Why you shouldn't be using excel to manage your business

Battle of the accounting stack

Don't get me wrong. I love excel. But I also value my time. If I can automate something to make my job more efficient, I'll do it. 

Take data entry as an example. The stereotype is that us accountants love it. Thing is... nothing can be further from the truth. Well for me at least.

Instead of manually inputting bank transactions, I use cloud accounting software such as Xero to pull in my bank feeds and reconcile the transactions to invoices and expenses. I alleviate the pain of having to manually enter the expenses by using Hubdoc to pull out data from receipts and vendor invoices. Hubdoc syncs beautifully to Xero so all I have to do is click a button and the transaction ends up in Xero. 

Sure all these apps cost a monthly fee, but it allows me to do my job in a fraction of the time. This leaves me more time to spend with my friends and family. It also gives me more time to concentrate on helping businesses like yours grow.

If the average business owner needs to spend one day a month to do a proper job of updating their accounting records using a non-automated system, he spends 8 hours per month (96 hours per year). Those hours could have been spent connecting with leads or spending time with family.

What would you do with the extra time you save?