From Excel to an online invoicing program
Small businesses always start with Excel. But Excel only works up to a point, then your business must evolve to avoid getting stuck. Discover why the best companies already use online invoicing.
Why isn’t Excel a long-term solution?
Excel can do many things, it can be easily obtained and is widely used in the business world. These are its merits and it would be a mistake not to recognize them.
Despite this, and although the program is robust, the use of spreadsheets in business management generates many errors.
Spreadsheets always involve errors
A poorly made spreadsheet can have fatal effects for any business.
Unfortunately these types of errors are very frequent. And while data is entered manually, there’s copy-paste and formulas exist, these errors will continue to be very common.
7 problems you’ll have if you use Excel
Using Excel isn’t the best program for your small business. These are the reasons:
Using Excel requires learning, and many companies forget this. Furthermore, on most occasions, its users poorly judge their level of experience with the program. That is, they think they know more than they actually know.
Preparing a reliable Excel sheet that satisfies all your needs requires time, concentration and knowledge. Getting to create expense or income reports is not easy at all. And you can also find that you have to constantly modify or add data to your spreadsheet. Losing a lot of time.
In Excel you have to know exactly what you’re going to use the data for before starting because then there’s no flexibility to configure them. You need to know how to name reports and their cells and ensure that each report has the appropriate timestamp.
Excel documents are manipulable because they can be modified very easily and it’s difficult to control who makes changes. Imagine if a team member enters 100,000 instead of 1,000 euros.
Many users have problems when working with multiple pages, large amounts of data and formulas. It’s very easy to make mistakes.
Excel doesn’t integrate with other programs you use in your business or that your tax advisor uses.
Excel doesn’t allow you to detect errors or duplicates. For example, it doesn’t warn you when you’ve created two invoices with the same numbering.
Excel isn’t good or bad, it simply wasn’t created to handle a business’s invoicing. The time has come to give your business the possibility to grow and succeed, without restrictions or errors.
Why is an online invoicing program better?
An online invoicing program:
Is much more reliable. Cloud software is scalable, profitable and totally adapted to your small business needs.
You can have multiple users for the same account with different access permissions, ensuring this way that sensitive information isn’t available to everyone.
The software is always updated without having to do anything, and backups of all information are made daily on secure servers. Something that gives you great peace of mind and prevents you from having to worry about how to store your company’s information, not to mention the cost.
There’s no possibility of fraud or manipulation with an online invoicing program, all operations are recorded and you’ll know who and when a certain action was performed.
Reports are created with one click, and you save a great amount of time on calculations. Income, expenses, taxes, … everything is at your fingertips with just one click.
This is Ferran, one of our happy clients:
8 reasons to move to the cloud.
They are the following:
You’ll never again make unfounded decisions, you’ll always do it with the information you need in hand.
Your data is always reliable: it’s permanently updated in the cloud and there are no calculation errors.
You can drastically reduce manual errors by automating processes.
You won’t need a month to access information. Real-time reports are easy to obtain and share.
Filing your taxes can be done in minutes instead of hours because the program calculates your taxes for you.
You’ll be able to manage your finances better and in a much more precise way. Your tax advisor can have a user that allows them to access your account to consult data, export information or even transfer to accounting.
It integrates with other programs, for example you can export for A3 and Contaplus which are the two accounting programs most used by managers and tax advisors in Spain.
You can access your data anytime and anywhere. Your data is in the cloud, which means you can consult it wherever you are and from any device (tablet, mobile, computer,…).
The effort is worth it
Although changing the way you work isn’t easy, the benefits that using an online invoicing program will give you are very important.
Go to the cloud and start working in a completely different way.
