Let’s face it, organising your business finances can be a bit of a pain. There are so many different ways to choose from including keeping those receipts in a shoe box to be handed over to someone come tax time. But, when you’re on top of the business finances, it means that you can use the information to help you run your business better and make decisions based on the data rather than guesswork. So here are the top three tools that I recommend and use daily myself that will help you organise your business finances as well as help you get a better handle on those finances so that you can use them to help run your business.
And of course, you don’t personally need to necessarily be using these tools yourself in your business. And I certainly wouldn’t expect you to either, but these are tools that I highly recommend you make efforts to get installed into your business to make things significantly more easier for you.

Xero

Xero describes themselves as beautiful accounting software, but honestly I think that sounds a little daunting for most people. After all this kind of accounting software sounds a bit daunting. Perhaps a great way to describe it would have been something like, “A five easy way to record your businesses numbers.” But hey, I’m not on their branding team. In reality, Xero is written from a business owner’s perspective and is a way for entrepreneurs to keep track of your income and your expenditure in the business but is also robust enough for accountants to love it too and we do.

We are Xero certified gold partners. I was asked recently, why are we are big such big fans of Xero and it came down to two things, ease of use and great reporting. Because Xero is incredibly easy to use. They have a tonne of free videos as well in their library called Xero University. They have really great reports that we can dig into the data and we can get to grips with exactly what’s happening in a business as well. I love Xero and I use it in my business. And we use it for pretty much 99% of our client’s businesses too is cloud based, which of course means you can access from any machine, PC or Mac and it has an app so you can access from your phone as well, which makes it nice and handy for people too.

ReceiptBank

The second tool that I highly, highly recommend is Receipt Bank. 

Receipt Bank uses optical character recognition to read purchase invoices and receipts. That means that you just need to take a photo of them from your phone and receipt bank does a lot of the hard work. You don’t need to type data in manually or post paper copies to your accountant. It means that you can just take a picture. You can also upload PDFs for example, to their website or email them by forwarding straight to a dedicated email address for processing. Then in the backend you link up Xero and Receipt Bank. They speak to each other, which means that you can upload something to Receipt Bank and it basically ends up in Zero without you having to do very much other do a quick check of the information to make sure that everything makes sense and nothing has been misread. But it makes it significantly easier.

Smartsheets

The third tool is Smartsheet. Smartsheet is a little like Excel on steroids. 

We use it for internal reporting and dashboard reporting. Also for a project management tool for non operational projects. I am a massive, massive fan of Smartsheet and I would really be lost without it in my business. We use it for all our planning, creating content, producing this podcast, our Facebook Lives, tracking applications for open roles we have with a team, employee onboarding, tracking leads, tracking revenue. You get it pretty much everything in the business other than the operational side. I would be completely lost without it. 

So those are my three Xero, Receipt Bank and Smartsheet. 

And as a PS I also love and use Evernote. I use it every single day but not for organising business finances. So that might be a topic for another time.

I hope that this episode has been useful for you understanding the three top tools for organising business finances. I also want to invite you to step into the Uncover Wealth community. This is my private community on Facebook. You can search Uncover Wealth Community and Facebook or go to annetteandco.co.uk/facebookgroup. I do live teaches in there every single Tuesday for Training Tuesday, and I love to have you in there. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, let’s find the clarity in your numbers. Increase your wealth and get more money in your pockets.