process so that time and attention to financial management are built into the schedule automatically. Having a second pair of eyes on the financial accounts can help cut down on errors, late payments to vendors, and outstanding unpaid invoices from clients. If the bookkeeping process is outdated beyond what an in-house process can fix, consider outside expertise from a virtual or part-time bookkeeper who can add professionalism to the financial management while also freeing up more of your time and energy.
While you’re getting rid of outdated equipment and systems this spring, ditch the old-fashioned check book and check-issuing process in favor of a more modernized, streamlined check printing system that adds efficiency, accuracy, and security to your payment process. Checkeeper works compatibly with many other widely-used accounting and payroll software products, ensuring you the most streamlined and time-efficient process for printing and mailing checks on demand.
Print customized business checks on demand, right from any office printer on any check stock of choice
Upload company logos, images, backgrounds, and design elements, as desired
Add custom fields to checks for specific bookkeeping needs
Convert unpaid invoices directly into check payments with attached invoice tables
Print paychecks for employees with pay stubs included
Have check details automatically recorded and stored in an online registry that is searchable by any check field
Authorize multiple users and add approval workflow
Access online check printing from anywhere
Outsource all the check printing and mailing for both high-volume orders and routine payments