Exporting payment data to your accounting software: Streamlining your bookkeeping
Hands up if you love bookkeeping. Anyone?
For many small business owners, handling the books is one of the most stressful and annoying tasks to deal with. It's even worse if you're still doing it all manually. Let's have a look at how you can use tools to make bookkeeping work better for you.
Bookkeeping doesn't have to be a headache
Small business owners have to wear a lot of different hats. You're the CEO, the HR representative, the marketing manager, and more. Some of those tasks can be enjoyable, but others are just a pain. Top of the list for many small business owners is bookkeeping.
You're not trained as a bookkeeper, and it's an area where human error can crop up more often than not. That's particularly true when you're doing it all manually. If you're still painstakingly copying over your sales numbers or reconciling your payments line by line, it's time to move on. There's a better way.
Why bookkeeping gets messy
Bookkeeping involves recording all the numbers involved in the financial side of your business. That means everything: staff wages, expenses, customer payments, loans, VAT, and more. It's an area of the business with a lot of moving parts, and it's where mistakes tend to happen. Here's why:
Manual entry can be inefficient
Sadly, at the top of the list is human error. If you're using a manual accounting reconciliation plan, you're putting yourself in a tricky position. It's very easy to enter a number wrong by accident, particularly at the end of a long day. Setting up your own spreadsheets can also lead to problems. Make a mistake in a formula, and you may end up magnifying every small error.
You're using several different tools
Small business owners typically use several different software systems. You may have one platform for payroll, another for taking payments, and a third for taxes. That means you'll need to move from one to another while you're putting your financial reports together.
The more different platforms you use, the more problems can arise. If you miss a detail on one platform, you'll find that the numbers don't match. That often means starting over, combing through the numbers on every platform to see where the problem lies.
There are delays at the end of the month
In an ideal world, it would be easy to do your monthly reports on the same day each time. Let's be real, though: that doesn't happen. Suppliers can be late to respond to invoices, there may be payroll delays, and unexpected incidents can cause you to fall behind. Unfortunately, once you hit a delay in your bookkeeping, it can be hard to get back on track.
You're struggling to connect with your accountant
One crucial step in many bookkeeping plans is liaising with a professional accountant. That means generating clear reports that you can share easily. Sadly, clear reports aren't always easy to create. This is an area where all the previous problems can pile up and make things worse. If you're juggling multiple platforms, if you're trying to do things manually, and if you're coping with delays, it gets harder and harder to generate those all-important reports and work with your accountant.
What payment data needs to be tracked?
As a small business owner, you need to stay on top of all the numbers. That can include:
Total revenue: Start with your overall figures. These will help you work out the bigger picture of your business finances.
Transaction dates and types: You should know when each individual transaction took place, and what it consisted of. That includes incoming payments from customers, as well as outgoing payments to suppliers, staff, and so on.
Tax and VAT: Every small business owner needs to stay on top of their taxes. Get that wrong, and you risk getting yourself into serious trouble.
Refunds and chargebacks: This is an area that many business owners accidentally overlook. You may have already reconciled a customer's transaction, but are you keeping track of refunds, as well?
That's not an exhaustive list. It's important that you get all the data right for your bookkeeping work, and that depends on the nature of your business. A retailer will have reports that look very different from a company running professional services.
Speak with your accountant to ensure that you're not missing anything, as this is an area where small mistakes can have huge consequences further down the line.
How SumUp helps you export and share your data
If you've got a SumUp Business Account, organising your bookkeeping can be a whole lot easier. We've set up a number of tools to help you streamline your payment accounting and automate bookkeeping entries.
Here are some of the things you can do within the SumUp ecosystem:
Use the SumUp Dashboard or app to instantly generate clear, easy-to-read reports. No more manually dealing with spreadsheets and tables.
Export your data for easy uploads. Choose the format you prefer: CSV or PDF.
Connect your payment data to Xero, QuickBooks, or your favourite spreadsheet programme. This is quick to set up and requires no special integration.
Using SumUp for payment system accounting integration makes your bookkeeping so much simpler. You can generate invoices in your Business Account, or collect payment data from your SumUp card reader.
Taking advantage of this type of automated data removes one of the biggest problems for bookkeepers: human error.
What’s more, there's no need to master several different applications, because all the data is collected within your SumUp Dashboard. When you export data to QuickBooks or Xero, it all happens automatically. That means you can wave goodbye to manually entering your financial information, transaction by transaction.
Real-world benefits
Using your SumUp Business Account to organise your bookkeeping can make a huge difference to your business. If you're not doing it yet, why not? You'll find several different ways that your professional life gets easier:
You'll save time at the end of the month
First and foremost, there are no more lengthy bookkeeping sessions to stay on top of. Every small business owner knows how much time bookkeeping can take, and let's be honest: those hours you spend poring over financial data aren't exactly fun. The first clear benefit of using SumUp Business Account to handle your bookkeeping is the extra time you can spend on other things.
You can hand off clean data to your accountant
Your SumUp Business Account makes it easy to generate clear reports, the kind that your accountant will love to see. Again, this helps save you time. More importantly, it makes it easier to connect with your accountant, organising your financial matters quickly and efficiently. This can also lead to a better working relationship going forward, which is such an important part of your future success.
There are fewer mistakes, so less stress
As we've discussed, human error is a huge problem for manual bookkeeping. When you automate bookkeeping, you cut down on possibilities for mistakes. Just set up your SumUp Dashboard to automatically send your data to Xeno, QuickBooks, or the programme of your choice. There's no need to double-check every figure, because you know that they're all going to be correct. That also means that your bookkeeping sessions won't induce so much panic, because you know you're not going to mess anything up.
You'll have better visibility over your business performance
Finally, let's look at one of the major benefits of efficient bookkeeping. It's not just about paying the right taxes and ensuring everything is above board. It also allows you to monitor your business. When you've got clean, correct, easy-to-read data, you can spot problems and issues with your business and quickly identify areas for improvement. Good financial data is so important when you're planning for the future. Even better, the time that you save on lengthy bookkeeping sessions can be spent working on those big plans.
Streamline your bookkeeping and improve your business
Those long hours you spend on manual data entry will soon be a thing of the past. Open up your SumUp Dashboard and see how exporting payment data can help you. To simplify things, try setting up a regular monthly report. With a simple, automated step, you'll never fall behind with your bookkeeping again.
