Small business owners rank administration as the most important work process to digitize in the next few years. In this article, you will read more about how we work to make accounting automatic in the long run – so that you as an entrepreneur can take advantage of the benefits and have more time to develop the business.
You who ran your own business twenty years ago will probably remember what it was like; bags with receipts that were submitted to the accounting firm, and then punched in manually. Even today, many small business owners spend more time on accounting than is actually needed. At the same time, the digitalization of the accounting industry is more relevant than ever and affects you as a small business owner to a very high degree. Anyone who does not adapt to new technology and people’s behavior risks falling behind, or in the worst case, disappearing completely. A good example is the camera company Kodak, which did not understand the breadth of the digital camera and therefore competed. History has thus taught us that a business strategy that benefits from new technology and people’s IT habits is likely to be more successful than an analog one. The question is how do you look at it all?
According to a previous report, more than one in four small business owners ranks administration as the most important work process to digitize over the next three years. But even more state that they are locked into their current systems, which stands in the way of digitization.
How does automatic accounting work?
Machine learning is a part of computer science, closely related to the concept called artificial intelligence. Simply put, it is about building a model of calculations, so-called algorithms. These algorithms can learn from historical data, and thus predict information based on the historical data.
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Through machine learning, the accounting programs can thus provide suggestions, based on historical data when the program has been used before. It is this process called automatic bookkeeping. The ambition is to eventually automate the entire accounting process for you as a small business owner.
Smart features that simplify your work
Today, most of Visa’s programs and add-ons contain some form of automatic accounting. Visa’s electronic invoice management helps you create digital invoices. Another is the app that belongs to the payroll program, where employees themselves can register their working hours in a simple way. In Visa economy are new function Accounting Aid, where the program itself suggests account, based on what other customers have chosen. What do these smart features have in common? They are all designed to facilitate your everyday life as a small business owner, so that you have time to get to the core of your business.
Johan works with the development of Visa’s apps. He believes that it is often a matter of developing small smart functions that save time and in this way can make it much easier for someone who sits and works with that type of task.
There are several benefits to digitizing and automatic bookkeeping in general. For example, collaboration and communication becomes much easier when you work in the cloud. Automatic accounting benefits you who work with agencies, as the work process becomes even more efficient for both parties. It also becomes safer; partly because the information is stored in the cloud but also because the program itself provides account suggestions based on historical data, which reduces the risk of posting errors.
Thoughts on future accounting programs
It is important that you as an entrepreneur feel secure with the updates that are made to your business systems, and that these systems follow developments in society. Regulations that affect how we plan for the future can, for example, be rules regarding digital receipts. According to the Accounting Act, the digital receipt must be saved for 7 years, but you must still save the original, ie the paper receipt, for at least four years *. These laws mean some duplication of work for many small business owners, and are something we need to take into account when tomorrow’s accounting program is developed.
Accounting Act allows a paper document that has been transferred to a digital format to be destroyed only from the fourth year after the end of the calendar year in which the financial year ended.
Justen is development director at Visa. He believes that in the future there will be demands that the accounting programs become even more digital, which presupposes that today’s paper documents are completely digitized. Digital data is a prerequisite for us to be able to carry out larger analyzes of data and further develop machine learning in the field of accounting.
Justen also predicts that the system will to an even greater extent be able to give suggestions on how to improve your business and provide new value to existing customers, and refines internal processes in the company in order to ensure high-quality digital data.
This is how your business can benefit from automatic accounting
