When you start up in business you focus on the essentials. You also focus on the passion of what you’re doing. As a result, this means that you tend to rely on tried and tested methods from the past for the areas of the business which aren’t the passion-drivers.

These areas, such as your bookkeeping, tend to get done ‘on the fly’ using whichever method you’re comfortable with from your previous life. In the case of bookkeeping, this often means a reliance on Excel, with maybe some backup support from Word.

Using Excel and Word then becomes the habit. It’s the way you ‘do’ things. You’ve got a system and it works. As long as you follow the system all is A-OK. Invoices are generated in Word, you log them in Excel, they get paid, you repeat the process.

Bookkeeping is, in many ways, a straightforward process. So the system works fine, right? This is where there’s a caveat: it’s worked fine so far. And another one: it could be better. It could be faster, more efficient, and definitely more accurate. The reality is, you don’t actually know how hard you’re making your accounting life because you don’t know any different.

Mistakes – human error and Excel are best buddies

Your Excel spreadsheets are only ever as accurate as the person entering the data. Humans are, well, human. Mistakes will happen. That mistake could be a decimal point in the wrong place, and errant figure, or it could be something a monumental as messing up your formatting.

Mistakes can be fixed once they’re found, but they take up valuable time. Time which you want to save for the real focus of the business. That’s assuming you notice the mistake before it becomes a real headache.

Delays – tracking the timings

Mistakes are bad enough, but with a manual Excel sheet you’re also required to do the legwork. It’s down to you to constantly keep an eye on payments coming in and out. You need to be vaguely aware that X client was due to pay Y invoice by last Friday.

Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to remember that? In fact, even if you do remember, you’ve then got to go back through all your processes to chase it up. More time spent. Wouldn’t it be great if it got chased up for you?

Tax – you cannot afford to make mistakes

Then there’s a real biggie. If you dread tax season, and Self Assessment, you probably are an avid Excel user. If, on the other hand, you use cloud accounting, the tax season should roll round and you feel comfortable that you’ve got everything in order. There’s also the possible chance of being audited which may leave you questioning your Excel wisdom.

Cloud accounting – the better way

These reasons are a big driver for looking for a better way of managing your books. However, there are additional benefits of choosing cloud accounting too.

An exceptional cloud accounting solution such as Pandle isn’t simply a different kind of book-keeping spreadsheet. It’s more. You can generate invoices automatically whilst still being able to customise them.

The legwork is then down to a computer system, far less likely to misplace that decimal point or forget that payment date. Payments also happen much more speedily, again tallying up what’s coming in to your bank with invoices.

Did you know you can try Pandle for free? Sign-up today and say goodbye to your Excel ways.