Many people would agree that running your own business – while rewarding and exciting – can be challenging and complex.
Your business might well be a vehicle for your ideas, motivations, and goals, but its success is dependent on sound financial management. Setting yourself up with software that can track your finances is integral to ensuring that your business thrives in the long-term.
This is an article about the frustrating way one of our members had to manually sign up to bank feeds using QuickBooks Online and an unknown company called SISS Data Services!
Having bank feeds reduces the amount of time you need to spend entering in your transaction data AND the potential for data entry errors.
Accounting software such as Xero, founded in New Zealand and listed on the ASX, as well as US software giant Intuit’s flagship product QuickBooks, are commonly used accounting programs. Both offer bankfeed connections so you can reconcile your business transactions all in one place quicker and easier.
Although similar in their promoted outcome, Xero and Quickbooks differ in how efficiently they appear to enable bank feeds. The user experience appears very different and QuickBooks seems quite clunky as you might see from the images below.
Tracking your cash flow is the key to success
Accessing direct feeds from your bank that reflect your business’ financial activities is important to verify just where your money goes and where it comes from. These days you would expect that everything can be done online with a couple of clicks but a recent example from one of our team members shows just how clunky it is with QuickBooks.
Software that helps you crunch the numbers
When it’s time to reconcile your business transactions with your bank, the provision of direct bank feeds and a simple reconciliation process ensures hassle-free business-as-usual.
For the recent QuickBooks user experience mentioned above the business owner had to follow these steps:
- direct bank feeds can be requested by entering the bank’s details via an online form
- The form had to be printed,
- hand-signed, and
- emailed or posted to a third-party company called SISS!?
Once this form is received, users should expect a 10-day waiting period before their request is approved!
For Xero users, bank feeds do not have to be requested, and bank transactions are simply displayed on the user’s business dashboard. These automated bank feeds can then be reconciled at the click of a button.
Quickbooks vs Xero, which one is really better?
Despite its popularity, QuickBooks might pose a challenge to users who want to hit the ground running with their business. Providing confidential bank records is something to be carefully considered and might be a source of unease while waiting for approval of what is considered essential business information. With Xero, accessing your transaction data seems like a far more seamless process.
Using cloud-based accounting software, particularly convenient for remote workers, can also help you get paid faster by clients: Xero highlights invoices that need to be chased up and can schedule invoices to be conveniently sent directly to the user.
The efficiency of financial management can influence the quality of client engagement, the delivery of products and services, and overall business success. If you haven’t looked closely at how your business finances are being tracked, here is a good place to start.
Looking for work or running a business
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