I drove to work this morning topless (the car that is, not me). You probably think I’m mad, most people do. It’s the middle of January and the temperature just above freezing but it was a beautiful morning and I just love driving with the top down, especially at night. It’s why I bought a convertible so I may as well use it.
And the same applies to your accounting software. No matter how simple it is it has the capability to help you to run your business by giving you the information you need. Whether it’s in the cloud or on your desktop, commercial accounting software usually comes as a standard pre-set package. It gives you the basic equipment you need to record your transactions, allocate them to a particular heading and balance everything up. But is it telling you what you want to know?
The old adage of garbage in, garbage out applies of course so you need to think about what information is going in and where. When you make an entry your income and expenditure is allocated to various descriptions which should be something that is relevant to your business. There are also various alpha-numeric fields that can be used to give you more analysis. You don’t have to accept a standard heading’, it is only an entry field which can be used for more targeted information. If you find out where the fields appear in reports they can be adapted accordingly to help you get the detail you want. Even if the reports within the software don’t give you exactly what you need you can usually export to.csv so if the information is in the system you can use Excel to refine the reporting. So don’t just accept what is standard, think about what you want to know and tailor the software to suit your business.
With the introduction by HMRC of ‘Making Tax Digital’ starting from 2018 businesses will be required to file accounts information quarterly using their ‘digital accounts software’. So if you have the technology you may as well use it.
If you want to give this concept a try, our clients get SageOne Start software free and we arrange a bespoke set up for your business.
