Automation software is changing the way that accounting companies operate. It offers numerous benefits, which, ultimately, help accounting practices achieve their business goals.
We put together this article to highlight the many benefits your accounting company can enjoy by investing in accounting automation software. Here are seven reasons why this could be the right move for your brand.
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What is Accounting Automation?
Before diving into our list of the benefits of accounting automation, let’s first make sure we’re all on the same page about what this is.
Accounting automation software is a tool that automatically completes many different accounting tasks. You just set it up in your practice and tell it what to do, and it will automatically begin completing a large portion of the basic tasks that your accounts work on every day.
Top 7 Benefits of Accounting Automation
1. Save Time and Boost Productivity
A recent report from Zapier found that accountants save an average of four hours per week with accounting automation software. Those are four hours that each of your accountants can spend working on other value-adding tasks every week.
You can extrapolate that across a year to get a good sense of exactly how much time and money your company could be saving with accounting automation software.
Four hours per week may not sound like a lot up front, but it adds up when you apply it across your whole team over time.
2. Enjoy More Reliable Data
Even the most careful humans will still make mistakes from time to time. But that adds a layer of unpredictability to your accounting data, impacting your calculations and forecasts.
Automation software uses a machine to complete many different accounting tasks for you. That way, you can have more confidence in the data you get, knowing that no human errors could have occurred.
3. Miss Fewer Deadlines
Accounting practice management software uses automation to help you track client work and hit accounting deadlines.
This can be useful because accountants have tons of minor tasks to complete for different clients every day. When you have automation software running inside your practice, it’ll ensure that none of these tasks slip through the cracks.
For example, you can use this kind of software to:
- Delegate recurring tasks
- Collaborate with staff
- Set up auto-reminders
- Quickly identify which of your accountants are the busiest and least busy for future work assignments
There are many different features that automation software has, which can help you manage your team and its schedule more efficiently.
4. Improved Security
You can also look forward to improved security when investing in accounting automation software. Manual accounting practices rely heavily on spreadsheets to complete and track various tasks.
But spreadsheets have minimal security features and lack a good way to limit control to keep your company safe from cyber attacks.
With accounting automation software, you can significantly reduce your use of spreadsheets. Instead, you can replace those with certain accounting practices that keep your most private data safer.
5. Faster Data Retrieval
Part of an accountant’s job is to sift through large piles of data and find the specific information they need. This is much easier to do now that most accounting happens on computers. But accounting automation software takes it a step further.
This type of software is designed to help you quickly create categories, reports, and dashboards that make it possible to organize your data however you want. The net result is that it will be much easier for your team to find the specific accounting data it needs whenever needed.
6. Simplified Integrations
The average small company today uses 73 business applications. That’s why integrations are super important in the modern business landscape. Businesses need to be able to send data and information between all of these applications efficiently to get the most out of them.
Accounting automation software makes it much easier to do that. It completes the integration process manually. You’ll need to tell the software what integrations you want to set up, and it will do it for you.
Many types of accounting automation software will also automatically sync data between multiple applications as it changes. This can be helpful as your team works to get as much out of different types of accounting software as possible.
7. Keep Up With the Competition
Accounting automation offers all of the benefits that we’ve covered above. You can be sure that your competition will start taking advantage of those soon if they haven’t already.
That’s another reason why now could be the right time for your company to make this investment. Doing so could be a crucial part of maintaining your competitive advantage as we move towards the future of accounting.
