What makes a successful business? Is it the products you offer that are innovative, inspiring and market leading in their ingenuity? Is it the branding that gives your business that “cool factor” while serving as a seal of quality that keeps customers coming back for more? Is it the outstanding customer service that you offer to each and every person who walks through your door?
Sure, these things are absolutely important, but in any business endeavor, the little things can make a big difference. In any small business, success lies in attention to detail and keeping a watchful eye on the minutiae. Keeping a close eye on the little expenditures and outgoings as well as what’s coming into the business are essential in facilitating a healthy cash flow.
And when your cash flow is healthy, your business is healthy. Good cash flow allows you not just to ensure that suppliers are paid on time and that your club or course can operate properly, it can also allow you to operate more strategically and invest properly in your enterprise’s growth. Accounting tools can be extremely effective in allowing you to do just that.
By providing you with accessible, accurate and easy to understand reporting they can empower your enterprise by allowing you to closely monitor your finances. This allows you to make well-informed strategic decisions for the betterment and growth of your business. Here we’ll look at the many functions of accounting tools and how they can meet the specific needs of the your business and your industry. Over the course of this article we’ll be looking closely at:
What are accounting tools?
How do accounting tools relate to your industry?
Advantages and Benefits
Best practice examples
Choosing the right provider
Solutions and alternatives
By the time you’re done you’ll have a great working knowledge of how accounting tools can benefit your business and some ideas of how you can use them to steer your business into a new era of prosperity.
What are accounting tools?
Accounting tools are digital solutions that allow businesses to better manage their finances. At their most basic level accounting tools offer solutions for recording and reporting income and expenditure. They enable you to calculate your overhead costs as well as your income from your various revenue sources and quickly calculate profit margins. They are instrumental in budgetary planning and strategy. They can help to identify areas of wasteful or excessive spending and identify which areas of your operation represent the maximum return on investment (ROI).
They can be extremely effective in cost allocation analysis, so that you can identify opportunities to reduce operational costs and determine where your resources are best spent. The financial statements that they produce are instrumental in determining the efficacy of your business operations, and in asking questions like: “How healthy are our profit margins in relation to those of our competitors or the industry standard?”
They can also be extremely helpful in forecasting and determining the opportunities within the future economic market. Finally, they can help to ensure that your business meets is tax compliance obligations. Let’s face it, nothing’s more likely to impede cash flow than a hefty fine from the IRS.
How do accounting tools relate to your industry?
Whatever the nature of your business, and whatever industry you have chosen to apply your skills to it’s likely that you have specific needs when it comes to your accounting. Here we’ll use golfing as an example from which you can extrapolate the needs of your own business or industry.
For the golf industry. Golfing is a multifaceted business and those who operate their own golf clubs and courses have specific needs when it comes to their accounting. Golf courses have a wide range of expenses that need to be closely monitored from green maintenance and irrigation costs to food and beverage expenses, from the sales of clubs and accessories to the payment of a wide range of contracted employees.
There are many different aspects of running a golf course and all will have their own levels of expenditure and margin of profit which can muddy the waters when it comes to accurate financial reporting. Keeping track of it all can be a time-consuming and laborious process. Accounting tools can make this process quicker and easier to enable your golfing business to be more agile and better meet the changing needs of the industry.
They can assist you in a variety of ways with their accurate reporting from helping you to realize which food and beverage options aren’t selling well to which players have the highest no-show rates. They can provide ample opportunities for saving costs and maximizing profits in a huge and multifaceted undertaking. Moreover, they can make the often Herculean task of managing such a sprawling business easier and more manageable, so that your golf club can be a stress free haven for you and your employees as well as the players.
Advantages and Benefits of Accounting Tools
So, why should you use accounting tools? The question should really be how did you ever manage without them? Without accounting tools, keeping track of the myriad costs that come with managing a business, even a small business, can be an extremely time and labor intensive task that involves trawling through and cross-referencing vast quantities of data from a range of different departments.
Accounting tools save you time and effort by presenting you with this information in an accessible and easily digestible way while also facilitating quick and easy data input so that records from all departments are accurate and up-to-date. Automated reports save you the time and effort of collating data on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis to enable you to make informed and agile decisions. They can allow you to track your inventory in any department with ease and many of the best tools are completely cloud based meaning that you don’t even need to be in your office to use them.
Hopefully you’re now educated on what accounting tools are, how they may pertain to the needs of your business and the benefits of their use. Now it’s simply a case of helping you to find the best one.
Best practice examples
We’ve been over the theoretical examples of how accounting tools can be beneficial to your business, but you may want some more practical examples of good practice when it comes to applying the use of accounting tools to the management of a range of enterprises.
Just a few of these include:
Controlling profit margins in the food and beverage industry— Restaurateurs must struggle to make a profit in an industry with infamously low margins. When you don’t know the true cost of every meal that you serve, it can feel as though your fortunes are left to fate. Do you know how you could drive down the overhead costs of every plate that is served without negatively impacting on your diners’ experience? Accounting tools can help you to do exactly that.
Retailers can spot profit holes— A sales rep can make it sound as though any product will simply fly off the shelves. Unfortunately, in many cases we don’t know if we’ve invested in a dud until it’s already too late. The right accounting software can allow you to identify which products are sitting gathering dust on your shelves and impeding your cash flow.
Identifying and preventing no-shows in the leisure industry— No-shows can be a nuisance in the leisure industry whether they’re not turning up in time for tee-off or failing to attend their PT session at the gym. This nuisance can cost your operation money and throw a wrench into an otherwise well-oiled machine. Fortunately, many industry specific accounting solutions also double as booking/CRM solutions. This enables you to send automated reminders while also helping you to identify serial no-shows and take appropriate measures.
Essentially, accounting tools put you in the driving seat in an industry where it’s all-too easy to feel as though you’re asleep at the wheel, watching helplessly as your business hemorrhages profits.
Choosing the right provider
With so many different accounting software providers out there, it’s difficult to know which is best equipped to service your business. You have a few to choose from, but it behooves you to select a tool that has been built with the specific needs of your industry in mind.
Since it won’t just be yourself using it but also your managerial staff it should have a simple, intuitive and user-friendly interface to minimize the down time needed for training. It should allow for simple data entry so that all departments can input data quickly, accurately and regularly to help you to make informed decisions. It should be fast and adaptive because, let’s face it, time is money. It should offer a host of automated solutions to save you time and effort including fully customizable automated reports, statements, inventory tracking and invoice generation.
Your software should help you and your staff to prevent or mitigate mistakes being made or at least allow you to quickly and easily identify any errors which could result in inaccurate / misleading reporting. Ideally it will integrate with any other digital solutions you may be operating (such as POS). For peak efficiency it should also be completely cloud-based and accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
When you know what to look for in an accounting tool, you’ll be able to make an informed decision about which one is best equipped to deal with your business’ specific needs.
Solutions and alternatives
Let’s take a look at some of the available options out there. All of the solutions here are designed with the specific needs of the golfing industry in mind, and are designed to help course and club owners to manage costs, reduce needless spending and boost time-efficiency while also boosting revenue. Some of our favorites by niche include:
Golfing: foreUP
foreUP is widely regarded as the most dynamic and innovative provider of software solutions to the golfing industry. What’s great about foreUP is that it’s not just an accounting tool, but a comprehensive course management software solution. Everything from website development to course management to POS to food and beverage management and email marketing is offered in their handy comprehensive and cloud-based tools. They even offer golf simulator software to drive sales and boost efficiency in your pro shop. Should you need assistance with any of their solutions you’ll find that they also offer free live support. If you want a powerful solution that’s also intuitive and user friendly, you’ll be hard pressed to find better than foreUP. Click here to get to know us better.
Restaurants: Zip Books
Perfect for restaurateurs and bar or club owners, Zip Books has been created with the needs of the service industry in mind. It’s simple and intuitive yet powerful with a wide range of tools that can breathe new operational life into an ailing restaurant. It allows you to send invoices, automate your billing process, and collecting payments quickly and easily. Its intuitive, color coding reporting makes it easy to track business expenses and identify areas of concern.
Contractors: Sage One
If you’re a one-person business like a freelancer or contractor, Sage One is a great choice. For starters it’s extremely cost-effective, allowing you to send invoices and receive payments for just $9 a month. If you need more robust functionality, upgrading to Sage One Accounting costs just $5 more a month and allows you an easy to follow overview of your financials, accounting reports and the ability to track your time and expenses.
Small Businesses: Freshbooks
One of the biggest names in small business accounting, Freshbooks offers unparalleled integration. Not only does it integrate easily with your bank accounts to allow you to create detailed financial reports, it also integrates with a wide range of CRMs and customer service apps.
Medium (or Small) Size Businesses: QuickBooks online
If you’re looking for an accounting tool that’s intuitive and hassle-free, look no further than QuickBooks. It’s versatile, user friendly and intuitive yet carries a robust range of tools. It offers everything you need from payroll to payment processing while integrating with your bank accounts and your business credit cards.
Now that you’ve seen just how beneficial accounting tools can be for your, don’t spend another day entrusting your business to the whims of fate. Take control of your profit margins and invest in the right accounting tools for your business and industry!