Doing accounting for your small business can turn into a complex and time-consuming process really fast. As your business grows, your accounting also becomes more difficult.

You need to create more invoices, make new journal entries, create financial statements, and the list goes on.

That’s why, in this day and age, most businesses use accounting software in Nigeria to manage their accounting. Accounting software can help you automate most steps of the accounting cycle, allowing you to spend time on what really matters, like growing your business.

#1. Access Accounting Data Any Time, Anywhere

The most obvious advantage that cloud accounting software in Nigeria has over any traditional accounting system is that computerized accounting software lets you access your data whenever you want, and from whichever device you want.

You can use online accounting software from your PC, laptop, tablet, and mobile phone. All you need is a device that’s connected to the internet and a browser (or mobile app).

No need to ask your accountant to prepare it three days ahead. Just log on the platform, navigate to your Financial Reports section, and download the financial statement you need.

#2. Easier Collaboration

Cloud accounting software makes collaboration as easy as 1-2-3.

Remember the times when you had to make changes to a spreadsheet, save it on a USB drive and then give it to your colleagues so that they could also have the most up-to-date version of the financial statements?

Well, those times are long gone.

With cloud accounting software, one of the main advantages is that everyone gets access to real-time accounting and financial data. So all your employees have to do is log-in to the platform, and do what they need to do.

No bottlenecks, no time wasted.

#3. Save Time With Automation

A big chunk of the work an accountant or bookkeeper has to do on a daily basis is very manual and repetitive. For example:

• Creating an invoice for each sale? Repetitive.
• Tracking transactions and creating respective journal entries? Repetitive.
• Sending late payment reminders to your clients? Repetitive.

You get the point. Most steps of the accounting cycle can be automated. And that’s exactly what online accounting software does best.

For starters, you can automate journal entry creation. All you need to do is integrate your bank directly with your accounting software. This way, everytime you make or receive a payment, a journal entry is automatically created and mapped to the right accounts.

You can also automate things like financial reporting (e.g: create a report every X day of the month). Or you could even set up automated vendor payments.

#4. Improved Accounting Security

One of the biggest advantages of cloud-based accounting software In Nigeria, is that all of your accounting data is safely secured on the cloud.

This means that your data is covered under layers of high-end encryption algorithms, making it a lot safer than keeping it on the office shelf.

And the best part is that all of your data is synced at all times. So not only is it more secure, but it’s also fresh.

Just to give you a better idea, when businesses were using desktop-based accounting software, accounting data had to continuously be backed up. After all, the data was stored on a hard drive. And as you probably already know, hard drives are quite delicate. They can get destroyed, wiped, or simply get corrupted and become unusable.

With online accounting software, you’ll never have to worry about backing up your data - the system will do it for you.

#5. Real-time Reporting

Real-time tracking and reporting is likely one of the top advantages of accounting software.

To track your accounting data in real-time, all you have to do is integrate your online accounting software with your business bank accounts and you’ll be able to track things like expenses, sales, and inventory in real-time.