How Accounting Automation Helps Businesses Stay Compliant

As a business owner, keeping track of finances is a critical task. However, it can also be time-consuming and stressful, especially if you're not familiar with accounting and bookkeeping. Fortunately, there are business accounting automation tools that can make the process more efficient and accurate whilst helping your business stay compliant.

Let's start by learning the benefits of using accounting automation tools to help with business financial compliance:

1. Keep Your Finances in Order

One of the primary benefits of using accounting automation tools is the ability to maintain organised financial records. One of them is Dext Prepare, which simplifies the process of collecting, storing and managing receipts, invoices, and other financial transactions. By integrating with popular accounting automation software like QuickBooks and Xero, Dext Prepare automatically categorises and reconciles expense transactions, helping you stay on top of your finances and make informed business decisions.

For e-commerce businesses, as well as expenses, the high volume of sales data can also be overwhelming. Dext Commerce fetches and consolidates sales transactions from marketplaces, e-commerce platforms and payment systems. Instead of dealing with hundreds of spreadsheets, you can rest assured your sales data is accurate and organised.

2. Pay the Right Tax

Accurate tax calculation and payment are crucial for businesses to avoid penalties and maintain compliance with tax regulations - it's the core of business financial compliance, after all. Dext Prepare and Dext Commerce play an essential role in organising and streamlining your business's financial data, which significantly contributes to paying the correct amount of tax.

Dext Prepare simplifies the process of capturing and categorising expenses (amongst many other things - check all its functionalities here), while Dext Commerce efficiently handles digital sales transactions across various regions (learn more about it here). They provide accurate and organised records of your financial transactions that can easily be accessible and uploaded into your main accounting software (e.g., Xero or QuickBooks). 

Having clean and accurate financial data is the foundation for precise tax calculations: it makes it easier to identify tax-deductible expenses, taxable income, and any other relevant tax-related information. This, in turn, ensures that you pay the right amount of tax in each region and stay compliant with ever-changing tax laws. Moreover, organised financial data enables you to better understand your tax liabilities and plan accordingly, reducing the risk of costly errors or unexpected tax bills.

3. Reduce the Risk of Errors

Manual accounting processes are prone to errors, which can lead to financial discrepancies and potential fines. Thankfully, business owners (and their accountants!) can now rely on technology to minimise the risk of errors by automating data entry, calculations, and reconciliation. This not only saves time but also ensures that your financial records are accurate and up-to-date, allowing you to focus on other aspects of your business.

4. Never Miss a Deadline for Tax Submission

Late tax submissions can result in penalties and interest charges, which can negatively impact your business's bottom line. The first step to preparing for upcoming deadlines is ensuring your financial data is accurate and up-to-date. Dext Prepare and Dext Commerce help you by collecting, storing and categorising your expenses and sales transactions. You and your accountant can also access your business data at any time to ensure nothing is missing and/or update any last-minute information. This ensures that you are always prepared for tax season and can submit your taxes on time, avoiding costly fines.

5. Upload Data From Anywhere, Anytime

With the ability to capture and upload financial data from anywhere, anytime, Dext Prepare and Dext Commerce provide unparalleled convenience for business owners. 

With Dext Prepare, you simply snap a photo of your receipt, invoice, or bank statement, and the software will automatically extract and store the relevant information. This feature eliminates the need for manual data entry and allows you to stay on top of your finances even while on the go.

Dext Commerce, on the other hand, automatically collects your digital sales transactions from your integrated platforms in real-time. It then categorised all that information in one standardised view - which you can check whenever you want and easily upload into your accounting software.

Both Dext Prepare and Dext Commerce are cloud-based software, which means you can access the platforms from anywhere, at any time. This makes it easy to keep track of your finances on the go, whether you're travelling or working remotely. It makes working with your accountant much easier too.

6. Ensure Data Security

It's understandable that business owners not yet familiar with cloud technology might feel a bit wary of accounting tools at first. Data security is a top concern for businesses of all sizes, and accounting automation tools like Dext Prepare and Dext Commerce prioritise keeping your financial data safe. Both tools use bank-level encryption to protect your data and are fully GDPR compliant, ensuring that your sensitive financial information remains secure at all times. This gives you peace of mind of knowing that no documents get lost and everything is easily accessed if you need it.

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Business financial compliance solution for expenses

Expense management is an important part of business admin, but it's also very time-consuming and prone to human errors. Dext Prepare (former Receipt Bank) is a powerful and reliable cloud-based accounting solution that helps business financial compliance stay in order. 

With an easy-to-use mobile app, you quickly photograph any receipts and the data is instantly processed and extracted into your account. You can edit the information to change categories for example, and set rules to “teach” the app how to standardise the data the best way for you and your accountant. 

You can also submit receipts, invoices and bank statements directly to the app via email, drag & drop, automatic bank fetch and several other ways. Your data is safely stored in the cloud, ready to be analysed and submitted to your accounting software.

Compliance solution for digital sales

If you have an e-commerce business, as well as your expenses you also need to deal with a high volume of digital sales. 

Each payment method and selling platform provide data in different places and formats. For example: if you sell on your own website, on Amazon and on eBay, and accept payments via several credit cards plus PayPal, Klarna and Apple Pay, you’ll need to collect all your sales and payments data from each individual platform. That’s also an issue if you have a physical store and take payments digitally - via bank cards or mobile payments, for example.

Dext Commerce helps you keep your business tax-ready by automatically fetching and reconciling all your transactions from digital sales platforms in real-time. Ensure your digital sales data is nice and tidy, pay the right tax in the right region and have a clear picture of how your business is performing. 

Conclusion

If there's one thing that never changes for business owners is the importance of ensuring tax compliance. And that will never go away - but accounting automation tools like Dext Prepare and Dext Commerce offer a range of benefits to help business owners streamline their financial management whilst ensuring compliance.

By automating everyday expenses management and bookkeeping tasks, you can reduce the risk of errors and ensure timely tax submissions - all whilst prioritising data security and having instant access to your data at any time. Implementing cloud-based accounting solutions helps you save time and money, and provides peace of mind, allowing you to focus on growing your business.

• Dext Prepare (former Receipt Bank) allows business owners to easily capture, store and upload expenses and financial records to the main accounting software – anytime, anywhere. Fully automate your expense management and bookkeeping process, and use the time to focus on running your business. It’s the fastest, most accurate and reliable accounting tool in the market. Try it for free and see it for yourself.

• Dext Commerce (former Greenback) fetches and consolidates sales transaction data in real-time from e-commerce websites and digital payment platforms. It gives you the reassurance you need without the stress of dealing with never-ending spreadsheets and helps you keep your business tax-ready - doesn't matter where in the world you sell. Start a free trial here!