Software. It can sometimes be the biggest helper of our personal and working lives.
In our personal life, many of us use Dropbox to store our pictures and personal documents. Dropbox also provides a hassle-free way to share files between users.
At work, software helps us significantly. It can help to cut costs by automating routine tasks, improve staff efficiency and office productivity, reduce paper usage thus saving the environment and allow us to communicate with our clients more effectively. These are just some advantages of using software.
For a Small to Medium Enterprise (SME) like Helix PR, software can help us greatly in our daily task of ensuring things run smoothly and that records are up to date. The benefits are felt greatly especially in terms of our bookkeeping.
So how was our bookkeeping done before we used a software?
Bookkeeping at Helix PR back then was pretty laborious, paper and time consuming. Each transaction had to be entered manually onto an excel spreadsheet. Hard copies of petty cash receipts had to be issued and bank statements had to be printed and manually tallied with the incomings and outgoings.
Basically, a lot of time and effort were needed to clear each month’s accounts. It was also not easy for us to give a quick and accurate update of the company’s latest bank accounts status using those spreadsheets.
So, to improve our efficiency and productivity, we made the switch to using an accounting software two years ago and we have never looked back since.
What software was it that got us converted?
Enter “Xero”.
What is Xero? Xero is a software company that offers cloud-based accounting software platform for SME businesses.
Why do we love Xero? Where do I begin!
First and foremost, it is a secure and reliable accounting software. These two factors are very important when it comes to bookkeeping. Not only that, Xero allows banks to connect directly to its platform and that saves us time as we do not need to upload the transactions to Xero.
And as it is connected to our bank accounts, it gives us a quick update on what’s outstanding, what has been paid, what our balances are. I like the way that Xero is also intuitive as it picks up matching incoming and outgoing amounts and highlights it to make reconciliation even faster and easier!
That’s not all, we love the easy to use and clean interface at Xero! One of the biggest challenges in learning how to use a new software is understanding the interface and how the buttons work. With Xero, little time is needed to adjust to its platform as the interface is dummy-friendly, clear and easy to use! Navigating around the platform is such a breeze!
We also use Xero to generate our invoices and we love how easy it is to format invoices according to the style that we want, in any currency we want. The end result?
A professional clean looking invoice. Payment chasers can also be done automatically via the software and that helps to save time. It even gives us the option of receiving updates when they are opened. Now how clever is that!
Xero also makes working with our accountants very easy as our accountants (who are Xero certified) can input notes into the system for discussion. It is also easy for us to pull out different accounting reports from the system and this makes filing our financial figures with the tax people a lot simpler.
The benefits of using Xero are many but we want to focus on those that made the greatest difference to our bookkeeping system at Helix PR.
In SMEs like ours and in many other busy PR firms, using this kind of software system can really add value and speed to the vital functions which keep us running each day.
In short, we went from Xero to Hero.
