I think you'll find that most of us involved in the Bookkeeping Industry are well and truly aboard the cloud "train." The cloud has many great benefits relating to scalability, access and security (although some also perceive this as a risk). One of the reasons that we have clients interested in taking their bookkeeping to the cloud is for the automation benefits derived from being able to setup an automatic bank feed from you bank and credit card accounts. There are definitely some time efficiencies to be achieved from this but just how much time depends on the size and type of business you are running and may not be a reason in itself for switching your bookkeeping on the cloud. The main benefits of bank feed automation are to gained if you are a small business with a small number of suppliers and customers and you have regular monthly transactions. The automatic bank feed can be setup to remember how these transactions were previously handled and therefore create the bank entry with general ledger coding based on the previous transaction. This can definitely save your bookkeeper an hour or two a week on data entry time. As the size of your business increases so too does the complexity of your transactions such as the following:
- Paying multiple supplier invoices and credit notes with one supplier
- Complex payroll to take account of leave and entitlements
- Customer deposits paying multiple invoices
The automated bank feed can still assist in matching these payments if they have already been entered however the automatic entry benefits may be reduced due to the manual input required. Bank Feeds are a great feature of cloud based software and are available with MYOB, XERO, QuickBooks and SAASU but may not be a reason in itself for choosing a particular software.
