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Introduction
Being able to control, manage and investigate your financial situation is incredibly important as a business. It’ll tell you how much tax you’re due to pay, the number of profits you can reinvest in your business, and whether you’re in the green or the red at any given point.
The best financial software can help you track these in real-time, while other technological solutions will help you manage your financial responsibilities without spending hours upon hours working on spreadsheets and painstakingly entering data into a database.
This guide’s about how you can better manage your finances this year using new processes and technologies.
Overview
Most business leaders appreciate having a live overview of how they’re doing financially. If they don’t, they’ll end up hitting unforeseen moments with low funds, when liquidity is an issue in buying in more stock to sell as a profit. The opposite can also be true: that you’re making so much in profits that you really ought to reinvest some of it in order to grow your business, but you’re unaware of the amount you have sloshing around in your bank.
So a live view of your finances is essential for the type of business planning that’ll keep your firm on the right side of the debt line. The best financial software can do this for you, working with the metadata that is sent with every payment in order to build an accurate picture of how you’re doing this month compared with previous months. That’s a godsend for those who are interested in making shrewd and sharp business decisions based on accurate and to-the-minute financial data processed by technology.
Software
Next up, we’ll take a look at the other software products on the market that are designed to help small businesses manage their finances. There is a great deal of choice in this space, from bank accounts that are aimed at business leaders like you all the way through to granular payment provider services that help you save money and time on processing payments into or out of your firm. That’s the key to managing your finances better: to engage with a variety of technology that automates the kinds of data processing that was once done by a human hand.
In order to get a good overview of the kinds of technology that are out there, you should consider searching online for reviews of the best business software on the market today. Ask your tech friends if there’s anything that they’d recommend for your business. Finally, some of this software is an absolute no-brainer, like invoicing software that’s designed to make your invoicing easy, saving you time while improving the accuracy of your financial management across the board.
Forecasting
As well as showing your financial data live and up to date, some software is also built to offer forecasts. Feed data into this software, and it’ll rapidly understand whether you’re heading in the right direction as a business and what you might wish to do in order to push your team and your clients to make more money and to reinvest more resources in your growth and your success. The best forecasting apps are built to be an early warning system for companies, showing you when something might be going wrong internally.
If you’re interested in forecasting technologies, you’ll certainly find them by searching them on Google. Make sure you test a demo before you get onboard with the technology, as some forecasting apps are built for those with financial training, while others are made so that anyone with any level of economic knowledge can take a look at charts in order to understand the performance of their business.
Business Banking
When you run a business, you’ll tend to use a business bank account and not a personal one. Many banks have been competing in recent years to provide better services to people like you, with incorporated features that you might have expected you could only access from outside the bank on the financial technology market. To give one example, it’s now fairly common or advanced business bank accounts to have a tax section in-built, which means you’re able to set aside your taxable income straight away to avoid confusion about how much you’re actually making in profits.
There are two main types of business accounts you should consider. The first is from incumbent banks – the large, established institutions that you know you can trust for advice and with your money. The second is provided by fintech, which are new players in the financial space which tend to be more innovative and more in-tune with the latest technology. Depending on the features you’re looking to enjoy with your company’s bank account, you should compare these two types of business banking software to make a decision that suits you. Often, you’ll use more than one account, which can guarantee you the best of both worlds.
Payments
When a shopper has filled a basket in an online store, they’ll become highly frustrated if, when they come to the checkout, the payment options are limited and clunky. They may well abandon their cart entirely, which would mean lost revenue for you and lost faith in your from your customer. Offering multiple ways in which your customers can pay will mean that they have as many options as possible to part with their cash. Think here not only of debits and credit cards but also the likes of Klarna, Stripe, and PayPal. Use all of these payment options to stand the best chance of seeing customers actually make their purchases.
You can use payment provider software to do this. If you’re selling online, it’ll plug into your website’s backend through simple APIs that are designed to make the whole process smooth and effortless. Meanwhile, if you’re selling in a store, do consider adding hardware that’ll help you take payments in a wide number of ways.
Conclusion
There you have it: some simple financial management tips that no firm can do without this year. Make sure that you’re making notes of them, and looking into the market for tech solutions, in order to save time and keep a firm hand on the tiller of your company.