A Practical Guide to Automating Your Accountancy with Xero

Let's be honest, no one starts a business and thinks, "Great, I'll get to do more accountancy." Bookkeeping, filing accounts, taxes, VAT, and all the nuts and bolts may not be any fun at all, but they are a necessary chore that can't be avoided. Thankfully, automated accountancy can be quite simple to achieve if you know the ropes, and typically at a very low cost too.

Step one: Get a modern accountant.

This may sound harsh, but if your accountant is still asking for bundles of paper receipts, lots of spreadsheets, talking about legacy software like Sage Line 50 or Mind Your Own Business, it might be time to move on. Your accountant will heavily influence the efficiency and ultimately the profitability of your business, and if they are stuck in the dark ages, you can be sure you will be too, to some degree.

Step two: Get a cloud-based accountancy package.

For us, Xero is peerless and has empowered small business owners to have greater visibility and control of the accounts functions of their businesses than ever before. If you’ve never grasped what a P&L (profit and loss statement), balance sheet, or cash flow statement is, Xero will allow you to run all of these reports yourself, helping you to better understand the fundamentals of your business in great detail. And best of all, Xero can 'talk' to other software, allowing your Point of Sale system, payments system, and e-commerce platforms to automatically post their data directly into your accounts. If the lifespan of your business is 20 years, just imagine the time saved and manual errors eliminated by this functionality alone!

>>> Read more on the AirPOS Blog

#xero #automation #accountancy #pointofsale #pos #payments #stripe #retail #business #ecommerce