Know How To Use Your Accounting Software To Prepare For An Easier Year-End Close

It is no secret that the year-end is one of the busiest times for all businesses. As business owners, you’re expected to juggle multiple end-of-year accounting duties while simultaneously attending payroll, sales, and other business tasks..

To ensure you don’t end up scrambling to get a handle on your accounting books as the new year draws closer, we recommend using an accounting software to wrap up your accounting duties with ease.

Here’s how you can leverage the best accounting software to prepare yourself for the tax season.

Get a handle on all your invoicing

Check your records and find out if there are any overdue payments—orders or projects that haven’t been billed yet, reimbursements that haven’t been addressed, or payroll that is overdue.

Accounting software provides a summary report that helps you instantly figure this out. You can review the details on your dashboard or even download detailed reports to track billable expenses that are yet to be invoiced.

Send payment reminders outstanding payments

In practice, you would need to reach out to your customers or employees and send or request them for invoices of any outstanding payments. This helps you stay on top of your cash flow and streamline the tax filing process.

You can leverage an accounting software to send automated reminders to customers and clients if a payment crosses the due date. This way, you won’t have to go through the trouble of doing so manually and costing yourself last-minute stress and unnecessary hours.

Look up your balance reports on Dext to determine if there are any overdue payments that your customers owe you so you can promptly send them reminders and tie up any loose ends.

Account for inventory

If you are an eCommerce business, you need to have accurate insight into the current supplies in your inventory. This will help you manage your supply chain better and avoid delays in order processing.

With accounting software in hand, business owners in the UK have access to accurate stock levels, orders, returns, and so on—which helps prevent discrepancies in balance sheets. This also helps you forecast inventory for the upcoming year and plan your budget for success.

Maintain financial receipts

Plenty of businesses are unorganized when it comes to tracking expenses receipts, invoices, and other paper-based records. An accounting software is your key to become more organized in the way you tidy up your business receipts and get organized for the upcoming year.

Any disorganization in handling receipts can prove to be detrimental when filing taxes receipts and lead to inaccuracy in your books. This can prevent you from availing tax deductions and returns you are eligible for.

Successful business owners leverage highly effective expense management software to organize their business receipts prior to year-end. This way, you can track your receipts based on whether they are debits or credits, the kind of expense it is, what the payment mode is. You can sort receipts chronologically and add additional tags or labels to increase accessibility.

All you have to do is capture and upload your receipts to your accounting software. The rest will be taken care of by the system.

Connect and reconcile bank accounts

One of the primary advantages of an accounting software is that it allows you to connect your system to your bank accounts and credit card statements to weed out any inaccuracies in your books.

It allows you easily locate errors, after which you can adjust your records to make the balances match. Comparing bank records manually can be a cumbersome and time-consuming process. Not to mention, it can lead to human errors.

Keep information backed up

To protect accounting data and stay updated for the new year, it is imperative for business owners  to ensure their financial data is regularly backed up and is safe from accidental losses.

Businesses in the UK leverage accounting software like Dext to secure important accounting information to ensure it is seamlessly carried forward to the next year. Dext automatically backs up data in a central, secure location, ensuring access at all times.

You can also upload your receipts to the cloud and even back up your hard data using your computer or smartphone. The automated system of accounting software also deploys upgrades and patches over the cloud to ensure your software is updated to reflect best practices year round.

The best accounting software is designed to help you square away key accounting tasks before the clock strikes for the new year. Stay organized and updated with Dext as the end of the year draws closer!

Whatever you decide to do, make sure your accounting records are backed up in a secure location so your efforts don’t go to waste should anything unfortunate transpire!.