Saving Time with Technology, Bank Integration
In our second post about how to make technology work for you we thought we would give you some tips of how to make running your books a little easier (or a little cheaper, depending on who keeps your books)! No joke, this particular feature that is included in some accounting software saves us hours per day. And as a public accounting firm, saving hours daily for our accountants means that we increase our capacity without increasing our variable expenses, allowing us to return these savings to our clients! How do we do this?
Automatically Classifying Transactions;
There are several accounting software programs that allow bank accounts to link directly with the books, QuickBooks being a primary platform. These programs then automatically import the transactions from the banking website. From there, the expenses are put directly into a cue where the user will classify and add the transactions to the books. This sounds like it would not save a ton of time, but the amazing software developers programmed some of these systems to learn your behaviors. This means that when you log in to add the transactions, they are already there and they are tied to a vendor, customer, or employee so all you have to do is review them for accuracy! Some of the programs have an intuitive nature, and take this amazing feature a step further making suggestions about which account to classify certain transactions into, based on your previous transactions with the given customer, employee or vendor.
One of the biggest benefits of this technology is that in implementing it, you are not just saving time, but you are able to keep your books current through the day’s end.
In doing so you are better able to take control of your finances and know where your money is at all times. Imagine being able to know if a card has been compromised, just by looking at your books, or to detect fraud earlier. If you know what you are looking for and use this tool to it optimum potential, you could do all of those things and more!
The trick is to choose a banking institution wisely; one that will allow you and/or your accounting firm to fully exploit these technological benefits, saving you and your business time, money, and providing more accuracy to your books, because if it sounds too good to be true, in some cases it is. Unfortunately not all banks are compatible with all accounting systems; some are better at linking than others. Having a conversation with your bank or just checking to see if the accounts can be linked is the best way to know if you can exploit this amazing time and money saving tool.
Sincerely,
Chelsea Auton
The Volpe Consulting & Accounting Team
