Accounting

What Is Accounting Software?

What is Accounting Software?

Accounting Systems Help You:

  • Visualize the flow of money
  • Analyze business assets
  • Make automatic payments
  • Optimize budgets
  • Manage tax payments

Visualize the flow of money

Accounting software enables businesses of all sizes to look at how money moves throughout a company. Through automatic tracking of transactions as they occur, as well as reports and graphs generated from data, users of any experience level can make sense of their employer’s financial performance at a glance and help make decisions to improve it if necessary.

Analyze business assets

Businesses can trace the costs their real estate, vehicles and other assets generate over time using accounting software’s asset management tools. By factoring these costs into the primary flow of money as they happen, you can easily perform a cost-benefit analysis for each of your assets and use the information to help decide which to keep and which to remove.

Make automatic payments

By submitting hours tracked to accounting software, your employees can receive accurate hourly and yearly payments through the payroll module, taking pressure off your accounting department to make these calculations manually. Your software can also handle payments directed to contractors based on their rates and the hours and work done.

Optimize budgets

By entrusting your financial data to your accounting software, you can use its budgeting features to help make plans for your business’s future based on past trends. From visualizations to machine learning capabilities, it’s easier than ever to plot out where your money needs to be focused and what can be safely cut back.

Manage tax payments

Accounting programs often include the ability to streamline the tax management process, which can especially help growing businesses that have more accounts to keep track of. Some vendors offer auto-tax calculators so that you know exactly how much revenue to allocate for tax purposes. Additionally, if your business operates in different tax zones, the program can help you calculate owed taxes for each relevant location.

FAQs

What does accounting software do?

In the modern business landscape, accounting software is an essential part of any business’s financial operations. Using it means managing money without the need for long data entry shifts, understanding financial performance at a glance, speeding up reporting and billing, and ensuring your data is as accurate as possible.

What modules can accounting software contain?

Our resources explaining the common features of accounting software systems can help you understand them in more detail, but in brief, here are a few modules you can expect to see in most of the available solutions:

  • General Ledger: A complete log of every transaction your company makes.
  • Accounts Payable and Receivable: Automatic tracking of short-term debts your company owes, as well as debts owed to you.
  • Billing and Invoicing: Payment collection, document design and accurate bill calculation.
  • Financial Reporting: Clear reports and visualizations generated from your existing data.
  • Chart of Accounts: A complete record of every business account your organization uses.

How do I Implement accounting software?

It’s important to consider whether you want to use a third-party subscription or an in-house deployment when deciding on what accounting system you want. Let’s take a quick look at each.

Software as a Service

Using a software-as-a-service (or SaaS) implementation means subscribing monthly and entrusting IT work to the software vendor. This allows your business to avoid a large upfront cost while also enabling you to use the software from the cloud — employees will be able to access it through any connected device. However, businesses may not want to entrust that information to another company, and subscription costs can add up over time.

On-Premise

Many accounting software solutions allow businesses to forgo subscriptions and cloud services in favor of installing the software on a computer or server within their organization. Though the up-front cost is higher and access will be more limited, some organizations consider the increased peace of mind and the lack of ongoing costs for subscription a fair trade-off.

How do I select an accounting system?

There are plenty of factors you’ll need to consider if you’re in the market for a new accounting software solution. How large is your business? What implementation works best for it? What modules are most important to you? The first and most important step in shopping for any new business software is doing research to identify your best options.

SelectHub is specially focused on helping you perform that research. No matter what phase of your software shopping journey you’re on — whether you need an initial list of the best SME accounting software or a more detailed accounting requirements checklist to identify what your system requires for proper integration — we have plenty of free resources to give you the edge you need in the chaotic software market.

If you have questions about finding the right accounting solution for your business, we’d love to help! You can contact our team of experts and get personalized software recommendations at [email protected] or by calling 855-850-3850.

Recent Articles

Research and Reports

Quickly find the best assets available for your Accounting selection research here. Our Market Research Analysts have clearly summarized and reviewed each asset to help you select only the assets you need.

Confidence Comes from Data

Enterprise accounting software selection is complex and beset with problems for both IT buyers and solution providers. We do three things to make it fast and simple:

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Our platform provides best-practices, including requirements templates & vendor comparisons, to help you make the right decisions for your unique needs, in a fraction of the time. Try it FREE.

Aggregated Reviews

We have collected every software review available online, crunched every last word using our proprietary Sentiment Analysis algorithms, all so we can tell you how a software product is viewed in its marketplace, retrospectively.

Professional Analysis

We relentlessly collect and analyze data about software, then compile and share it so every company has the same access to the information. The information we gain is then used in our Software Selection platform to help you find the right software.

Your Guides

Our industry journalists proudly distill the helpful information you read on SelectHub, always on the mission to share what matters so you can make your best decisions independently.

Enterprise accounting articles are written and edited by:

Zachary Totah

Content Manager

As SelectHub’s Content Manager, Zachary Totah leads a team of more than 35 writers and editors in their quest to provide content that helps software buyers find the right system for their company.

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Dianna Dragonetti

Editor

As an editor, Dianna Dragonetti leads a team of five writers in writing about a variety of software, with an emphasis on how these tools empower businesses.

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Hunter Lowe

Content Editor and Senior Market Analyst

Hunter Lowe is a Content Editor and Senior Market Analyst at SelectHub. He writes content for Construction, Inventory, Warehouse, and Supply Chain Management.

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Khaleel Hayes

Market Analyst

Khaleel Hayes is a Market Analyst for SelectHub who crafts content for manufacturing, PLM, PSA, and Construction ERP.

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Peter Lalush

Market Analyst

With an interest in technology and a master’s in Technical Communication, Peter’s content writing at SelectHub aims to bring complicated business software to an everyday audience.

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Thought Leaders

SelectHub has sought out and invited thought leaders to contribute to our Accounting industry articles and resources. These thought leaders ensure we deliver quality content with the most accurate information, focusing on what matters most. No thought leader is compensated for their contributions, but shares our belief that information should be democratized so everyone can make the best decision.

Hitendra Patil

Director of Customer Success, AccountantsWorld

Hitendra R. Patil, the author of  Accountaneur: The Entrepreneurial Accountant , has been named
one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in Accounting from 2017 to 2019. He has also been among the Top 10

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