Are you a small engineering firm owner and want to learn accounting or simply improve your invoicing skills? How about learning how to write business checks? This is the blog post for you.You may not be interested in reading through tons of long blog posts that can sometimes be boring, especially if they aren’t relevant or right to the point. It’s also not always easy to figure out where to find all the relevant information –there are so many different resources available which can end up overwhelming people.
There’s a lot of different choices when it comes to accounting for engineering firms, however, if you’re like most small businesses, you aren’t using an accounting software program. Why? Because of complexity, cost and time. Many business owners are also concerned about hiring an accountant with the knowledge of handling small business bookkeeping tasks.
Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate
Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate, formerly Sage Timberline Office, provides contractors, developers, and property managers with the most complete solution for managing the entire project or property lifecycle with confidence, precision, and efficiency. The market leader in end-to-end construction and property management, Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate includes functionality for reducing risk, improving business visibility, and managing a full project or property portfolio. With a deep level of accounting functionality, users can expect to find usual accounting modules such as job costing, accounts payable, accounts receivable, general ledger, and payroll processing, all tailored to the unique needs of construction business. Sage’s network of business partners, consultants, and support representatives, all specialize in the construction industry with decades of experience helping businesses improve construction financial management processes and results.
QuickBooks Online
If you are the owner of a small engineering consulting firm, QuickBooks Online has all the features and functionality you need. This program can help you manage expense tracking, project management, billing, time tracking and can help you customize job costing and invoicing.
This program can provide detailed reports on a project-by-project basis to gauge profitability and compare budget versus actual data on each project.
Dext Prepare for Expense Management
Spending time on manual data entry isn’t efficient and can lead to errors. Using a program like Dext Prepare can eliminate these issues. Dext Prepare extracts data from invoices and receipts using OCR technology and automatically categorizes and labels each line item. Plus, it stores all data in the cloud, eliminating the need for saving hard copies and leaving an audit trail.
Dext Prepare can integrate with your accounting software and easily export your expense data, speeding up the entire bank reconciliation process. It also has reporting capabilities, generating and approving expense reports so your team members can submit their expenses from their mobile phone, and you will receive a notification via email.
Rotessa for Pre-Authorized Debit Payments
Your engineering projects can take place over an extended period of time. Waiting until the end of the project to bill your clients can affect your cash flow. Breaking up your billing into different phases or milestones can keep a steady flow of cash coming into your accounts.
Rotessa can help by automatically withdrawing payments from your client’s bank accounts. It connects with your accounting software, allowing you to schedule payments based on invoices for variable amounts.
It also gives you more control over your cash flow, and you pay fewer fees than with credit card processing. Rotessa can eliminate the lengthy wait times that can occur when your clients pay with cheques, and it simplifies the entire receivables process.
Plooto for Electronic Vendor Payments
One of the most important things you can do in business is maintaining a good relationship with your vendors. One way to do this is to ensure that all payments are made on time. Doing so will keep you in good standing with your vendors and may also lead to early payment discounts or bulk discounts in the future.
Plooto helps you streamline your payables process by integrating with your cloud-based accounting software. It makes it easy to view your accounts payable listings showing which vendors require payment and when. Plooto ensures that all of your bills are paid on time and helps you avoid any late fees or penalties. Plus, if multiple people must approve a payment, Plooto will email them for full authorization first before electronically sending funds.
Not only will Plooto keep your suppliers happy, but it will also keep your cash flow visible, improve your record-keeping and give you the freedom to spend your time doing more important things than making payments.
Expensify for Employee Reimbursement
Collecting receipts and managing reimbursement from your employees may be challenging, especially if they are working on different projects and travelling to various job sites. Expensify is a program that can help with this issue. Like Dext, this software tool allows employees to take a photo of their receipt, and Expensify will automatically extract critical information. Employees can then submit their expense reports without having to enter any data manually.
Expensify has additional functionality that allows employees to track their mileage, and it can easily integrate with apps like Uber, Lyft, and Hotel Tonight. When your employee uses any of these apps, their receipts can be automatically sent to Expensify.
Expensify makes it easy for you to set specific expense policies for different types of employees, allowing you to determine expense submission rules, define approval workflow and configure reimbursements.
QuickBooks Time for Time Tracking
Ensuring that your employees are using their time efficiently is vital to the success of your business. A good time tracking app that allows you to track billable and non-billable hours can help you do this.
QuickBooks Time can help you budget and track the amount of time spent on different projects and specific project tasks. Plus, it can use project data to create reliable job estimates for other projects in the future. You can then use the data it provides to create more detailed invoices for clients, breaking down the number of hours spent on each specific task.
Taking advantage of the specialized accounting and bookkeeping tools that have applications specifically geared towards the engineering industry can go a long way in maximizing your productivity. Combining cloud-based technology, expense and payment management, along with time tracking functionality, can help your engineering firm become more efficient with considerably less hassle.
If you are interested in finding out more about the latest software and technology that can help your engineering firm, contact us today. Our team of experts can provide you with the knowledge and guidance you need to keep your engineering firm’s finances in order and allow your business to run as smoothly as possible.
Dynamics 365
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a cloud-based CRM ecosystem for small, medium and enterprise organizations, with a focus on Sales, Field Service, Customer Service complete with strong integrations with Microsoft’s other Office 365 offerings like Teams, Outlook, Excel & Word. The Microsoft Dynamics 365 ecosystem has offerings ranging from lead and opportunity management, marketing, field service, IOT, customer service, mixed reality and project service automation all allowing for a more frictionless engagement with your customers. Microsoft Dynamics CRM is available for software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployment as well as on-premises complete with a nice user interface for mobile and desktop as well as a technology stack that ensure database security. Dynamics 365 also offers strong API capabilities to help integrate to your other critical systems.
Happay
Happay is a cloud-based expense management solution that helps medium to large businesses manage and track expenses. It uses AI and machine learning technologies to automate processes related to expense claims management, reimbursement, time/cost savings and policy compliance monitoring. Happay allows users to capture expenses, handle reports submission/approval and gain real-time visibility into spends. The invoice management module for accounts payable facilitates digital invoice capturing to eliminate fraudulent invoices and streamline vendor payment approvals, ensuring compliance with taxes. Additionally, users can manage and track fuel purchases, toll payments, driver salary and more using the FleetXpress tool. Happay enables organizations to manage multiple branches/stores and monitor budget using the petty cash distribution process. It supports integration with various e-commerce platforms and payment systems via an API. The solution offers support via phone, email, FAQs and other online measures.
TimeSolv
TimeSolv is a cloud-based time tracking and billing solution that caters to accountants, consultants, architects, and freelancers, helping them manage daily business operations. TimeSolv integrates project management features such as time tracking and assigning tasks with billing functionality, allowing users to track billable hours and budget in real time. It also provides case management features and document management tools to help organize and store data. Users can utilize a document automation feature for auto-filling standard formatted documents. It offers a suite of billing functions, including invoicing, batch billing, allowing users to pay their bill online. Users can upload images of receipts to invoice files. TimeSolv also provides reports so law managers or practitioners can track their billable hours over weeks or months. TimeSolv offers two-way integration with QuickBooks, as well as integrations with Xero Accounting, Dropbox and NetDocuments. It offers Android and iOS apps for remote usage. Services are offered on a monthly subscription basis that includes support via phone and email.
BQE Core
BQE Core makes it easier and more profitable to run your business. It organizes information, automates repetitive tasks and allows your firm to spend more time providing service to your clients instead of managing internal processes. BQE Core is an integrated Time and Expense Tracking, Project Management, Billing and Accounting solution that is scalable for businesses of all sizes. It is built by Architects, Engineers, and CPA’s to meet the specific needs of professional services firms. It is packed with simple, powerful features designed to help firms bolster their cash flow by expediting their billing process, while dramatically improving their project management and their ability to analyze performance. Certified partnerships with Intuit, MYOB and other market leaders ensure that Core intuitively extracts, customizes and delivers customized output from any third-party accounting software.
Conclusion:
Keeping track of all the finances in your small engineering firm isn’t easy. This can be even more difficult during tax season if you haven’t already been keeping up with your invoicing. It can also be hard to stay on top of the payroll sheets, sales records, and bookkeeping. For those in a small firm, it can seem impossible to find the time to learn a new program or tool. But it doesn’t have to be this way.