Tag: accounting software
Custom Accounting Software Development: Understand the Steps, Cost, and Benefits!
Small business accounting software is a system that helps maintain a count of business revenues, cash reserves, loan allocation, cash flow, and payment data. There are several pre-packaged commercial accounting software available to meet business requirements. However, custom development of accounting software helps address a business’s specific needs.
View infographic: What are the advantages of custom software over commercial off-the-shelf solutions?
Custom accounting software is developed keeping in mind the specific needs and goals of your company. Typically, a custom accounting software system helps businesses streamline business operations such as cash flow tracking, tax calculating, internal auditing, financial transactions, business analysis, and reporting.
Small business accounting software solutions help reduce human resource costs and increase overall productivity. Most start-ups adopt accounting programs to boost competitive advantages to develop into mid-size and large companies.
Read more: Custom Software Development is the Ideal Way to Build Business Apps in 2021
Benefits of custom accounting software
1. Improves efficiency
There’s no denying that technology works faster than humans. All you need to do is input the data correctly and command it to perform the function. The software will perform all the tasks within the stipulated time frame. Simply put, custom accounting software does all the finance-related work while the business owner can concentrate on your business.
2. Reduces human errors
Regardless of your business’s size, you need an accounting system. Otherwise, managing all the accounts can be a daunting task. In the process, there will be some chances of human errors. A custom accounting software will perform all the functions with technical efficiency and helps in reducing human errors.
3. Saves time
Custom accounting software allows you to perform more tasks in less time and enables business growth. With small business accounting software, your resource hiring and maintenance costs will come down as the software allows you to handle more accounting jobs in less time.
4. Better financial monitoring and reporting
When financial operations are handled manually, the financial reports are usually prepared at the end of the year. Organizations can reduce this mundane task with the help of custom accounting software. It can generate the report at any time and help you identify any problems beforehand.
5. Faster data processing
When it comes to accounting, you must have experienced and efficient people to register and process all the data before using it. Custom accounting software makes this process easier and faster.
Significance of small business accounting software
Business accounting includes a wide range of operations to capture the entire financial situation of an organization. Done manually, it is time-consuming and a daunting task. However, custom accounting software has helped automate all the processes, allowing business owners more time to concentrate on other vital business aspects.
Without accounting, it’s impossible to do business. The accounting team makes it possible to evaluate the progress of the organization. It gathers information, creates arrangements, and evaluates the financial data of the organization. Small business accounting software simplifies financial reporting and management of operations.
Steps involved in custom accounting software development
Step 1. Define an idea
So, you got an excellent idea for your small business accounting software? That’s great! The idea itself is enough to kickstart the project. Next, you need to solidify it into an actionable strategy. Your team should take the initiative, perform analysis, identify the additional functions and features that will be feasible for the system.
Step 2. Design the UX/UI of your system
After assessing the project, the next step is to start on the prototypes and designs. The cost of software development tools is often based on the number of features the solution requires. As a business owner, you can ask the developer to design the app according to your business needs.
You will be able to decide what to add and delete during the initial phase. Once the software’s framework and future design are accepted, you can switch to determining the accounting software’s functionality.
Step 3. Decide the features and functionality
Some of the critical features you need to include in the software are:
- Account management
- Inventory management
- Invoice processing
- Multi-user support
- Budgeting
- VAT calculations
- Third-party app integration
- Sales order
- Payroll management
- Credit tracking
- Payment management
- Advanced analytics
- Billing management & record keeping
- Generate reports
Step 4. Develop the software
Designing accounting software is a complex and time-consuming process. However, using a questionnaire development approach can help develop appropriate accounting software.
Designers and QA engineers need to compose test cases before the actual development work. This will prevent any bugs in the future. At Fingent, our developers know the trending designs and develop applications using configuration management techniques to ensure proper software development methodology. Before that, we guarantee to address all the steps and innovations.
Step 5. Deploy and maintain
After the development of the software, the project is implemented and ready to use. The application may need tracking and improvements to stay relevant. Therefore, a support and maintenance team is a must for small business accounting software. The team must resolve issues and cope with problems in case of any crashes.
Cost of custom accounting software development
The development cost depends on several factors, such as the software’s features and techniques. The more features and tools you require, the more money you may need to spend from your pocket.
Additionally, you will have to consider the production period- the longer it will take, the more expensive it will be. The cost would also rely on the developers you employ to create your software.
Read more: Offshoring Software Development: Here’s All You Need to Know
Choosing the right partner for custom software development
Custom accounting software development may seem challenging, but it proves worthy in the long run as it allows your business to stay out of chaos. When businesses go for custom software development, they can build new capabilities on top of existing enterprise applications. Custom software solutions appeal to tech leaders and companies of all sectors globally. In today’s dipping economy, software development companies like Fingent help businesses restart or rebuild what they lagged with custom software solutions.
Read more: Points to Consider Before Choosing the Best Software Development Company
Being the top custom software development company, Fingent helps you identify the right tech stack and skills required to develop your software. Are you wondering how to boost your company’s growth and operating efficiency? Talk to our expert right away and get your questions answered.
Most often, one of the main reasons behind failure of businesses is the lack of a good financial management system that provides warning signs when the business runs out of cash. As the leader of an SMB, you will have better things to concentrate in, than to keep track of your company’s expenses, stress out on updating ledgers, create bills/reports, and perform other time-consuming finance affairs manually. The manual bookkeeping system (with accounting books, pens and calculator) no more works in a fast growing and busy environment like your company’s as it can bog you down with slow and complex information analyzing methods and limited accessibility.
In today’s pace of technological advancements, modern CXOs of small and medium-sized businesses should meticulously choose a financial management and accounting system that provides them clear visibility of the company’s finances, and allows them to solve current problems and future challenges easily. However, selecting the apt solution is not an easy task, particularly with the large number of options available out there. Financial management software is the backbone of any companies managing and providing insights into most critical areas of the business. As such, a wrong choice of the accounting software can be a complete disaster.The trade shows, magazines, seminars, and brochures typically tell you only the good side of what they have to offer. It’s almost impossible to foresee what can go wrong or is not possible with the software. However, over the years, almost all financial management software have gotten better and are competing with rivals to be the best. The question is how do you select the best for your business? And here’s the answer for it…
1. Budget
It would be nice to have a dedicated team of 5-6 people who can oversee the evaluation and selection process of the right financial management application. They should decide upon a budget range that can be spent on the solution and communicate it with the members actually performing the evaluation/selection of the software. The Budget should include the costs for the new software, any new hardware involved, training/implementation, product upgrades, maintenance, and support.
2. Identifying your pains
If you are moving from bookkeeping to software, you probably know what the issues are with your system. Or if you already have an accounting system, it might not be meeting all your requirements adequately. In either case, make a list of issues, shortcomings, inefficiencies or weaknesses of the current system. If you have a compelling list in the end, a new financial management tool is the way to go. However, if your issues list is not convincing enough, you may want to reconsider buying a new system and work on tweaking/upgrading/adding features to the current system, so as to make it efficient. Give a chance for your current vendor to provide a better solution to your pains. If having a new system is just an option, it is always better, cheaper, less disruptive and easier to keep your current system itself. If the issue is with your vendor, consider replacing them.
3. Involve the IT Staff
Your information technology staff will be well aware of the current and trending technologies. Before you make a move on your vendor’s suggestions, it would always be better to meet with your internal IT team to seek their advice on the different technologies and platforms that will suit the organization. The IT staff can provide insights on which technologies to look for, in your line of search. They can clearly understand whether the vendor’s recommendation for a high-end, expensive solution is essential or not.
4. Ignore current hardware and platforms
Companies are found to stress for financial management software that will work on their current systems, so that they don’t have to change their hardware equipment and systems. This is however the wrong way to do things. The best way is to find the right accounting software for your needs first and then find the hardware that runs best on this software. If the new software can run on your existing hardware, great, otherwise buy the hardware suited for the software. And this would be by far the least expensive component of the whole process.
5. Search, evaluate, shortlist, test and then Buy
Do proper research; educate yourself about the different solutions available out there. Search the internet; get people’s opinion in forums, discussions, social medias, and the like. Make a list of all products from top sellers you come across that almost meet your requirements. Elaborate the list to include all necessary features you want for your financial accounting application, providing a comparison of different products with respect to these factors. For instance, the factors to evaluate the different products can be pricing, modules, customization capabilities, platform, certified payroll, bar coding, time and billing solution and everything that is important for your business accounting software. The list can be then shared among key decision makers, who can then eliminate the obvious poor options, evaluate the remaining ones with respect to the features and relevance to business, to shortlist very few solutions. Check if they have the file system hosted or if you need to purchase it, former is the better option. Find out how much availability and bandwidth they can promise. You may even visit your vendor’s organization to have that ‘touch and feel’ impression. Request a demo to test the software’s capabilities and efficiency in your business, to the shortlisted vendors and take it from there.
6. Personalizing options to add features
By now, you are well aware of your requirements. See whether the shortlisted solution provides these, if not, ask your vendor how they can customize the app for you. However, keep these additional requirements (for instance, consolidation capabilities, e-commerce capabilities, multi-currency support, etc.)that you want to add to the solution minimal, because, if you need too much of altering/addition, you may better find a solution that already has those.
The good part of the whole process is that, you will be able to predict the apparent winner much before completing the entire steps. However, just to be on the safe side, it’s better to perform all these steps. Want to know more about implementing an integrated financial management software solution? We can help.