5 reasons why you should automate your accounting

Accounting is an indispensable part of everyday business life. But not the most popular one. Many entrepreneurs complain about long and complicated processes that cost a lot of time and money. One in three self-employed people spends at least 20 percent of their working time on accounting. Time that would be better invested in projects, further development or strategic adjustments. So it is worth devoting some time to the matter in order to automate your accounting.

Still need convincing? We have summarised for you why it pays off to automate all of your accounting processes.

Save time and nerves

The most obvious advantage: the time saved. The less time you have to spend on your accounting thanks to automation, the more time you can invest elsewhere: strategy development, company growth, customer acquisition. Not just your management or you personally — employees in various areas also gain more time for planning and analysis, because tedious routine accounting tasks disappear.

At the moment, accountants spend the most time collecting receipts. That is why you should try to reduce this time factor as far as possible. We have several solutions for you here:

• Scan app: simply scan receipts with your smartphone and they are automatically uploaded to FastBill.
• Mail forwarding with one click: receipts you receive by email can simply be forwarded directly to your FastBill inbox.
• Connect your customer portals: with the FastBill GetMyInvoices add-on you can connect more than 1,500 customer portals such as Amazon, Telekom or LinkedIn to FastBill, so that your invoices are transferred directly.

Automated accounting saves not only time but also nerves. With automated dunning, for example, you no longer have to chase overdue invoices, because your reminders are sent by themselves.

A quick and easy overview

Many companies try to get an overview of their accounting with an Excel list. Most will confirm that this is laborious and error-prone. The following overviews can be created automatically with good accounting software, so that you never lose track in spreadsheet chaos again:

a. Income and expenditure

To have a constant overview of your income and expenditure, bank reconciliation should happen automatically. Your accounting tool takes care of that for you. That way you keep an eye on all your accounts, automatically see the monthly surplus and where you record the most expenditure. This is important so that you can keep adjusting and optimising your spending.

b. Open items list

Maintaining an open items list by hand in Excel is laborious. But any good accounting tool can create it automatically. If you send your invoices through such a tool, you will always be shown which of these invoices have already been paid and which have not. Automatic bank reconciliation does that for you too. If needed, you can then also automate the dunning process so that these open items are settled as quickly as possible.

c. Missing receipts

One of the most tedious tasks for accountants is finding out which receipts are missing and collecting them in time. This work is also often done in Excel. Yet the right tool can take this off your hands too and show you automatically which expenses are missing the corresponding receipt. When a receipt is uploaded, it is automatically linked to the corresponding transaction on the basis of the receipt number, invoice amount and so on. That way you can be sure that no missing receipt slips through your fingers again.

Communication and work with your tax advisor also becomes easier, especially as you keep an automatic overview of your accounting at all times and can forward reports quickly.

Reduce costs

Time is money. That naturally applies to your accounting too. Accounting software costs money as well, of course. But if you automate the processes as far as possible, you save on average 40 to 60 percent of your current accounting costs. This aspect is often overlooked and many people are not aware of it.

Suppose you are a self-employed entrepreneur and spend one day a week on your accounting. That is 32 hours a month. Let us assume your hourly rate is €80. 32 hours times €80 makes €2,560.

Against that we now set an accounting tool such as FastBill, which saves this time and cost. FastBill Premium starts at just under €60 a month. Measured against the €2,560 a month that a self-employed entrepreneur spends on accounting, our example means you save €2,500 a month. Do you still find accounting software too expensive?

Work out for yourself how many hours you and your employees currently spend creating invoices, collecting and recording receipts and preparing monthly financial reports.

As mentioned at the start: one in three self-employed people spends at least 20 percent of their working time on this “paperwork”. Are you one of them?

Avoid errors and increase security

Another advantage that automating your accounting brings, alongside saving time and money, is avoiding typical recording and transfer errors. Corrections are usually no longer necessary.

In invoicing alone, an automated process and the right tools put you on safe ground. FastBill makes sure, for example, …

… that your invoices automatically carry consecutive invoice numbers,

… that all your invoices are GoBD-compliant,

… that the retention requirements are met,

… that all mandatory details are complete.

Deadlines are no longer a problem either with automated accounting and the right tool. For both the advance VAT return and the tax return, you have all documents collected centrally and to hand whenever you need them.

Control your finances

To keep driving your company’s growth, it is essential to have an overview of your finances at all times.

That includes …

… your income and expenditure,

… your revenue,

… your open items (open items list),

… an overall and individual overview of all business accounts.

With any good accounting tool (such as FastBill), account reconciliation should happen automatically, so that you do not first have to link receipts and transfers or debits to get an overview. An open items list is then generated automatically from this account reconciliation, including an overview of missing receipts. That way you always keep an eye on which payments are coming in, going out or missing.

An overview of all FastBill features is also available at fastbill.com. Further tips on accounting and automation can be found on the FastBill blog.

With FastBill you always keep an automatic, up-to-date overview of your finances. With these figures you then move on to cash flow planning. And this is where COMMITLY comes in.

COMMITLY – simply better cash flow management

Liquidity is at the centre of every economic action. Especially in economically uncertain times like these, knowing your own liquidity is arguably the most important element of business success. It is not only about knowing the current liquidity status of your own company (how much cash do I have?) but rather about planning ahead how liquidity will develop (how much cash will I have in 3, 6 or 12 months?). Only then can business decisions be made sensibly, liquidity bottlenecks be responded to, or funding gaps be financed in good time.

Sounds complicated? It is, if you try to do cash flow planning solely with Excel spreadsheets, as most entrepreneurs do. For large companies there are complex and expensive tools such as SAP, Tipco and so on. For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which after all make up 99.2% of all companies in the EU, these tools are too expensive and too laborious to implement.

Since 2020, however, there has been COMMITLY, the most popular cash flow planning tool in the German-speaking world. With COMMITLY you plan and monitor your company’s cash flows and liquidity simply and effortlessly, cost-effectively and efficiently.

• Planning made easy: simply create a cash flow plan, automatic forecasts and controlling, reports at the push of a button
• Excel bye-bye: no more formula errors, always up to date and in sync with your bank accounts, ready to use at any time
• Save time: simple template, easy to use, team-ready, best practice guaranteed.

Thanks to our cooperation with FastBill, you can easily connect both tools and, for example, automatically take open items into account in your cash flow planning.

Do you want to put this process in place?

Then try FastBill and COMMITLY free of charge for 14 days.

With the code COMMITLY15 you also save 15% on all annual FastBill contracts.

You can enter the code during the booking process of your FastBill test account.

Have fun automating!

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash