Accounting is a key aspect of any business, so it is important that it is done properly and efficiently. Utilising accounting software can greatly contribute to the process, streamlining your accounting operations so that you can spend more time focussing on other aspects of running your business. Here’s how accounting software can help you:
With traditional paper/manual Excel sheet accounting, each transaction must be entered by hand, often in multiple accounts. Everything must be handled meticulously to ensure that all entries are completed properly. Accounting software makes it easier to get the accounting done quickly. Many software applications automate everything for you, ensuring that each entry is allocated properly with minimal time and effort.
When errors occur in the accounting process, it is often a result of human error. Whether it is through entering data in the wrong column or account, or through mistakes in calculations, the human element greatly increases the risk of discrepancies in the books. With accounting software, you know that calculations will always be done correctly. With many accounting software applications, there are in-built checks that can alert you if a transaction may be entered incorrectly, helping to reduce errors even more.
When tax time comes around each year, many businesses scramble at the last minute to obtain the data they need to lodge their taxes properly. Any errors can result in fines or audits, putting added pressure on your business. Accounting software makes the tax lodging process easier by compiling all of the necessary data for you. In some cases, you can even complete your tax forms directly within the software, making things even easier and saving you a lot of headaches throughout the process.
Knowing exactly what is going on with your business’ finances is crucial to keeping it successful. Creating financial reports can take a lot of time when doing it by hand, which can take you away from the day-to-day aspects of running your company. Instead of taking the time to do this yourself, accounting software is capable of creating detailed reports for you automatically. In addition, the extensive reporting capabilities in most accounting software applications can give you access to data that you would have been unable to examine on your own due to the time involved in completing the calculations.
Forecasting capabilities are one of the most useful features in many accounting software applications. By analysing past data and trends, as well as your sales projections, accounting software can often generate predictions regarding the future cash flow of your organisation. This can be of great assistance in planning future courses of action for your company, such as when would be a good time to invest in an equipment upgrade for example.
As with creating financial reports, developing forecasts can be incredibly time-consuming when done by hand. Having this information at your fingertips, within the software application, can help you to make informed decisions about how to proceed.
Here at Horizon Business Systems, we are committed to providing market-leading accounting software to help businesses all across Australia. Our team of associates would be happy to discuss our products and services with you further to help you understand how we can help you take your business to the next level. Call us at 61 8 9328 1678 or get in touch with us online for more information. Your business’ success is our business, and we will work with you to help make it happen.
As we approach the end of 2015 our attention turns to rewarding our staff to show them that their hard work and dedication has been noticed and appreciated.
There are a variety of ways that employers can reward staff Christmas parties, bonuses, gifts and leave. These are great ways of boosting the morale of staff but they can be a headache when it comes to entering them into your accounting software system as you try to work out what is tax deductible and what isn’t.
A Christmas bonus is morale boosting for employees – especially if it is linked to their work performance over the year.
Of course you’ll need to check the books to make sure the bonus structure doesn’t break the bank, as it is important that the yearly bonus system you choose to adopt is fair to your employees and covers you and your business if you go through a challenging period. Choosing a fair system that rewards the most hardworking members of your workforce will help you to keep your best members of staff motivated and encourage them to stay at your company.
When your staff have been working hard for you all year it can be nice to reward them with an office Christmas party. It allows staff to socialise, let their hair down and can be very morale boosting.
An important consideration, however, is that in the past the office Christmas party was tax deductible, but it no longer covers food, drink and entertainment.
You will find yourself having to pay Entertainment Fringe Benefits Tax if the cost per person is greater than $300 for the office Christmas party, so keep this in mind when setting the bar tab or choosing the venue/restaurant.
While employee entertainment in no longer tax-deducible, non-entertainment gifts up to the value of $300 per employee are still fully tax deductible and won’t incur Fringe Benefit Tax, so gifts are becoming an increasingly popular way to treat staff at Christmas.
Popular non-entertainment gift options include multi-store gift cards and Christmas food hampers. Staff love these kinds of useful gifts and the bonus for you is they fall under the $300 exemption from Entertainment Fringe Benefits tax.
As the New Year approaches it’s important to keep track of your employees’ annual leave accrual and keep on top of each situation. You must allow employees to carry over their accrued annual leave to the next year, but there are two situations in which you can direct employees to take annual leave:
Keeping on top of excess leave is important in order to mitigate the risk that employees with excess leave will resign, leaving you having to pay out a large sum of accrued leave pay.
A good business management and accounting system like MYOB Exo allows you to integrate accounting and payroll functions to make this task much simpler.
Once upon a time, maybe tracking all of your financial and accounting data in an excel spreadsheet was all it took. Then, as you grew, you probably graduated to an accounting software tool. But, as you continue to grow, so does the need for better organisational tools. So, how do you know when it’s time to upgrade your business accounting software to a more powerful package?
If the following items fit your situation, you may want to look into upgrading.
Small business accounting software is meant for just that – small business. They often come with limits as far as the number of transactions, number of clients, number of employees or the amount of storage they can handle. As your business grows, so will your number of transactions, clients, employees and the amount of storage you require. If you’re reaching the limits of your current software, then it’s time to upgrade.
If you’re spending a lot of time on record keeping, and you still can’t stay on top of your accounting data, it may be time for an upgrade.
As your business grows, the amount of information that you need to keep track of does too. However, when you don’t have all of your information recorded accurately, you can’t look at your financial reports and you can’t track your company’s finances.
It’s time to find a new accounting software tool that simplifies or partially-automates the record keeping process, and you can spend your time analysing and coming up with ways to improve your business instead of struggling to keep track of it.
In this day and age, you should be able to access your accounting data from anywhere, anytime. Integrating your entire system with your accounting software can help make it easier to record, easier to analyse and easier to improve.
Regardless of where you or your employees work from, having an accounting system that can be as mobile as you are can help your business grow further, and allow you to take care of bookkeeping, accounts and billing faster.
Your accountant’s job is to help you with your business accounting. He or she understands how your business works as well as how your accounting software may be holding you back from growing and expanding. If you’re unsure of how to improve your current system, your accountant can be a great resource, and may be aware of how software, like MYOB Exo or MYOB Advanced, can improve your accounting process. A more integrated system may be just what you need.
Your accountant knows you and your business, and they are an expert when it comes to accounting, so if they’ve suggested that you upgrade your software, you may want to take the advice into consideration.
Accounting software helps you keep track of things from employee payroll to the number of sales per customer. If your current system has become unorganised, inaccurate or even slow and clunky from maxed out memory, then it’s time to look for a better alternative.
The right accounting software can help improve all aspects of your business processes, so having the right one is critical. If you find yourself in this situation you might find some of our other resources helpful:
Or you can get in touch with one of our consultants who can help find the right software package for you.
June 30 always seems to sneak up on us doesn’t it? There’s a lot involved in preparing your business documentation for the end of financial year.
The Australian Taxation Office will be expecting your return between July – October 31 2015, and employees will be expecting their payroll information ASAP. It’s not too late to get your business ready for tax time, even if you’ve done a poor job of record keeping so far.
1. MONITOR BANK TRANSACTIONS CLOSELY
According to a 2014 member survey from the Institute of Public Accountants and MYOB, 65% of business operators miscode bank statements. If most of your entries have already been made, it’s not too late to incorporate a software tool to help you catch errors. Accounting software should have built in controls to ensure that data is accounted for correctly, within an easy-to-use interface.
2. STAY ORGANISED AS YOU GO
According to the same research, it is estimated that 58% of business managers fail to keep up with their accounting and business statements on a regular basis throughout the year. One of the main reasons business people run into trouble is the fact that they are disorganised or simply don’t know where important records are.
This is where choosing the right business management and accounting software can really make a difference. Intuitive and user-friendly software (like MYOB Exo!), which can integrate the accounting function with other business management functions (like sales, stock, point-of-sale, payroll, field management etc.) means less work for you as these functions will communicate with one another and keep your accounts up-to-date.
3. EVALUATE GST LIABILITY
You may need to change your GST net liability for a reporting period. Business owners can increase or decrease adjustments, depending on their circumstances. MYOB Exo can help you evaluate your situation and ensure compliance.
4. PAY ATTENTION TO SUPERANNUATION
If you have to make superannuation payments for your staff, paying them in June will ensure that you can deduct them in this fiscal year. An advanced accounting software program can help you avoid exceeding your personal contribution caps.
5. RESPOND TO REQUEST FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE
Around 49% of business owners fail to report or update information when it is asked for. Take care of any “loose ends” and tie things up as fast as you can.
6. CONSULT A PROFESSIONAL
If your paperwork is not quite ready to file, it’s still a wise decision to sit down with an accountant who can assist you with planning and strategy. If your records for this year are not up to date, business data from prior years can give your accounting professional a glimpse into your finances. Accounting software ensures that prior year records and returns are easily accessible at tax time.
7. GET THE BIG PICTURE
Don’t look at June 30th as tax time, look at it as a time to analyse your business, and your financial future. Enterprise accounting software will not only help you with last minute tax details, but it will give you a glimpse into other important details, such as insurance, investments, and retirement planning.
8. LEARN HOW YOUR ACCOUNTING SOFTWARE CAN MAKE THINGS EASIER
Smart business software keeps up with facts and figures that you might forget otherwise. No one can remember all of the facts necessary to keep up with the intricate accounting details of a busy office. However, 46% of business managers are not able to use the software they choose with a high level of functionality. This can defeat the purpose of having tax or accounting software in the first place!
At Horizon Business Systems we have MYOB EXO & MYOB Advanced Consultants, who can work closely with your team to deliver customised training and support.
Automated and fully supported ERP systems – such as MYOB Exo and MYOB Advanced – offer reporting and compliance functionality for business owners and managers to confidently make decisions and forecasts to ensure successful financial management and the ability to seize market opportunities.
Horizon Business Systems offers the perfect combination of expertise and service to ensure that your business is ready to handle tax season, every year!
There are a number of reasons to invest in a great enterprise resource planning (ERP) system as a business develops. From more targeted inventory tracking to better human resource management, software that is developed specifically for your business can help you reduce bottlenecks, identify opportunities, and increase growth.
One of the areas that an ERP like MYOB Exo can really help a company shine is its impressive reporting capabilities. How can one piece of software save your business time, effort, and confusion? Let’s explore the reporting capabilities of MYOB Exo.
One of the greatest benefits of MYOB Exo is the availability of different facets of the software and add-ons that work seamlessly together – such as accounting, point-of-sale, job costing, payroll and stock control to name just a few.
This gives you the ability to generate unified reports that pull information from all the different areas of your business. This might enable you, for example, to cross reference POS and stock, or sales and debtor tracking.
The reporting capabilities of MYOB Exo, however, are advanced even for an ERP of its class. From the core software, MYOB Exo offers deep diving reports on creditors, debtors, taxes, sales, and a variety of other pieces of information that might be necessary for your business.
MYOB Exo also offers a variety of ways to see the reports you run. You can view the report in your system, which is a great way to preview the information and make sure it’s showing the data you need in the way that you intended. For a report that you need to manipulate externally, you can have MYOB Exo save the report to an Excel file, then open it and manipulate the data in Office. Or, if you know exactly what you need, you can have the ERP use its first class reporting capabilities to email the report directly to the intended recipient.
Unique to the MYOB Exo brand is the Analytics report. Analytics is an add-on module which allows business owners to see exactly what is happening with the deepest level of their business. Analytics takes data snapshots at set times from various points in the software, and then collates that data in different graphic displays.
MYOB Exo also offers the Clarity Report Browser and Designer. Most of the above reports have already been created and are built into the software package, but Clarity assures the business owner that there will never be a report they need that can’t be created. By using drop down menus and easy selection tools, the user can compare virtually any data elements from within their company.
If there’s a report you need, and it isn’t natively available in MYOB Exo, you can partner with your Horizon support team to get it created. Horizon has worked with MYOB Exo since it’s inception as Exonet (for over a decade!), and has the kind of in-depth product knowledge that makes creating a custom add-on for your company’s needs both efficient and cost effective. The HBiz Development Team at Horizon is intimately familiar with not just the accounting and financial side of running a business, but also the intricacies of marketing and operations functions. They can help you get what you need out of the software, so that you can get back to work.
If you want to take advantage of the ability to customise your MYOB Exo software, there’s no one better at it than Horizon; that’s why we earned MYOB’s Enterprise Platinum Partner of the Year status. Find out more about our team, or review our client testimonials, and then get in touch to find out what we can do to help your business access the full reporting capabilities of MYOB Exo. Contact us here!
Copyright @ 2016 - WallStreet. Designed by Webriti