The Best Ways To Choose An Accounting Software

Entrepreneurs cannot avoid accounting and/ bookkeeping. Most who did not take accounting or any related subject in their college years would have a good chance to struggle doing the accounting and/ bookkeeping work of their businesses. But your small startup business has not earned more than enough and cannot yet afford one of those expensive solutions, or is unrealistic to hire a full time accountant, the one best solution is to find and use an accounting software for small business, or startup size business.
Out there, there are plenty accounting software programs that may meet some or most of your requirements. Do you need a cloud based platform, or a desktop computer based software? And do you need a software for tracking your inventory or receipts, or a platform to manage your sales tax? First you will need to know (or identify) exactly what your requirements are.
You need to make sure the accounting software you choose to use in the first place is scalable in a few years when the size of your business grows i.e. Higher volume of sales transactions, more invoicing, more billing, more complicated sales tax, etc. very often in only several years, many entrepreneurs would end up saying “I cannot wait to buy more software.” to handle the finance/accounting side operations. When this is the case, it proves your chosen software at the time was never going to scale sufficiently for your growing/expanding business.
Xero accounting/bookkeeping software is one of the cloud based solutions which is very scalable, and is available for relatively low cost. Xero lets you easily connect your bank feeds so all your bank transactions can automatically imported into your software. Certainly, it would allow you to create your company’s chart of accounts, deal with all the invoices and bills, and receive payments through online platforms including PayPal, Stripe, etc.
Watchlist is also another feature provided by Xero. It is like a dashboard report. A watchlist keeps track of your selected accounts, and shows the balance for this month and the financial year to date (YTD). A properly set up watchlist allows for good practice. It can be used to keep an eye on expense accounts, and prevent your business from over-spending. On this dashboard, you can quickly check your tax debts, and watch your sales increase as the month or year progresses. Being able to track tax debts would give you a great reminder to put some cash aside for paying your next upcoming tax debts.