Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

By Lizzie Weakley

As your business grows more each year, you realize the importance of streamlining your company’s operations, especially accounting and bookkeeping. Like other important areas of your business, you know your bookkeeping needs to be accurate day in and day out. If you find your administrative staff is having to spend too much time on accounting tasks, here are four great steps you can take to manage your company’s bookkeeping much more efficiently.

Choose the best accounting software

While it is a given your company is using some type of accounting software, this does not mean you are necessarily using the best type of software for your business. If you are using software that is too basic, this can mean your staff is still having to spend too much time on certain tasks. Should your software be too complex, it could actually be slowing down your bookkeeping process. Get employee feedback to determine if there is an issue that can be solved with new software.

Organize your data into categories

Once you are using the best type of accounting software for your business, modify it a bit more by organizing your data into certain categories. By doing so, you will have an easier time keeping track of each and every transaction. While the five main categories will be assets, liabilities, equity, expenses, and income, you can create sub-categories such as payroll, accounts payable, accounts receivable, and others that will ease your bookkeeping burden.

Train your employees

One of the best ways to streamline your company’s finances is to ensure your administrative staff is well-trained on the various bookkeeping procedures and software. This is especially important if you have multiple employees who will be using the software or if you are starting to use new software. Should you fall short on training, the result will be far more mistakes being made on payroll and other key areas. This will take more time from various employees to correct the mistakes and show other employees how to avoid mistakes in the future.

Practice financial maintenance

Finally, you and your bookkeeping staff will need to practice financial maintenance. This means updating your financial data regularly, keeping track of various deadlines, and making sure your bookkeeping software is always updated. While this can sometimes fall by the wayside when day-to-day operations get busy, making this a regular practice within your accounting department will allow your employees to always have the data needed to meet deadlines.

As you put these steps into practice, you and your employees should begin to notice many tasks are much easier to complete, mistakes are now few and far between, and all employees are comfortable using the accounting software.

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Lizzie Weakley is a freelance writer from Columbus, Ohio. In her free time, she enjoys the outdoors and walks in the park with her husky, Snowball.