How To Streamline Your Bookkeeping Operations

One of the most important functions of a business is bookkeeping. It involves taking care of your financial statements and reports, all of which are key to making sound business decisions. While crucial, bookkeeping operations can be labor-intensive and time-consuming. They’ll take up so much of your team’s time—time that could’ve otherwise been spent performing other necessary functions of your business.

This is why many businesses are always on the hunt for strategies to streamline and optimize their bookkeeping operations. Streamlining and optimizing bookkeeping operations allows companies to improve productivity without the need to add more resources. Moreover, when bookkeeping operations become efficient, they’re completed faster, without sacrificing quality and accuracy.

Hence, streamlining your bookkeeping operations is essential. Read on to learn about the strategies to achieve smooth-running bookkeeping operations.

 

1. Analyze Your Current Bookkeeping Workflow

 

The first step of streamlining your bookkeeping operations is analyzing your business’s current workflow. This may be hard to believe, but there are actually many businesses that aren’t aware of what goes on during the accounting and bookkeeping processes. So, when you don’t assess these processes, your team will still continue using bookkeeping methods that are outdated.

If you aren’t well versed in bookkeeping and accounting, include your bookkeeping team in the analysis process. They’re the ones who are updated on the latest industry standards in bookkeeping and accounting, which you may not have been able to adapt to yet. They also determine what’s beneficial for your business.

 

2. Go Paperless

 

In the past, bookkeeping and accounting processes were dependent on paper. A paper system makes it harder to organize hard copies of bank statements, financial statements, and tax records, as well as sticky notes. Moreover, it increases the risk of losing important files and divulging confidential information. Though using a filing cabinet can be helpful, it isn’t the most practical way to distribute information to concerned parties. 

On the other hand, a software system like Bank Profit makes financial processes easier. The following is a list of reasons why using an automated bookkeeping system will be worthwhile:

• It simplifies the whole bookkeeping process.
• It lessens the risk of files getting lost.
• It enables your whole bookkeeping team to retrieve records or send files in real time, even when they aren’t working on site.
• It’s easier to back up information since paperless programs are more secure than hard copies.
• It provides easy access to data on mobile phones.
• It may be more cost-effective, particularly when you start using free banking and bookkeeping for small businesses before paying for the services.

As a result of automating your bookkeeping system, your staff members won’t have to worry about losing documents and looking through papers just to find statistics data they need for reports.

 

3. Categorize Business Expenses

 

Classifying all your business expenses can help your company improve its bookkeeping operations significantly. Thus, it’ll be easier for your bookkeepers or accountants to identify which expenses belong to a particular category and which don’t. There’s that sense of order, where you’re not just piling numbers one after another without a clear computation.

Generally, some of the most common classifications of expenses used in bookkeeping and accounting include:

• Advertising expenses, which cover all the costs needed for your business to appear on all its marketing paraphernalia.
• Payroll or the salaries and wages of your employees. They’re often the biggest expenses of any business.
• Office or operating expenses, which refer to an umbrella term for all expenses needed to keep the business running and operational daily.

 

4. Learn To Prioritize Work

 

Setting meetings with your team too frequently may not be necessary. In fact, it may even be a distraction to your team. However, once in a while, it’s a good idea to have a catch-up meeting with each department, including bookkeeping. One of your goals should be to discuss any bottleneck areas in bookkeeping that may be hurting your operations. 

Additionally, you should prioritize urgent assignments. As soon as you arrive at work in the morning, for instance, give priority to those bookkeeping tasks that are the most time-consuming or the hardest to complete. It’s best to handle the ones with impending deadlines as soon as possible. Once urgent tasks are done, you can devote the remainder of the afternoon to minor bookkeeping functions.

Failing to check accounts on time may result in overlooking invoices, miscalculating, and inputting inaccurate data. Resolving these issues will be a lengthy process that could have been avoided had a schedule for account maintenance been arranged and followed. 

Conclusion

While undeniably time-consuming, bookkeeping and accounting still currently stands as one of the most vital functions of every business. Fortunately, utilizing technology will help you streamline bookkeeping operations easily.