As a business owner, time is your most valuable asset. The best advice I can provide small business owners to save time is to utilize the automatic bank feed option within their accounting system, if available.
A bank feed allows banking transactions or credit card transactions to flow easily into your accounting system eliminating the use for manual imports while providing accurate, timely, secure and reliable information.
A bank feed typically works by connecting your financial institution directly with your online accounting software system to import banking transactions into your system each business day.
The most important things you need to start are to verify if your financial institution offers this service for your accounting software for small business and secondly, to have internet access. Quickbooks and Xero both have lists of financial institutions which allow secure data transfers available for reference.
Bank feeds allow business owners to quickly reconcile banking transactions daily; the user simply codes the transactions to the proper accounts or matches the cash transactions to the correlating Customer Invoice or Vendor Bill once the information has been brought into the system.
Users also have the capability to set up rules that automatically code recurring transactions when applicable.
For example, if you have a rent payment for the same amount each month, the system can be set up to bring in the banking transaction and takes it one step further by coding the expense automatically to “Rent Expense.”
The smartest thing you can do as a business owner is to take advantage of these efficiencies built into your software system to minimize the time you spend recording entries.
This will allow you the freedom to spend more time growing your business and less time focusing on business administration.
