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If you choose to do your accounting in-house, there are steps you can take to streamline the process:

Take Advantage of Accounting Apps

Cloud-based accounting apps offer several compelling advantages for streamlined accounting. They allow you to access your data from mobile devices. They also have the capability of integrating with certain other third-party, cloud-based applications, allowing for the possibility of securing the data and backing it up easily.

Standardize Your Accounting Procedures

Create a written checklist of accounting procedures that should always be followed at your company. If you have multiple employees who are assigned to doing accounting tasks, all of them should be made aware of the checklist and held responsible for using it.

Use Cards That Give You Consolidated Receipts

Some card companies specifically market credit cards or fuel cards for small business. One of the many advantages these cards offer is the capability to enjoy consolidated receipts for your company’s purchases. This is particularly beneficial if you have multiple employees who need to make purchases on behalf of your business. There is no longer any need for dealing with stacks of paper receipts and time-consuming expense reports when you have the option to eliminate them and enjoy consolidated receipts from your fuel card or credit card issuer.

Create a Consistent Document Filing System

You’ll need an efficient system for storing and accessing any files that relate to your accounting system. The old-fashioned way of doing this is with a physical filing cabinet, file folders and sticky labels. This is still a viable method. The updated approach is digitising your documents and storing them in the cloud. If you take this approach, it will be essential to create regular backups and to store them in a different place than you store the originals.

Whenever Practical, Automate Your Accounting Processes

Human error is a primary cause of accounting problems and mistakes on tax documents. These problems can be limited by enabling automation to the greatest extent possible. Technology now allows for the automation of many accounting processes such as automated data entry.

Automated data entry typically requires some means of extracting data from scanned documents. Optical character recognition (OCR) software is one common method of accomplishing this. There are third-party companies that handle data extraction and verification, but doing it this way makes a company vulnerable to security breaches. An in-house data extraction service may be preferable in order to avoid that particular issue.