7 Factors to Consider When Choosing Accounting Software for Small Business

If you are thinking of streamlining your books, you should not hurry. There are a few factors to consider in choosing an accounting software for small business. If you are the first-time buyer of an accounting system, you should not ignore these essential tips. They will only enhance your experience and your choice of business software.

Do you really need to use web-based accounting software? Regularly updating books of your small business, no doubt, is a mean task. It is especially so after juggling various tasks in the course of your working day. On the other hand, it is necessary as timely bookkeeping & accounting boost decision-making. And, it matters how you do it.

Doing your books manually is not efficient accounting. Only a business having a negligible number of financial transactions use paper-pencil accounting. Even a small business cannot use Excel sheets for long. The owner of an expanding business, sooner or later, has to think about automation.

User-Friendly Software

The ease of use is a prime factor to consider when buying accounting system. The user-friendly software provides you with a dashboard that shows charts giving the financial status of your company.

Seeing cash in or out of the company over the last six months, invoices owed to the company or bills to be paid by the company, and all user activities in one place is a great help. The software should simplify your bookkeeping and accounting.

Multi-Currency Transactions

The internet has reduced the distances between the consumers and businesses. Today, even small enterprise serve overseas clients.

If you have such clients, make sure that accounting software that you are investigating facilitates multi-currency transactions. It must also handle foreign exchange rates and conversions as per your convenience. It must also show these transactions in your base currency.

Web Based Application

The new breed of business owners prefers to use online accounting software. They like to keep in touch with their business’ financial data on-the-go and email invoices to the clients from wherever they are.

Web-Based accounting software for small business allows them to collaborate with their staff or the accountants to speed up the things. The anytime and anywhere access to the latest financial data assists them in decision-making.

Integration With Other Business Software

If you are looking to upgrade to the latest accounting software, you should be careful in what you select. Choose software that will integrate seamlessly with your suite of other business software. Picking an accounting software without considering the grave implication of your choice can be harmful to your business. It may disrupt its smooth running.

Moreover, in future, you may buy additional software tools for increasing the efficiency of your business. So buying software that is flexible and easy to integrate makes sense.

Secure Data

The market trend is to use web-based accounting software. You should also invest in such tool and not in the desktop-based ones. The heydays of desktop-based software tools are fading fast.

With the online accounting software, you can save business’ financial data on the external servers. It is safe there from any physical hazard at your end. You should know when the data is backed up and make sure the frequency is as per your needs.

Many business owners hesitate to store their financial data on external servers. However, it is actually safer there than on your own servers. The security experts look after it. They use latest technologies to secure it. It should be one of the factors to consider when selecting a software package.

Customer Support

Switching to new accounting software, however, user-friendly or advanced, is a bit uncomfortable to everyone involved. Be sure that from time to time you or the staff are going to need support from an expert. The product’s user manual is not going to have all the answers.

The level of customer support offered by the manufacturer of accounting software is one of the vital factors to consider when selecting a software package. If your staff is not happy with the software, it is going to delay the transition from the old system to new one.

Pricing of Accounting Software

The pricing, for small business owners, has always been one of the things to consider when buying accounting software. They are not in a position to pay high license fees for it.

However, it is not true in case of the online accounting software. You can use these tools by subscribing to them on a monthly basis. You can start using their basic features by paying $9-$20 in monthly subscriptions.

Don’t Hurry, Take Your Time Before Buying an Accounting Software

The following is a list of accounting software that you should try before going ahead and buying one.

• Sage 50
• OneAccounting Software
• Xero
• Intuit Quickbooks Online

Sage 50, Xero, and Intuit Quickbooks are known tools. OneAccounting software is an online accounting software specially designed to meet the needs of small businesses. It is GST compatible software that offers multi-user & multi-currency support, Dashboard with live-feed, and can do reconciliation of any account.

Visit the software websites, download their trial versions, and see how the tools measure up in your daily use. Such a copy offers fewer features than its paid version. However, you will still be able to figure it out whether it is the tool that you would like to use for your business needs.

Go through their paid features too, and see, if they will satisfactorily map to your accounting needs.