Taking care of accounting is essential to the operation of your business. However, taking care of your accounting should not take up a ton of time. There are lots of ways that you can streamline your accounting process so you spend less time working on accounting tasks.

#1 Hire an Accountant

The first thing that you should do is hire an accountant. You don't have to bring them onto your staff; most accountants take on clients and work as independent contractors. You can enjoy the service of an accountant without having to hire one full-time. You can work with an accounting firm or hire an independent certified public account.

When you first hire an accountant, you are going to want to work together to clean up your books. You are going to want to make sure that your accounting books are up-to-date and current. From there, determine what tasks you want your accountant to work on and how often you want them to work on your books.

#2 Automate Your Expense Reporting

Keeping track of expenses can be time consuming. Collecting receipts for all of your expenses, and manually entering that information, can be time consuming. You can cut down on a lot of these times by having all employees that make purchases for your business install an expense tracking apps. These applications can be set up to feed information to your bookkeeping software.

The primary functions of these apps is to take pictures of your receipts as soon as you get them. That way, you don't have to save and file receipts. Then, the information from the receipts is transferred to your accounting software for you. This information should be checked, but an expense reporting application can save you a lot of time and effort.

#3 Rewards On-Time Payments

Finally, if you send out invoices to customers, instead of focusing on how to collect overdue accountants and the punishments to issue for overdue accountants, focus on rewards for paying invoices on-time or ahead of schedule. This may be the key to helping your collect payments faster.

For example, you could offer clients 5% or 10% off their invoice if they pay it before their due date. Or, you could offer them a discount off their next invoice if they pay their current invoice by its due date. Putting financial incentives in place for on-time payments can help you reduce the effort for tracking down payments.

Save time on your accounting by hiring an accountant, such as Vlasac John M & Co, using automated expense reporting apps, and providing incentives for on-time payments.