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Methods to save time via automation – three strategies to implement.
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Time. The one thing that small business owners can’t get enough of.
Research commissioned by Prospa in 2019 showed that almost 50% of small business owners in New Zealand work between six and seven days every week with many saying they make sacrifices in other areas of their life to spend long hours on their business.
The main culprits creating stress and frustration are, no surprise, processes related to finance and accounting. It’s time to take back your hobbies, family time and sleep, and embrace automation. Luckily there are so many tools in the market to replace manual, time-consuming and stressful financial admin tasks. It’s all about choosing which ones work best for you.
Save time and money by automating your expense and receipts processing with RIP Expenses.
Timesheets and Payroll
While it’s easy to keep everything offline, using the ‘but that’s the way things have always been done’ mentality, there are so many benefits to automating offline tasks. Timesheets are a prime example. As small as your business may be, paper-based timesheets can slow you down through manual processing and data-entry errors. If you look at the process from start to finish you can easily see where the inefficiencies lie. For instance, get employees to write down their hours, chase them up to submit their timesheet, check the timesheets and manually input into a payroll database. Then finally, schedule payment.
There are several web and mobile-app options to streamline this process such as FlexiTime, an online payroll platform to manage your team and pay them with confidence, or TimeHub, allowing business owners to reduce time sent on timesheets and payroll. Even better, cloud-based automated timesheet solutions can be set up to automatically integrate with your payroll software, meaning the whole process is covered from start to finish.
Expense Management Apps
Processing receipts and expenses cost a business time and money - time and money that can be better spent elsewhere like on your customers or business strategy. For small business owners keeping track of receipts and expenses often translates to keeping piles of receipts in shoeboxes, envelopes or glove boxes. It can then take hours to sort these into some order at the end of every month - a task often left to the weekend or evening - before uploading to an accounting system or passing on to an accountant. Not only highly inefficient but they also then have to deal with missing, lost or illegible receipts or are unable to reimburse receipts that aren’t tax compliant.
We weren’t the only ones to notice that there is an easy fix to this problem developing apps to automate the process.
How do most expense management apps work? All you have to do is buy something in person or online, then upload your invoice or a photo of your receipt to the app. The application creates your expense report for you and automatically integrates with your accounting software.
RIP Expenses is an expense management app that brings automation to the highest imaginable level. Designed to ease the time pressure on small business owners, even more, RIP Expenses takes less admin time and facilitates 100% expense compliance. Visit a RIP Expenses store partner, scan your QR code with your RIP Expenses app, pay and walk away. No receipt, no uploads, just easy expense submission.
Cloud Accounting Systems
Often signing up for online accounting software is the first step small business owners take to help control their accounts and finances, whether they are managing their own accounts or alongside an accountant. And it’s a logical step towards automation with the likes of MYOB and Xero including various other integrations such as payroll, timesheets and expense management solutions.
The best about cloud accounting systems is that your data is accessible online anywhere, anytime from any device. This alone dramatically improves your productivity and efficiency giving you a real-time, up-to-date snapshot of your finances. You also can collaborate with team members and financial advisors, rest easy knowing everything is securely stored in the cloud without needing to complete backups, and save on system downtime with upgrades automatically scheduled.
See how RIP Expenses integrates with MYOB and Xero
Although most apps or software to automate your finance and accounting processes may come at a cost, what cost would you put on taking back some of your time? Often it is a small price to pay in order to spend more time with family or focus on the other things that matter to you.