In today’s fast-paced world it is important to stay ahead of the competition in order to stay on top of things. Having ready access to financial tools helps enterprises to cope with the business complexities and concentrate on their core competencies.

Small businesses are finding it increasingly challenging to keep their finances in order. There are various aspects that need to be taken care of like accounting, invoicing, employee payroll, and so on. Today there are various apps that can help with the financial aspect of a business. A lot of online tools are also available that can come in handy. But it is important to know what are the tools that help to improve efficiency and reduce redundancies and cut down on manual tasks.

Here are the financial tools that can help small business:

Cash flow tracker

It is important to know where your money comes from and where it is going. Tracking the cash flow of a business is very vital in order to keep the finances in order. There are a lot of tools available that track the cash flow of a business enterprise very efficiently. It might be a simple spreadsheet or a complex software tool that can measure where cash is flowing so that any financial contingency can be taken care of. It helps to detect an anomaly and set corrective actions for better regulation and management.

Invoice management

Businesses have complex relationships with various vendors and suppliers plus there are different types of clients and customers that they have to deal with on a regular basis. Invoicing thus can turn out to be a pretty laborious task but one which can be easily managed with the help of technology. It is essential to ensure that all bills are settled and issues resolved without any major fallout. Today supply chain management can be easily taken care of with the right software so that business can be conducted with enhanced ease. Automation of invoicing can lead to improved cash flow and businesses can take change in their stride with minimum hindrance. It is possible to extract information, gain valuable insights, deploy a set of action all by using software for invoice management. Today cloud-based billing can ensure that regardless of where the suppliers or customers are it is super easy to process and realize invoices at a much faster rate.

Accounting software

Accounting software helps to keep things in order, save time and money and lets you concentrate on growing sales. It is a single point for all information regarding the customers, all their vital information and important segmentation based on personas that have been created. All this helps to pitch the right product to the right customer at the right time. Keep track of all employees, the salaries that they are drawing, tax deductions, additional benefits all from one place. Staying on top of inventory is also possible and you can precisely know how many products of a certain category are in stock, how many are sold and so on.

The various aspects like tracking expense, supplier/customer relationship management, and automation of price quote, creation of estimation and such other tasks can be carried out without any problems. All this can be directly accessed via mobile devices by anybody and even integrated with credit card processing, POS technology and so on.

Payroll management

Managing the payroll of a company is an essential task but it does not need multiple personnel poring over documents to search for relevant information in order to finish repetitive tasks. Also when people do it manually there is high likelihood of making mistakes. The efficiency is also not up to mark as compared to a payroll management which has been automated. So this saves a lot of money and time and everything can be achieved to meet highest standards anywhere in the world.

Budgeting tools

Budget is of huge consequence especially for a small business where every dollar matters and it is worthwhile to squeeze the maximum juice out of every penny spent. Having a budgeting software is worth the cost since it can help to stay on top of company’s budget. It helps to create a roadmap to where the company is headed in terms of spending, expenses, revenue generation and other aspects. Due to this there is no room for second guessing and the desire to change things in hindsight.

Financial Analytics

It is always important to check whether your business is financially sound and monitor the financial status before exploring any new business venture and such other things. Financial analytics can help a business to answer very important business questions in terms of financial language. It aids people when creating financial reports, interpret the data and convert it into human readable format, give graphical manifestation and integrate various data to provide the big picture. It provides the telltale signs of business verticals that are performing well and ones that are lagging thus assisting to make informed decision. It also lets you model your business in a simulated environment and check the results of various cash flow deployment and its affect on the revenue in general.