5 Reasons to Integrate Your Payment Data and Accounting Software

If you’re like 46 percent of small business owners, you probably hate bookkeeping. Not only is it time-consuming—daily accounting tasks can add up to three whole weeks of work each year—but it’s also tedious and rife with the potential for error.Luckily, there is another way: You could integrate your payment processing system with your accounting software, which allows your sales and accounting info to automatically sync up in real time. This provides business owners with a variety of benefits. Here are five reasons to integrate your payment data and accounting software ASAP.Note: SwipeSum is a partner of several software companies and may receive commission on sales made through links on this page. Read more about our partnership disclosures here.

Reduce errors

Integrating your POS and accounting systems ensures that any updates made to one system will automatically populate in the other. That means you and your staff won’t need to manually enter vendor, customer, and payment information more than once—and that reduces the chance for costly clerical errors to be made. Additionally, account balances will always be up to date, which further reduces the risk of billing errors.

Improve efficiency

Because integrated systems reduce the need for manual data entry and redundant inputs, you and your staff will save time in a number of ways:

• You won’t need to reconcile your POS and accounting systems manually.
• Whenever you train new employees, you won’t need to train them on multiple, separate systems.
• Because integrated systems generally rely on the cloud, you’ll be able to access your accounting info from anywhere with the touch of a button.

These time savings improve your team’s productivity overall and free up your energy to be spent on other areas of the business.

Facilitate sales tax coordination

Sales made through a POS system that’s integrated with accounting software will be recorded in real time. The system automatically takes over separating sales tax from the cost of goods and parsing out different types of tax that may have applied to a given transaction. When it comes time to issue sales tax payments, you’ll have accurate, up-to-date information at your fingertips. This will both save you time and virtually eliminate the chances of making clerical errors that may result in fines.

Expedite invoicing

Any business involved in back-office sales (e.g. manufacturing) will find that integrating POS and accounting systems expedites the processes of accepting payments and managing invoices. Integration allows these transactions to be automated, so your sales team doesn’t need to be involved in manually processing the payment info. Instead, they can send out an email with the invoice, the bill can be paid instantly online, and the invoice status will be automatically updated in your payment and accounting systems. Major accounting systems including Xero (an accounting software we recommend to our clients) offer these types of services.Learn more about Xero here.

Inform strategy

Integrating your POS and accounting systems provides you with up-to-date reports that can prove invaluable to your marketing and sales strategies. For example, you’ll be able to instantaneously determine your best-selling items or highest-paying customers; identify opportunities for consolidation (e.g. for shipping processes); and experiment with price adjustments, new hours, and so on while tracking the results. Bottom line? Integrated systems enable you to quickly identify losses and profit makers so you can adjust your sales strategy accordingly.When you consider the benefits, integrating your payment data and accounting software is a no-brainer. The first step is to identify a payment processor that suits your business’ needs and provides opportunities for accounting integration. (SwipeSum can help you choose the right payment processor for you.) Not only will integration reduce costly errors and save you time on everything from inputting customer data to processing invoices and sales tax payments, it will also provide you with the analytics you need to refine your business strategy over the long haul.