Bookkeeping automation is a powerful tool for streamlining and optimizing your business’s finances. Using a program will eliminate the need to enter transaction details manually, from in-store office supply runs to client lunches.

This will also decrease your risk of human error, resulting in more reliable data. 

Automate Reconciliations

Reconciliation is crucial to financial processes, verifying a company’s internal data against external sources. It can include checking payments, reducing fraudulent activity, and ensuring accurate and healthy cash flow. It’s one of the most time-consuming tasks for accounting teams and can be prone to human error because it requires trawling multiple spreadsheets.

Bookkeeping for construction companies reduces the time it takes colleagues to process and review data, freeing them up for more value-added tasks. It also improves team motivation and retention, removing the stress of trawling through large folders of printouts or spreadsheets. Automation also provides higher accuracy and traceability, with transparent visibility for all stakeholders. This ensures compliance and enables better risk management. All while saving you money.

Automate Invoices

Invoice processing is one of the most time-consuming chores that may clog an accounts payable department. Manual processes increase the likelihood of invoice errors and missing paperwork, resulting in late payments that affect your bottom line and ruin vendor relationships.

Automating your invoices eliminates spending time filing or searching for paper files and streamlines document workflows by reducing processing cycles by 73%. Automation allows employees to focus on more strategic work and improve vendor relationships.

When an invoice is received — whether it’s a digital e-invoice or a physical paper document that must be scanned — software parses different bits of information on the document and decides what to do next based on predetermined rules. This helps reduce human error risk and speed up the approval process.

Automate Bill Payments

Managing bill payments can be stressful and time-consuming for individuals and businesses. Payments must be received on time to avoid late fees, credit score damage, and strained relationships with service providers.

Luckily, individuals can save time and effort by automating their bill payments. This feature allows individuals to set up recurring payments for fixed charges, such as utility bills, car loans, and credit card bills, from their bank account each month.

It is important to note that despite the benefits of automated bill payments, it is still crucial for individuals to maintain a buffer in their bank accounts in case of unexpected expenses or delays in income. 

Automate Payments to Vendors

Businesses must purchase goods and services from outside vendors to function. The accounts payable department must ensure that these suppliers are paid quickly and accurately to avoid wasted expenditures. An automated payment system can streamline these processes to save time and money.

Automating the invoice-to-payment process allows businesses to maximize early payment discounts with their vendors, which helps reduce overall costs. The ability to execute payments digitally also makes it easier to support cash flow forecasting and reduce the risk of excessive overdraft fees.

The ability to manage vendor contracts, pricing, and other details in one central platform provides a single source of truth. It also eliminates the need for paper checks, envelopes, and stamps. It also improves financial security by reducing the amount of personal information shared with external vendors.

Automate Bank Reconciliations

Reconciliations allow accounting teams to check and ensure that the general ledger matches a company’s bank statements. A successful process identifies and rectifies errors, such as customer payments being recorded on the wrong account, which could otherwise go unnoticed.

Despite its importance, bank reconciliation is an intensive and labor-intensive process that requires close attention to detail. Using modern software to automate this process liberates significant time and resources that can be focused on more strategic and qualitative initiatives.

Automation also helps quickly identify discrepancies, such as unauthorized monetary transactions. This enables your business to spot and investigate suspicious entries before they cause severe damage. In addition, an automated process enables your financial team to share reconciliations easily with stakeholders and investors. This transparency boosts visibility into the financial health of your organization.