Efficiency is often seen as painful cuts for the sake of reduced spending. The principle seems like something failing companies cling to in order to survive. Of course, the truth is just the opposite. Efficient businesses understand their resources and use them to their maximum advantage. This leads to larger profits and happier employees. Bookkeeping software may not seem like the kind of program you’d need to make your business as a whole more efficient, but QuickBooks is changing how the world sees bookkeeping.
Removing Unnecessary Labor
Downsizing isn’t a step forward, but freeing employees for more productive labor is a major advantage. Relatively few businesses keep on-site bookkeepers to manage their records. That job is usually either sourced out to a third party firm or relegated to an employee as part of a larger role. This is a tremendous loss of potential. After all, top tier management is already busy managing and developing staff, controlling merchandise, serving customers, and handling advanced tasks behind the scenes. Adding an unnecessary role to this part of your workforce will slow down other, vital functions. It may also lead to higher turnover rate from exhausted and overburdened managers. Both of these are gross inefficiencies that would slow any business’s development.
Even if you do utilize a third party bookkeeping service, you’ll need to do some of the work yourself. At the very least, you’ll need compatible software to communicate and review data. QuickBooks is popular bookkeeping software for a reason. Even professional, third party bookkeeping services often use it. Using QuickBooks from the start ensures you know what you’re reading when services send reports. It also makes the entire process smoother, faster, and more efficient.
Demonstrating Your Company’s Strengths and Weaknesses
QuickBooks is more than a fancy spreadsheet program. Advanced features help with many minor managerial bookkeeping tasks, but one of QuickBooks’ best features is its reporting software. Built-in reports provide basic overviews of your finances. Online, QuickBooks offers a platform for business owners to share report templates, and advanced users can always take advantage of the customized reporting features. These features grow more valuable with time. The more you use QuickBooks, and the more features you utilize, the more these reports can do.
Used wisely, they essentially function as a kind of business intelligence tool. They reveal your best customers and help you examine how and why those customers bring you so much business. You can also look into under-performing locations. When did the location start losing money? How does the purchase history of your top clients reflect those losses? With time, you may discover your company profits more from a particular side service than those you spend the most advertising.
The bird’s eye view these reports provide make it easy to spot and analyze inefficiencies as they develop. Rather than waiting for major losses to threaten your business’s integrity, you can keep pace with opportunities for cutbacks and growth as they develop. Management’s role becomes easier, and progress is available sooner.
Strengthening Bookkeeping Habits
Very few people genuinely enjoy bookkeeping, and those few tend to work for dedicated bookkeeping services. Despite that, bookkeeping is a vital business skill that makes the difference between successful ventures and failed companies time and time again. QuickBooks makes it much easier to develop strong, regular bookkeeping habits. This is thanks in large part to the amount of busy-work it removes from employee’s plates. Still, it’s much easier to work with user-friendly software like QuickBooks than it is to venture into a blank spreadsheet by yourself. The better your bookkeeping habits become, the more you’ll be able to trim from extra expenses, and the better you will come to know your company. Efficiency must work from the top down.
Savings
Errors cost. They cost time, and they cost money. Bookkeeping by hand or through limited programs like Excel Spreadsheets invites accidents. Even if you have a dedicated, on-site bookkeeper, everyone makes mistakes. No single individual can do their job perfectly, but bookkeeping errors create much broader consequences than those of most other roles. A shifted decimal could mean huge tax penalties. Failure to deliver the right amount of pay to an employee means you have to repeat at least one week’s entire entry. Losses hit your business right in the bank account, and this time-consuming labor is only more time consuming the second time around. QuickBooks provides a much more reliable framework for bookkeepers, and advanced packages even help bear the brunt of tax time.
Bookkeeping with QuickBooks gives you a chance to improve your business’s efficiency from the top down. Employees would be free to focus on their core roles. Decision makers would gain a better vantage point for making important choices. Of course, you’d also save. Whether you need more hands on the sales floor, fewer penalty-causing errors, or you’re simply ready to take your business to the next level, QuickBooks is the tool your business needs to grow more efficient.
