It is natural for business owners or accountants to be primarily concerned with the cost implications of signing up for bookkeeping software. They might at best verify basic functionality before hitting the subscribe or buy button.
However, bookkeeping software can streamline your entire business and allow all departments to attain higher efficiency. This could easily translate to higher profitability for your business in the long run.
Our easy-to-use P4S2 approach to adopting bookkeeping software can help you to choose and deploy your software more effectively. We’re talking about problems, people processes, and performance + scalability and service = P4S2
Problems
Before you start examining what various bookkeeping software options bring to the table, take a magnifying glass to various departments and find out what issues they face with regards to bookkeeping – that includes sales, marketing, HR, operations; everyone. Your accountant should be part of all discussions because he or she might be able to lead discussions, point to where delays occur or lack of sufficient/ on-time reporting is a problem.
Offer the teams some lead time so that they can observe over the course of a few weeks to a month, where the problems or obstacles lie.
People
Too often, bookkeeping discussions or troubleshooting only occur between the business owner and the accountant, or the heads of departments and the accounts team, depending on the size of the organization. However, everyone who is utilizing or contributing to the company’s funds on a regular basis must be part of the discussion. It could be a junior employee who is servicing a client on a daily basis that gives you an insight like: I spend x hours a day doing unbilled work for client A. If we were able to quantify the hours and negotiate, that work is worth an additional GBP 10,000 per month.
Processes
Some processes and timelines might need to be reviewed in order for you to be able to make the most of your bookkeeping software. For example, such software offers live data insights but those insights are not actually live if people are not keeping data up to date. With the level of automation that bookkeeping software brings to the table, there are no excuses for team members neglecting on time updation of company expenses and sales income. Streamline your processes and add penalties for tardiness or rewards for the timeliness, as you see fit.
Performance
It is imperative that you sample the bookkeeping software before you make a long-term commitment. It is quite common for you to be offered a free trial. Take it!
For the duration of the free trial make sure that everyone we talked about under the Problems subhead and the People subhead above, gets a chance to take the bookkeeping software for a spin. Let people use various components as relevant for their departments – does it work?
Scalability
Organizations grow and their bookkeeping software should support this growth, rather than become an obstacle. Look for solutions that offer you a pay as you go and pay as you grow approach where you can start with only a few login ids and add on ids (and corresponding cost) as your business grows.
Service
Evaluate the customer service, technical support, and prior user reviews of a bookkeeping software before deploying it in your organization. How quickly and effectively does troubleshooting occur? Is instant help available when needed/ are they located in your time zone? Read reviews with care to identify what exactly prior users found useful/ problematic with the software and the service of the software provider. With this approach that is easy to remember, you should be able to zero in on the best bookkeeping software for your organization. Always remember your priorities and expectations while finalizing the bookkeeping software.
