As a small business owner, you might be a born entrepreneur, but you’re less likely to be a born accountant. So it’s possible that you’ll find bookkeeping a tedious distraction, especially when your focus lies with building your brand and growing your business. Even with this limitation, current small business accounting software can make it easy to manage all of your financial activity. In this lesson, we outline the various features of the major software offerings and what they can do for your business.

Get Accounting Software From The Start

When you are running your business, you are incurring expenses, billing customers and managing your money. When this is done through a bank account and on spreadsheets, you are wasting time and will have to go back later and enter all of these transactions into a software package. Performing these activities in small business accounting software makes from the start your makes your life much easier. All of the common functions—billing, expenses, payments, bank accounts—can be easily executed in these packages. And when you do, you will have all your activity in one place, making it easy to create financial statements, get a picture of your business and prepare information for third parties such as accountants, advisors or investors. All of these packages are also accessible online, providing easy access to anyone who needs financial information. Starting with a package will keep your financial world well organized in the midst of growing your business.

Common Features of Accounting Software

Your small business accounting software arms you with all the features and functionalities you need to run the finances of your business:

• Vendors & Purchases. Keep track of your vendors, pay your bills and track your purchases. You can also make managing your expenses easier with bank feeds and mobile payments.
• Customers & Sales. Manage your customer contacts and create quotes, sales orders and invoices. Track customer payments, issue monthly statements and customize your forms with your logo and specific requirements. This usually includes electronic, automatic and recurring invoicing.
• Banking. Transfer funds, make deposits and reconcile your bank account. Many include features to make the process even easier with bank feeds directly in and out of your bank account.
• Inventory. Optimize inventory management and control inventory costs and quantities.
• Time & Billing. Create service items for billing purposes, track your employee’s time with customers and map that time to employee payroll.
• Payroll. Manage payroll and pay employees anytime with the most up-to-date payroll tax calculations. This includes paying W-2 employees and filing and ability to pay by check or direct deposit.
• Electronic Payments. Process payments electronically for all major payment activities:
  • Pay Employees
  • Accept Customer Payments
  • Pay Vendors
• Reporting. Reports including financial statements and various standard financial reports to manage the finances of your business.
• Share with your Accountant. Your accountant can instantly access your records from anywhere, anytime.
• Prepare 1099s. Automatically keep track of payments you make to subcontractors.
• Paperless Receipt Tracking. Snap a photo of your receipt and link it to a transaction for easy tax prep. This can be used for all common expenses such as travel expenses, dinner for a client, that box of pens, or a card for your digital camera.
• Process Credit Card Payments. Process credit card payments.
• Track Mileage. Track mileage automatically.
• Cloud Access. Having information available in the cloud allows team members or accountants to access financial information securely at any time.

All of the major small business accounting packages have most of these features. Select one and start using it from day one, and it will make managing your finances easy.