Smart lights turn on your porch lights at 6 p.m. Smart thermostats turn up your heat just before you get home. Smart plugs turn off major appliances to save energy. All of these “smart” things we rely on are the result of automation that exists for convenience and to help us save time.
In your business, automation means posting social media updates on multiple platforms at once or sending upsell messages to buyers through workflows. But automation goes much deeper than social media and marketing.
Accounting automation extends the same time saving to the financial side of your business as marketing automation extends to promotion. A few sources suggest you can automate up to 75% of accounting tasks with software. So if you’re not sure whether accounting automation is right for you, consider the following benefits.
1. It can help you eliminate manual tasks
Automation exists to take tedious tasks off your hands. Let’s say you sell on an e-commerce website and use a cloud accounting solution like QuickBooks.
At some point, you will need to enter all of your order, returns, sales tax, shipping, inventory, and customer data into the accounting software. But sales and returns can happen at any time. So unless you work at the pace of your business, let automation do the work for you.
Accounting automation connects all of your online storefronts to your accounting software. Every time you make a sale or accept a return, the automation sends all of that data to your accounting solution as a summarized journal entry or individual line item – and continues to sync the data as often as every 15 minutes.
Even if you only sell on one channel, imagine how much time and energy you could save by not entering all the order details, guessing numbers, or finding clerical errors days or weeks old later. In fact, this real-time flow of information has saved e-commerce businesses up to 10 hours per week on manual processes.1
2. It can help you grow your business presence with confidence
Maybe you’ve had your online store for a while and want to expand it by selling on a new marketplace, on your own site for the first time, or in person at local pop-ups. Expansion means exposing yourself to new challenges, fees and exciting buyers.
But if you’re worried about the extra time it will take to manage new channels for all the data entry reasons above, consider, again, automation. In some cases, automation can speed up and simplify these initial setup processes.
For example, let’s say you want to list all of the products on your website on your new Amazon or Etsy account. You could do it by hand. But if you use desktop accounting software, your automation solution can automatically transfer product listings (including names, descriptions, photos, prices and quantities) to your new store.
And once you’re ready to sell, the same data entry benefits apply, even when customers purchase from a point-of-sale terminal. Automation can give you the confidence to grow your operations, knowing that you won’t have to handle more orders or manually update item counts and prices in multiple locations.
Not only are sellers using automation to increase order volumes, but they are also using it to grow by at least two sales channels after just one year.2
3. It can help you record accurate sales tax to ensure compliance
From 2018 South Dakota v. Wayfair ruling, each state that imposes a sales tax has economic nexus requirements. When you sell products to customers who live in states other than yours, you are required to collect and remit sales tax based on certain criteria.
If you’ve been hesitant to expand your business presence – or start selling online – because of sales tax requirements, let automation take over. Marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy will calculate, collect and remit sales tax for you. But many tax compliance tools integrate directly with your website to calculate sales tax in real time, so you don’t have to research tax rates yourself.
Accounting automation goes a step further by confirming that you have charged the correct rate and routing the taxes you collect to any bank or clearing account you have in your accounting solution for easy compliance and a payment without error.
Automation can even help you customize how you handle sales tax in your store. For example, you can select the states in which you do not want to record sales tax. When you ship an item to a customer in these states, the system automatically ignores it when it syncs the tax data with your accounting solution.
At its core, accounting automation runs around the clock on monotonous, time-consuming tasks that hinder growth-focused initiatives, such as improving product listings, keyword research, developing new product lines and response to customer requests.
However, the benefits of accounting automation extend far beyond this list. It can manage inventories in the windows, generate purchase orders based on the number of items, simplify your sales taxanalyze profitability and even forecast demand based on past performance.
So, whether you’re moving from a marketplace to a custom online store or just starting an online store, think about the tools and technology that can improve your business and propel you to higher revenues.
- Based on a survey of 41 Webgility customers who were asked how many hours they had saved on manual processes or back-office operations since they started using Webgility. Data acquired in November 2023.
- Based on an analysis of over 3,000 subscribers who have been using Webgility automation for over a year. Data acquired in October 2023.