5 Ways Technology Can Enhance Bookkeeping

A general definition of the bookkeeping can summarize it as the task of maintaining track of all financial transactions in a time-based order. Accurate bookkeeping empowers the decision makers of the business to determine its exact status, which eventually makes them control the finance more attentively. Though the task may sound simple with its definition, the actual efforts involved in the process are significantly challenging.

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Depending on size and form of the business, the expenses, and the incurred income have variable sources, which determine the amount of complexity for the bookkeeper. The more are complexities, the tougher it is to work for the bookkeepers. Technology has a worthy role to play in reducing these complexities and simplifying the various tasks to enhance the bookkeeping performance. Here are the most crucial ways in which technology helps bookkeeping performance:

1. Automated & Error-free Expense Tracking

Here are the most crucial ways in which technology helps bookkeeping performance: Thanks to bookkeeping or accounting applications, you can automate the tracking of bank accounts, credit cards, and other e-payment accounts without any repeated manual actions. Compared to traditional methods of maintaining countless receipts for the entire year, such applications save a huge amount of time for the bookkeeper and also immunes the operations from the possible redundancy and other human errors. Digital mediums identify the number of transactions accurately and modern solutions are smart enough to identify expense and income separately. Along with that, you always have the option to check and edit the details, if needed.

2. Virtual Meeting with Clients

Offshore bookkeeping is a common practice in the business world. Phone calls cannot always address the communication needs and face-to-face meetings are expensive as well as time-consuming. Virtual meeting solutions delivered in the form of unified communications makes the perfect solution. Delivering video and voice conference on the same platform with the option to share files and instant messages empower the bookkeepers ominously. Such virtual interactions are affordable, time-saving and still convey all the requirements. Utilizing the saved money and time, bookkeepers are able to serve more clients.

3. Work Even When Traveling

Frequent travel is inevitable because of various factors, which could be official or personal. Customarily, it hampers the performance of an accountant or a bookkeeper. The advent of cloud technology has broken that jinx. Adapting to the cloud solutions mean that the bookkeeper is able to work from anywhere and at any time. They just need to connect any of their devices to the internet and the accounting data will be available to work upon. The cross-device functionality of the cloud ensures that you access it even on the portable devices, like – laptop or smartphone. Since all the storage and processes are executed on the cloud-based server, the device specification will not trouble the performance. This implies that even when you are traveling, your performance will only be improving.

4. Automated Data Backup

Hardwar issues, software crash, etc. are some of the possibilities that can take away all the accounting data without any warning. Losing the accounting data is nothing less than a disaster for the accounting firms. To escape such incident, regular online data backup is the most reliable solution. But implementing it manually at the end of the day is not possible. That is why automated backup becomes a lifesaver for the accounting firms. There are various methods of backing up data online. Of them, hosting accounting application on the cloud is currently most preferred because it solves two problems in one go. It enables anytime, anywhere software access as mentioned above and also automates the data backup.

5. Scheduling and Time-tracking

Scheduling tasks for different employees and tracking their performance using software has been helping all sorts of businesses. Same goes the story for bookkeeping firms. Delivering the tasks on time with maintained quality standards requires a thorough solution. As the bookkeeping trends are changing and new practices, such as – outsourcing, work from home, BYOD, etc., are adopted, control methods in the accounting firm is not as simple as they were. This is where the role of technology comes into play. The market is abundantly filled with the applications to serve this cause. Depending on your bookkeeping business structure and other deployed technologies you can make the final choice with the application.