What Do Accountants/Businesses Look for in an Accounting Software

Tally Solutions |Updated on: December 9, 2022

• What is Accounting Software?
• Core Qualities that Accountants look for in Accounting Software Solutions
• What do Accountants/ Businesses need Accounting Software Solutions
• What do Accountants value most in Accounting Software Solutions?
  • Security of Data
  • Inventory Management
  • Payroll Management
  • Principal work of Accounting
  • Fixed Asset Management
  • Providing Reporting Framework Work
  • Preparing Invoices
  • Automation of Accounts
  • Tax Management
  • Portability and Access to Data
  • Integration of Accounts and Building Resource for ERP Systems

What is Accounting Software?

An accounting software solution is one that cultivates under the same roof all systems and applications dedicated to managing and processing financial data. Professional accountants and bookkeeping teams use these programs to govern accounts and automate systematic operations, while certain systems are also enabled to record accounting data, measure indicators, and report on the company’s financial activity.

Core Qualities that Accountants look for in Accounting Software Solutions

The core qualities that an accountant/businesses look for in accounting software solutions could be tabularised as under

What do Accountants/ Businesses need Accounting Software Solutions

The answers lies with the features that accounting software offers. Accounting software solutions make the solving financial problems and working with numbers much easier. And if it’s something that makes the job much easier, then it’s certainly something that’s high on an accountant’s list.

From businesses purview, accounting software solutions becomes their first choice because, it simplifies the handling of a company’s financials and keeps all finance related activities accurate and efficient. As accounting software’s streamlines and automates processes, the company’s financial records and figures are kept error free, cost is reduced, productivity is increased, and tax compliances are made to meet ends and other regulatory requirements are also ensured.

What do Accountants value most in Accounting Software Solutions?

This could be categorised and understood as follows

Security of Data

Financial data is the main source of the accounting work and must there by be safeguarded at all times. Cloud computing platforms gives a centralized location for storing all the financial information and it offers different levels of data protection as well. So this is the first and most thing that an accountant value the most in an accounting software which is nothing but safeguarding the data.

This is done with help of data encryption and setting passwords and user needs as who could access what information etc.,

Inventory Management

For performing this function, the accountant may look for a stand alone software or integrate the same in an existing accounting solution depending upon the necessity. Accounting software solutions in this block, helps to manage the movement of products to avoid overstocking which can affect your company’s profits.

The additional tool added to the accounting software solution enables you to track orders, sales, deliveries, and inventory levels, and even calculate stock depreciation if the products dealt by the business has a low shelf life product line. The tool can give you a paperless Inventory records (say in form of spreadsheets), for organizing the inventory data which one can upload and store in the cloud data.

Payroll Management

Payroll management is an another tool that attracts accountants as it makes the tasks of processing employee payrolls, automatically withholding and paying of taxes, creating legal and tax reports on schedule, and paying employees by transferring funds and salaries to their bank accounts or paying them directly by printing cheques an easier responsibility to handle.

Accounting software solution eliminates all the hardships that manual payroll maintenance offers by keeping the process efficient, fast, and free of mistakes.

Principal work of Accounting

Accounting software solutions here ensures that you have the figures right and accurate for general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, fixed assets, and bank reconciliation, among others. With the accounting systems core capability; we are able to track all of the company’s financial and monetary information which will form the financial record and history that will be sought out by management in their everyday operations as well in decision making.

Again here the automation capability of Accounting systems not just limits its work to bookkeeping alone instead it rides over higher level processes like matching transactions on bank statements to those in the general ledger or matching payments to invoices etc.,

Fixed Asset Management

The feature in accounting software helps to easily manage the financial information related to companies assets. It keeps you updated and informed of the location, quantity, condition, and depreciation status of the company’s fixed assets as well as the cost of maintaining them.

The decision making process of disposing of the fully depreciated asset or in productive assets comes from the reports generated in this part of the segment of accounting systems.

Providing Reporting Framework Work

Today accountants undertake vivid responsibilities in an organisation for the role-play of taking care of corporate data and information. So as a professional requires tools to perform his duties, accounting software solutions offer that hand which accountants need to perform his duties.

Today the accounting solutions offer robust reporting and analytics tools that help greatly bin decision making over matters concerned with finance and figures. It provides accountants and finance managers with crucial financial insights and accurate financial information, all of which they can report to management for its guidance.

Preparing Invoices

The accounting software helps automate invoice creation based on the requirements and can even send invoices via email to customers and clients. A real time client portal can be created with credibility for invoice modification and automatic reflection of the amount after instant calculation of taxes.

Processing of payments can also be undertaken either through the online payment capabilities built into the software or through integrations with third party payment processors or payment gateways. Many accounting applications such as TallyPrime can let you automate the payment process – from scheduling bank payments to direct deposits and even printing cheques.

Automation of Accounts

Automation is the pillar stone for building a reliable accounting solution. Every accounting software solution applies some sort of automation to simplify processes, from simple accounting transactions to complex financial activities.

Most companies today utilize accounting software solutions to fully automate timesheets and payroll, to track employee expenses, prepare corporate budgets, ascertain purchase requisitions, creation of invoice, online tax filing (GST in TallyPrime), scheduling of payments, and many other financial operations.

Tax Management

Tax regulations change over time and one fine example is the introduction of Goods and Service Taxes Act in India. Accounting systems can help you manage all those compliance requirements with automatic calculations on tax for sales (GST) and payments as well as on withholdings for employee payroll (ESI, EPF etc.,) and other direct tax taxation laws such as Tax deducted at Source (TDS).

As the accounting software keeps you updated and informed through automatic reminders and sorting everything, the risks of being penalized for late payments are also minimized if not eliminated.

Portability and Access to Data

With the help of the mobile based apps of the accounting systems instilled in the office premise, cloud hosted or web based accounting performances can be carried out with ease as it offers a lot more mobility and freedom to work and access the financial data.

It enhances work performance; enables building up of communication with clients, vendors and suppliers, and management; it keeps us updated on the go with all the important work reminders and notifications, and informs us of the scheduled tasks and activities to be undertaken period.

Integration of Accounts and Building Resource for ERP Systems

Accounting systems offer flexibility with elasticity to integrate with third party business software’s and productivity apps and services such as payment gateways, sales software, CRMs, business intelligence systems, project management tools, and many others.

This ability of accounting systems translates the businesses by being able to work on important events concerning the company’s financials.