How Modern PO Systems Help with Bookkeeping

Bookkeeping can be a time consuming and tedious task. Nevertheless, having an up-to-date set of books is critical, not only because of the legal compliance requirements, but it also illustrates exactly where your business stands financially. Good bookkeeping also helps business owners stay organised throughout the year, which can reduce the time and stress level during the year-end period and statutory reporting time. A clear view of your financial situation can keep you in the know and enable you to make better business decisions.

Old-Fashioned Manual Bookkeeping

In the past, bookkeeping typically was a time consuming manual processes that relies on either excel spreadsheets or a desktop accounting system to record all transactions and associated material. Hard-copy receipts and invoices were piling up and manually entered into the system, resulting in wasting valuable time on an inefficient process. It’s no wonder bookkeeping was seen as dull and it stayed at the very bottom on business priority list. Luckily, technology advancement has brought modern systems to rescue. Business owners can now enjoy automated bookkeeping with much reduced stress and improved efficiency.

Introducing Approvol

Approvol is a cloud-based budget and purchasing management system. It is easy to use and helps automating a lot of daily tasks in a purchasing department. Approvol's main focus is to help businesses streamline their purchasing while having flexible budget control. It provides a central place for your procure-to-pay process. The net outcome is that Approvol allows users to process invoices with a high level of automation.

Automation Saves Time

With Approval, manual invoice data entry is a thing of the past. Approvol handles both purchase orders & invoices and makes them work together. Once an invoice comes in from a supplier, all you need to do is to create a new record in Approvol by selecting the related POs, and the system automatically pulls the ordered items onto the invoice record. Everything is then ready for you to review.

The invoice data entry only takes a few clicks. This approach reduces the amount of time your team spends on the manual process, thus freeing up their time to carry out more strategic value-adding tasks for your business instead.

Accurate Data Ensures Quality Books

Bookkeeping cannot be done to a high standard without accurate inputs. Old-fashioned manual processes are prone to human errors. The more documents and data points you process, the more likely you are to introduce errors without noticing. Over time, accumulated inconsistencies result in legacy problems in the book that are difficult to rectify.

Approvol provides automatic 3-way matching. At the point you file an invoice in Approvol, the system automatically validates it by matching the ordered & delivered quantities. With this, it eliminates under- and over-invoices. The end result is that you will be confident that the invoices recorded in the system are error free and ready for financial reporting & accounting.

Invoice Processing with Bookkeeping In Mind

All accounting software packages requires a set of mandatory information. With Approvol, you can set up your own library of nominal codes, tax codes, and supplier currencies. When you add an invoice record to Approvol, you are able to choose the nominal code, tax rate, etc from the library for each invoice item. As such, invoice creation is not only done with automation but also ready for bookkeeping purpose.

When it comes to the time that you need to extract the records from Approvol to your accounting software, all the required information for bookkeeping is already in place. For instance, at each month-end you can export an invoice list from Approvol and import it into an accounting package such as Sage and Xero. A big part of bookkeeping is done simply by a few clicks of buttons.

Improve Traceability

It can be quite a headache to follow a trail from thousands of records in the book. Approvol, being a central place of your procure-to-pay process, holds and records all the purchase orders, invoices, attachments, and actions together. Recorded events are organised and interlinked based on their business functions and relationships.

If you ever need to trace a transaction, simply start from a PO or an invoice, and all the related information in the whole business flow is immediately presented to you. There is no more timing consuming and head-scratching manual searches. Being a cloud base system, any related documents or data you need is available to you whenever you need, wherever you are.

Summary

Bookkeeping is a necessary task that was manual and tedious in the past. Modern software systems provide automation that helps streamline essential business processes such as procure-to-pay to bookkeeping.

Approvol is a solution for efficient budgeting and purchasing management. It links purchasing and invoice processing with a high degree of automation. It replaces manual invoice data entry with automated creation ready for bookkeeping. Furthermore, it not only saves time and ensures data accuracy, but more importantly enables you to focus on more value-adding activities for your business.

If you are considering a move to a modern system to improve your bookkeeping process, Approvol can help. Contact us today to request a demo or find out more.