Remote accounting with automation - The future of accounting

Whether your business has an in-house person for handling accounts and finances or you outsource your financial management to a CPA firm, you save time and money in both cases.

An in-house professional no longer has to travel to an office, which gives them more productive remote hours.

As the business owner, you save on the cost of office rent for all employees.

If you have hired a CPA firm that already does remote accounting, their services are much cheaper in general. 

Thanks to modern video conferencing tools like Zoom, Google Meet, etc. you can connect with your employees and service providers from wherever you are and whichever time is suitable for both parties. This also brings a great level of flexibility.

Since you will be dealing with all digital methods of accounting, all data will be stored on the cloud and easily accessible at any time.

Cloud services safeguard your data with industry-grade encryption and security protocols.

When you use an expense management software like Volopay, all your finances are recorded digitally.

This negates the need for finance teams to maintain piles of paper filled with ledgers that they have to submit to the accounting department. 

All your transactions happening through Volopay are directly recorded on the platform and can be accessed by you anywhere and anytime thanks to the data being stored in the cloud.

Since everything is being stored on an internet server rather than locally on your desktop or on paper, you also protect the data from getting lost, damaged, or stolen from a physical office space. 

While storing your data on the cloud, you’ll also have the ability to backup data separately to add further safety.

And when it comes to security, all cloud storage platforms use robust infrastructure to ensure that your financial data cannot be accessed by hackers.

Filing for reimbursements itself is a long process.

No employee enjoys having to collect and safely store all their expense receipts, create an expense report, and submit all of them together at the end of the month. Add to that the time it takes to process reimbursements.

Weeks and months of waiting can cause employees to stress over their finances.

To avoid this and reduce the burden on everyone involved in the process, you can simply use a receipt scanner.

This feature is built into Volopay, which allows you to directly scan and attach a receipt to its relevant expense and not have to worry about storing it physically anymore.

Once the receipt is scanned and captured on the system, even the reimbursement can take place instantly. (If you opt for corporate cards for your employees, you won’t have to deal with reimbursements at all.)

Related read - Benefits of employee mileage reimbursement for businesses

The best part about using a system like Volopay is that all transactions are recorded in real-time.

This negates the need for a financial professional or accountant to sit and collect information regarding expenses from employees every week.

Be it expenses through corporate cards or making money transfers through Volopay, each transaction is recorded in its respective ledger and can be viewed by the admins at all times to ensure complete transparency.

Related read - How to streamline business expense reporting process?

A great benefit of using accounting automation software like Volopay is the simple yet super useful feature like 3-way invoice sourcing.

What this basically allows you to do is automatically source vendor invoices from your email and accounting tool, or upload them directly to the platform.

Thanks to this feature, you can always be sure that you have not missed out on paying a vendor invoice and don’t incur any late payment fees.

Related read - Simplify matching invoices to purchase orders

Accounting triggers is a Volopay specific function that cuts down on time spent on an already efficient digital accounting process.

When expenses are made on Volopay, and they have to be synced to your accounting software, the admin has to manually enter the accounting fields for each expense so that they are synced into the correct ledgers on your accounting system.

What accounting triggers let you do is autofill specific accounting fields for an expense made through a card, from a particular user, vendor, or a departmental budget so that you don’t have to fill the same fields every time for the same type of expenses.

You can just set a trigger, and the next time the accounting fields of an expense for that particular user, card, vendor, or budget will be automatically filled and ready to sync with your accounting system.

OCR refers to optical character recognition technology.

This functionality on Volopay helps the system automatically scan invoices being uploaded and turns them into bills.

It is also useful for automatically matching receipts with expenses and verifying their legitimacy.

OCR is a form of machine learning technology that gets better each time it is used and delivers better accuracy over time.

Many companies deal with managing travel bookings and expenses for their employees.

This can be a cumbersome process if you’re not using the right tools.

When using Volopay, our platform is integrated with TruTrip which helps your employees choose from a wide range of travel options and select hotel bookings as per their comfort.

This makes the process less hectic for the finance department as the employees get to make liberal choices based on their needs while still adhering to company travel policies.

It has been over a decade now since real-time synced online systems have been commercialized.

There’s no reason for organizations to avoid digitization and adopt new technologies that help important business functions to be conducted more efficiently.

Digital accounting is one such avenue that should definitely be on every entrepreneur’s radar to maximize business efficiency.

The cost savings and operational insight that financial tools like Volopay give you are far greater than the small subscription fee that we and similar tech solutions take.

While it is great to have experienced and skilled accountants or financial professionals on your team, you must always aim to upskill your staff with newer methodologies to keep up with the fast-paced business environment.

This not only means giving them access to accounting automation tools but also necessary learning resources to develop their knowledge base.

When you do this, we can promise you that you will see enhanced productivity from your finance team and accounting department.