Does your business’ accounting need updating?

Whether you’re taking over a family business or starting your journey towards growth, a cost-effective and adaptable set of accounting processes is essential.  

Despite that, many business owners still favour long-standing manual processes – instead dedicating time and investment into the product or service offered by their business.  

However, a formal process for optimising your financial operations is an excellent tactic for making your business more commercially effective and adaptable in the future.  

These are the things that you need to watch out for when assessing your accounting system and making improvements.  

Developing and ongoing needs 

A cloud-based approach to accountancy provides the opportunity for each business to build its own bespoke app stack, meeting the needs of that business without unnecessary additional features.  

For this reason, identify your needs and goals before you make changes to your core processes.  

Consider cost and staff capacity, but also: 

• Your plans for growth 

• Sector-specific reporting requirements 

• Training and support needs of staff 

• Non-financial processes which could benefit from being brought into the cloud 

This will help you to get it right from the word ‘go’.  

Labour and time costs 

Accounting processes will always involve some degree of cost and labour to ensure that it is done to a high standard and according to any deadlines.  

However, manual processes that aren’t optimised to save time and streamline workflows can cost your business money that could be invested in growth or its staff. They also take attention away from processes that need a high level of expertise.  

A modernised, cloud-based accounting system can help to improve the communication between different systems and the migration of data for processes such as: 

• Payroll 

• Invoicing 

• Compliance and reporting 

• Accounts submission 

• Bookkeeping 

Scalability 

Scalability is a major advantage of modern accounting trends that favour cloud-based architecture.  

Manual processes become difficult to manage when a business grows, while subscription-based cloud solutions are easily scaled up or down depending on the evolving needs of an individual business.  

Compliance 

The demand for companies to digitally maintain and file their financial records is increasing and is likely to grow further in the future.  

A key initiative in this area is Making Tax Digital (MTD) for VAT.  

Every business registered for VAT is required to store and submit their financial details and quarterly VAT returns through MTD-compatible or bridging software. 

Although many types of bridging software are available, they do not offer the same level of adaptability and scalability as a tailored cloud-based accounting system – and only address one area of compliance.  

We can advise you on how to align your accounting software and processes with your business goals and future strategies.  

Please get in touch with a member of our team to discuss your requirements further.