With the increasing engagement of masses buying and selling online, E-commerce is no more a choice but a lifestyle. This has led many such E-commerce businesses to bloom out. But, your finances and accounting operations get more complicated and gigantic with increasing the scale of the business.
Managing accounts through excel spreadsheets is not feasible for daily operations like online sales, payment gateways, returns and refunds, banking transactions, etc. Also, reporting and recording real-time data gets clumsy during internal and external audit purposes.
To tackle the human-error and laborious accounting tasks, E-commerce accounting software becomes the smart choice – https://dext.com/uk/products/commerce. It provides the benefit of automated accounting reporting and real-time data updation, along with easy payment and refund management tools.
But, finding the right accounting software for your e-commerce business is a brainstorming task. Here’s few points to look for while choosing the right ecommerce accounting software for your business.
1. In-built Integrations With Important Platforms
The most important factor for the success of small business owners is the ability to integrate with ecommerce solutions and payment processors. The in-built integration feature automates the time-consuming task of switching and sharing data, which reduces the need of technical accountants and eases up the entire process.
Also, it allows mobile integration and bank reconciliation features, which makes the tracking and monitoring of real-time transactions simple and effective.
Your choice must be flexible integrating with various big ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Bigcommerce, etc., as well as platforms like inventory management, CRM systems, shipping software and more.
2. Usability
Another important factor to consider is the usability which not only fits in your business requirements, but also adapts with your level of understanding.
You must ascertain various factors through some questions like,
- Which factor do you need the most – time or scale?
- How knowledgeable are your team members to adapt to the new software?
- Which solution will be better for you – cloud-based or desktop version?
This will ease the filtering out process, and you can understand the needs of your business and customers better. Also, you can run a free trial of the softwares you have selected, which will help you decide which software fits your required user experience and design.
3. Customer-centric Solution
You know that any software purchase is not the end of the problem, as while working with the solution sometimes you require technical assistance or customer support from the provider.
No matter how instructional and resourceful the user guides and manuals are, you need a proper onboarding process and customer support from time to time. Therefore, your choice of ecommerce accounting software should have good user ratings, and testimonials, along with user-friendly support channels and fast response time.
4. Easy Reporting
With managing huge business operations, making business reports manually with a huge amount of data becomes frustrating.
The ecommerce accounting software automates the reporting process by generating on-demand reports, displaying growth metrics like customer acquisition cost, revenue, purchase order value, conversion rates, etc. You must look for reports with metrics like customer margin, profit rate, sales vs. refunds, return rate, and inventory depreciation, which will help you understand business growth profoundly.
5. Security and Updation
Managing your data online requires the software provider’s credibility for better security. Your software must have different security layers for both internal and external threat prevention.
Also, your software provider should provide regular and timely updates for competing technological developments in the market, and adhere to the best accounting practices.
Conclusion
Ecommerce businesses run smoothly with an accounting software in place. It automates the daily laborious accounting operations for better reporting and error-free audits. You must list out the criteria before choosing the right accounting software for your business like, in-built integrations with various platforms, usability, customer support, reporting, and security levels of the software.