HomeBusinessHow Automation can be Useful to Bookkeepers to overcome the Data Entry...

How Automation can be Useful to Bookkeepers to overcome the Data Entry Challenge?

An accounting practice that wants to achieve sustained and consistent business growth needs to discover a competitive advantage that will put it on the path to success.

These competitive advantages may come in the form of increased productivity among employees, more efficiency with projects, smoother business operations, or a combination of thereof.

The majority of bookkeeping tasks take countless hours to manually enter data.

A primary solution to overcoming from challenges manual data entry creates is automation.

Accountant sharing how automation can be useful to overcome data entry challenges.

1. Data Entry Challenges in Accounting

Bookkeepers are well known for feverishly scanning documents and inputting numbers.

While it is possible that they enter more data than other professions – bookkeepers face many challenges with this task like,

2. Time Consumption

Even the most precise bookkeepers are not exempt from the amount of time that data entry consumes.

They spend many hours examining ledgers, reviewing stacks of receipts, and attempting to decipher handwriting.

This challenge is not just an issue of time, but rather a stifling of growth.

Experienced employees are unable to use their expertise because they are spending more time on work that requires no skill.

Practices and businesses could increase their earning potential if they utilized these experienced experts with more complex duties.

3. Chances of Errors

Any type of repetitive task is at chances of risk for any size of human error.

This also applies to manual data entry.

These errors could be due to faded receipts, illegible handwriting, missing documents, or merely a typo.

No matter what the reason is, accounting experts are employed for their remarkable accuracy.

And a simple mistake could cost a business a large client, thousands of pounds, or in some cases depending on severity – a lawsuit.

4. Inability in Handling Influx of Work

In the case of manually entering data, a sudden surplus of work is a significant setback.

For instance, annual occurrences such as tax season could be detrimental to accounting professionals who are not using automation software.

If the team of bookkeepers is small, they will face an increase of pressure, often resulting in workplace dissatisfaction.

More significantly, an influx in work will usually result in huge amounts of errors in case of manual data entry.

5. Automation in Bookkeepers

The automation can be used to eliminate the data entry challenges mentioned above.

The accounting industry can use automation in the form of Artificial Intelligence (AI), or Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

Software robots, or ‘digital workforce’, can replicate the repetitive task related to data entry.

These automotive bots can automatically scan receipts, invoices, and other documents.

Receipt-bank, Hubdoc, AutoEntry to name a few, can be deployed to automate bookkeeping and repetitive data entry tasks.

Robotic automation can automatically update the client database without manually entering customer information.

As a result, documents could be processed with increased speed and accuracy.

The addition of RPA allows data entry to be completed 20 times faster than manual data entry.

For smaller practice, it is particularly relevant to note the benefits of cloud technologies which provide access to data that is consolidated in a secure environment and support scaling up to more easily.

6. Why do we need to go for Automation?

Data entries can be more time consuming and can cause errors despite your best efforts.

And in the long term fixing those errors can cost more time and money.

Automation will help bookkeepers to do this task accurately and faster so that you can save more time to look after other accounting tasks of your client’s business.

In short, a lack of automation can cost you more time and money.

Benefits of Automation in Bookkeepers

1. Time and cost-saving

Just like other technological changes in accounting, the use of automation in the accounting data entry task is cost saving.

Start using automation for data entry is generally like adding up a new employee in staff, the one that does not require any holidays.

Automation in the data entry task can save days and even weeks of time.

2. Staff Satisfaction

No one enjoys the mind-numbing and repetitive task of reconciliation and data entry.

Automation in such tasks will free up the employee’s time to use their experience and expertise in more diverse situations, and they will be happier in their role.

3. Remote Working

Automation in accounting will open another door to the convenience of mobile working and working outside mandated working hours.

By automation of data entry, the details can be entered into the correct ledger automatically and can be understood easily.

Final Thought

Nowadays, technology is leaping ahead, and solutions thought as science fiction previously are available to use here and there.

A computer can understand and read receipts and invoices, and ensure the details are into the correct ledger leading your business to potential revolutions the way you work.

At last, there’s everything to gain and nothing to lose with the use of automation in accounting tasks like data entry.

FinanceGAB
FinanceGABhttps://financegab.com/
Ajeet Sharma, the founder of Financegab and a well-known name in the field of financial blogging. Blogging since 2017, he has the expertise and excellent knowledge about personal finance. Financegab is all about personal finance which aims to create awareness among people about personal finance and help them to make smart, well-informed financial decisions.

RECENT POSTS

Most Popular