Small Business Guide to Real-Time Accounting

Real-time accounting, also known as managed accounting, uses live data to give you up-to-date insight into your income, expenses, balances and all things related to bookkeeping. This real-time aspect allows businesses to make decisions promptly and paints a clear financial picture for companies on a daily basis.

In this post we’ll take you through 5 benefits of real-time accounting so that you can decide if it’s right for your business.

5 benefits of real time accounting

Get your taxes done accurately and on-time

Real-time accounting system software creates thorough and accurate income statements and balance sheets, in - you guessed it - real time. This means that financial statements going out of date is no longer an issue. This can help make paying your taxes far easier and allows for much less room for error.

Easily show investors and banks your financial status

If you’re looking to attract investors or apply for a loan with a bank, it’s crucial that you can show up to date accurate financial statements demonstrating your business’ financial performance. With real-time accounting, you don’t have to wait until the end of the month to have all this information handy. This means you can schedule your meetings with investors and/or the bank whenever you please.

Keep up to date with profit and losses

Having more regular insight into profit and loss is a key way in which you will benefit from having real-time accounting. With just a single click at any time of day or night, you can get an accurate picture of your profitability. This is opposed to having to wait for specific intervals during the year when the data is ready to be presented.

Keep a closer eye on cash-flow

Cash flow waxes and wanes on a daily basis. This means that waiting for weekly or monthly cash flow charts can impede you seeing important cash flow changes as and when they happen. In a worst case scenario, this can lead to some nasty surprises. With real-time visibility, however, you can constantly see cash flow shortages and act to remedy them immediately.

Make smarter business decisions

Making big financial decisions for your business, such as deciding whether or not to expand, can be difficult. However, real-time accounting can help facilitate this decision process. This is because you can check at any moment what your cash situation is like and what steps you need to take in order to obtain your financial goals.

Evade the end of year rush

Instead of having to rush to gather all your accounting information at the end of the tax year, you’ll have everything clearly and accurately laid out and ready to go. As well as being more organised at this stage, you also won’t have any surprises when it comes to taxes as you will have seen the calculations in real-time.

Have more time to attend to your growing business

With managed accounting, many processes are automated. This frees up time for you and your accounting team to focus on other tasks. Saving time, money and resources in this way can give you more means to invest in other aspects of your business.

How GoCardless can help

Using GoCardless saves businesses time and money. Due to payment being collected directly from customer bank accounts, late payments are drastically reduced making cash flow run far smoother.

Additionally, by integrating your existing accounting software with GC - real-time or not - you’ll be able to see the status of the payment at a glance. Plus, once you receive them, payments can be reconciled automatically.

We can help

GoCardless is a global payments solution that helps you automate payment collection, cutting down on the amount of financial admin your team needs to deal with. Find out how GoCardless can help you with one-off or recurring payments.