If you run a small business or are a freelancer, then keeping a tight grip on finances is critical for success. Our reviews cover the best small business accounting tools to help keep your company in the black.
Keep Business Running With A Small Business Accounting Website Tens of thousands of small businesses in the US have closed permanently since COVID-19 shutdowns began in March. And now that the weather is turning colder and people will be staying indoors more, we could continue to see more waves of the virus spreading throughout the country. Whether or not that leads to a return to shutdowns, small businesses will undoubtedly continue to suffer. If you own a small business that has lost customers and sales in 2020, you need all the help you can get to survive. Small business accounting websites certainly aren’t a panacea, but if you use one religiously, you should feel more in control of your finances and be able to make better decisions. As you grapple with the current state of your income and expenses, you can make smarter plans for your future. We broadly categorize these accounting products into two groups: those best for small businesses and those best for sole proprietors and freelancers. The first category of sites includes Editors’ Choice winner Intuit QuickBooks Online, Sage 50cloud Accounting, Wave, Xero, and Zoho Books. The second group features Editors’ Choice winner FreshBooks, GoDaddy Bookkeeping, QuickBooks Self-Employed, Sunrise, and Wave. We differentiate the latter category in a later section of this roundup. What These Services Can Do Financial bookkeeping is complicated and time consuming. Business owners find it challenging enough to cover the basics—paying the bills and tracking incoming revenue—let alone answer critical questions such as: Are we profitable? Why or why not? Can we make required tax payments? Should we invest in new equipment? Do we need to explore financing? Will we hit our budget numbers? Where can we cut expenses? Can the appropriate team members access all our accounting data online, if they have to work from home? A good small business accounting website can provide information in seconds that will help you answer these questions, based on the input you supply. Once you populate a site with information about your financial accounts; your customers and vendors; and the products or services you sell, you can use that data to create transactions that the site can, in turn, use to create insights. Instant search tools and customizable reports help you track down the smallest details and see overviews of how your business is performing. Android and iOS apps for the sites give you access to your finances from your mobile devices. Setting Up Bookkeeping Depending on how long your business has been operating, getting started with a small business accounting website can take anywhere from five minutes to several hours after signing up for an account. Small business accounting sites charge monthly subscription fees and usually offer free trial periods. The more you need it to do, the longer your setup tasks will take (and the higher the monthly payment, generally). First, you need to supply your contact details. If you want your logo to appear on sales and purchase forms, you can simply upload it. Some small business accounting sites ask whether or not you plan to use specific features such as purchase orders and inventory tracking, so they can turn them on or off. They may also ask when your fiscal year starts, for example, and whether you use account numbers. Do you want access to the transactions you have stored in online financial accounts (checking, credit cards, and so on)? Enter your login credentials for that account and the small business accounting site will import recent transactions (usually 90 days’ worth) and add them to an online register. Would you like to let customers pay with credit cards and bank withdrawals? You’ll need to sign up with a payment processor such as PayPal (extra charges will apply) or Stripe. Your People, Your Stuff One of the great things about using a small business accounting website is that it reduces repetitive data entry. Once you fill in the blanks to create a customer record, for example, you never have to look up that ZIP code again. When you need to reference a customer in a transaction, it will appear in a list. The same goes for vendors, items or services, and employees. No more filling out card files or messy spreadsheets. Once you complete a customer record and started creating invoices, sending statements, and recording billable expenses, you can usually access those historical activities within the record itself. Some sites, such as Zoho Books, display a map of the individual or company’s location and let you create your own fields so you can track additional information that’s important to you (customer since, birthday, and other similar fields). If you have employees that you have been paying via another method, you may have the option to use either an internal payroll solution or one offered by another company. Payroll setup can take some time and effort since you have to supply payroll history information (website support staff can help with this). Even when you’re starting fresh with employee compensation, there’s a lot of ground to cover.
