What are the features and benefits of accounting software?
If you’ve landed on this article, you’re probably asking yourself if a new accounting software for your organisation is going to be worth the time, effort and money.
With thousands of finance professionals using our accounting software, we’re confident that the benefits and return on investment (ROI) you’ll get is worth it. How? Because our customers save 20 hours each month, £50,000 each year and have seen £8m growth using Access Financials - our powerful financial software.
But don’t just take our word for it…
This article simply explains accounting software features and benefits, how our customers use it, and providing you with more information before you buy.
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Accounting software features and benefits
Before we delve deep into the benefits, let’s talk about accounting software features. Each provider may offer different features within their accounting system. We’ll go through our accounting software features list below so you can compare this to other providers when you’re looking around. For an easier view, we compare our software features to Sage 50 and XERO in a table here.
We have 6 core features and 4 advanced features in our accounting software. Here they are:
Accounting software features list
Core features
- Advanced nominal ledger: with two entry segments (e.g nominal code and cost centre) plus six further reporting categories
- Sales and purchase ledger: manage invoices, credit notes, secure BACs payments, Direct Debit processing, payments, statements, and aged debtor/creditor reporting
- Self-serve: allow people across your organisation to input financial data, action approvals and view reports using easy-to-use apps
- Automatic bank reconciliation: secure open banking integrations and automatic transaction matching
- Tax and VAT: calculate tax and VAT as you go, and submit tax returns digitally
- Corrections: change, merge and amend account records and transaction details with corrections tools – all with a full audit trail
Advanced features
- Multi-dimensional ledgers: report from every angle – branch, department, group, fund or project – with three-segment nominal code entry. The flexible nominal ledger enables you to configure your accounts to your preferred management reporting style.
- Multiple entities: easily manage intercompany transactions and multi-entity accounting consolidation. Generate single-entity and consolidated financial statements at the click of a button
- Multi-currency: make light work of VAT for EU and non-EU transactions with multi-currency accounting and automated currency conversion using up-to-date exchange rates
- Transaction level user security: restrict what users can see at transaction level in the system
What are the benefits of accounting software?
Whether you’re purchasing your first accounting system or upgrading to a new one, you’ll see huge benefits to your finance team and financial processes. Like what? Here goes…
Increase your turnover
New accounting software will replace your manual, complex processes with streamlined, automated processes. You’ll be able to throw away spreadsheets and notepads to make room for real-time financial data and dashboards - accessed anytime, anywhere. This means your finance team will save time and be able to focus on what’s important to drive business success.
Your finance team will be able to automate invoices, track expenses, manage inventory, reconcile bank statements and more.
AFH Wealth Management switched from Sage to Access and saw an increase in their turnover. Read the full story here.
From a headcount perspective, considering we've grown from 50-60 million turnover to 80-90 million turnover as a business and as a group, we've not had to put in any more resource to maintain that level of growth”.
Easily report on financial health and business performance
Whether you’re in a meeting, focusing on a piece of work or presenting to a client/employee, you want to be able to easily flick to real-time data to back up what you’re saying or doing. With accounting software, you can do just this.
Anytime, anywhere you can get an instant view of financial performance with interactive, configurable dashboards; including debtors and revenue, creditors and purchasing, and nominal and cashflow.
You’ll be able to see key metrics, stats and insights, then drill down with smart search and filters to see the underlying data and granular detail.
If you need to, you can generate hundreds of ready-made reports with a click of a button to save or share with stakeholders.
And to make things even easier, you can create management reports in Excel with two-way integration with our Excel management reporting template and view, update and approve financial data directly in Microsoft Outlook.
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Give employees access to the financial data they need
With cloud-based accounting software your staff will be able to access the financial information you want them to see whether they’re in the office, at home, on site, in a warehouse, on a walk, wherever!
They’ll be able to search for clients and suppliers on the system, view customer transactions, see transactions under query, view all purchase orders and see the status of them, and so much more.
Providing staff with the tools to do their jobs more effectively is a great way to drive production and motivation. British Pipeline Agency (BPA) did just that - read the full story here.
There are really two main benefits with Access Financials - control and efficiency. It has improved our business processes and allowed us to operate much faster. By streamlining things we can now react much quicker to what’s important and the knock on effect is greater productivity
Know that all your financial data is safe and secure
With cloud-based accounting software you can have peace of mind that your financial data is safe from threats, data loss and leaks with enterprise-level security.
You’ll get automatic software upgrades to give you all the latest features without having to do anything, as well as 100% uptime performance with automated backups and 24/7 support in case anything needs looking at.
Stay compliant with latest UK regulations
We all want peace of mind that we’re complying with the relevant regulations to make sure we don’t end up with a fine. Accounting software complies with:
- ISO/IEC 27001 certificate for security
- Making Tax Digital (MTD): recognised by HMRC, Access Digital Tax application allows you to submit your VAT and tax returns directly to HMRC.
- GDPR compliant: store your data safely and securely in leading UK data centres. Plus, you can quickly search, update and delete records.
- CIS VAT reverse charge: businesses in the construction industry can submit reverse charge VAT returns at the click of a button
- Open banking: securely feed transactions from your bank to accounting software
So, there’s a few of the main accounting software benefits that you could see after you purchase the right accounting software for you. Your finance team will thank you for making their jobs easier and empowering them to focus on the right things that are going to drive success for your business.
If you’re a small business that’s growing, we highly recommend you implement an accounting software to automate and streamline your processes before things become difficult to manage. Our accounting software is modular so you can add on different modules when you need it so that your accounting software grows as you do.
If you’re a medium business, you may already have an accounting system. If you’re looking to switch accounting systems then take a look at our accounting software package prices to see if ours would suit you. You may also want to look at other modules that you could use to enhance your financial processes further such as financial reporting, invoicing and purchase order management.
See our finance software in action
Want to know more?
Have a read through more accounting software information, guidance and advice.
