Get Your Small Business Finances Together in 2017

Running a business is no small feat; it takes countless hours, mountains of paperwork, tireless nights, and is filled with trials and tribulations. Entrepreneurs perform many different tasks in a given day, including managing the books.

If you’re already open for business and don’t have your finances in order, you’re not alone. According to an interview with Chris Myers, Co-Founder of BodeTree, 90% of business owners don’t have organized, timely and accurate finances. With the help of a financial management system, you can quickly get your small business finances together so you can stop losing money.

There are a lot of services and programs available online, but one in particular does an excellent job of streamlining financials and offers an entire suite of services outside accounting services. Here’s how to get started with BodeTree:

  • Register for a free BodeTree account.
  • Connect business financial accounts, such as business checking and savings account and credit card accounts.
  • If applicable, sync accounting systems, such as QuickBooks (Xero and QuickBooks are currently the only two accounting systems supported by the platform).

Small business customers of SnapCap, an online alternative business lender, now have access to the full suite of tools, free of charge! Let’s take a look at how opening an account can get your finances together come the New Year.

Eliminate Manual Entry and Save Time

As a result of poor financial literacy, half of all small businesses fail within the first five years of opening their doors. More than 25 percent of business owners can’t identify their primary expenses and 90 percent of small businesses lack financial clarity and organization. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Like many business owners, Camille and Omar Brown, owners of Caribbean restaurant Kale Café, had a chaotic system with boxes of receipts and paperwork before they learned about BodeTree. They needed help organizing their finances to gain a better understanding of the health of their business.

The platform connects directly to more than 25,000 different financial institutions to automatically categorize each transaction that’s tied to the business, limiting the amount of manual data entry required. The types of financial institutions includes bank and credit union accounts, credit cards, ancillary services like PayPal and Amazon payments, and accounting systems like QuickBooks and Xero.

What’s the benefit of connecting your financials? You’ll get a real-time view into what’s happening with your business so changes can be tracked on a daily basis. Gone are the days where business owners have to check multiple accounts using different login information, and no more digging through piles of receipts to piece together historical transaction data. When connecting the business’ accounting software, you’ll get month-end financials and a view into the business performance based on accrual accounting.

Improve Finances with Industry Data

BodeTree can customize every user’s experience by providing unique responses based on the goals of the company, so you won’t have to worry about getting standard, canned responses. Business owners can provide an overview of their company and complete questions pertaining to their strategy, financials, organization, customers, operations, and more. This helps busy entrepreneurs create goals specific to their business and provides them with solutions on how to reach those goals (many of which include cost savings tips, such as choosing a different distributor).

For example, one question may be, ‘what do you do (or need to do) to increase the amount of products/services your customers buy from you?’ You can then choose from a set of answers on how to achieve that goal, such as build new products/services, increase marketing presence, or make more sales calls. That information is then used to provide constructive feedback on how the business is progressing.

Another cool feature you get when integrating your business information and financials into one platform is the Enlightenment Score. The Enlightenment Score takes a look at everything, such as historical performance and a business forecast based on the performance relative to your set goals or strategies and competitors, and then provides a visual “score” of the business based on the results. This is great for business owners because it points them in the right direction on which areas of their business they can improve, or identify an area of their business where they are missing out on valuable opportunities.

This unique platform takes complicated data and makes it easily digestible through colorful maps, graphs, charts, and other illustrations. The result is an automated and instant aggregation of your finances to start the New Year strong.

This article originally appeared on Huffington Post

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