If you have a brand-new small business in Singapore, you started with a basic Excel template for your monthly bookkeeping. In the beginning, this works for you. It gets your information all in one place, and you have basic functionality.

However, Excel-based bookkeeping is a temporary solution. As your business grows beyond a one-person operation, you will need to bring more small business software solutions on board to ease your workload and create efficiencies between you and your employees. This will include replacing your Excel bookkeeping with cloud accounting software. Just like human growth, business growth can come with growing pains.

In this blog, we’ll explore:

Some of the obstacles
Lack of flexibility
Easy to make mistakes
High maintenance
Less organized
The Cloud Solution

These are some of the obstacles you will have to overcome as you scale your business:

Lack of flexibility

If your small business is steady, Excel will work fine for you. But as soon as you want to scale or expand your business, you may need to redesign your Excel templates. What used to work may not work once you have more customers or more income streams to account for. Adding new columns or tabs to your worksheet can, at best, make your template cumbersome, or at worst, wreck it altogether. You might even need to export all your information and re-enter it into a new template altogether to level up your business. This would use a great deal of time that otherwise could be invested in growing your business. Expanding or scaling your business means that you need to find more efficient small business software processes for your business.

Easy to make mistakes

While Excel offers features like protected or locked cells and tabs, you will input information into the wrong cell in your spreadsheet. The chances of this exponentially increase if you hire a bookkeeper or other employee who will be responsible for taking care of the day-to-day input. Having multiple people working on the same spreadsheet is a recipe for easily missed mistakes and incorrect financial data. This situation is also not ideal from a financial standpoint, as Excel does not have the same financial controls built into it as specific cloud accounting software does. If you have other employees in your business who have access to your Excel-based accounting method, it can provide opportunities for fraud that should not exist.

Broken formulas or cell references are another danger to the integrity of your accounting that can be avoided by switching to cloud accounting. It is so easy to end up with a faulty Excel spreadsheet just because one cell was modified, whether it was intentionally modified to change the sheet or modified in error. When you switch to accounting software, you will not need to worry about broken cell references and formulas that only produce errors.

High maintenance

Excel also requires more manual work than accounting software. There is often a lot more raw data entry involved in Excel than with a cloud accounting solution, where data is automatically copied to all necessary places once it has been inputted. So why spend time creating something complicated in Excel when accounting software has already automated it for you? You can save a lot of time by using a cloud accounting system.

Less organized

Do you know how most businesses that use Excel add information to their spreadsheets? They just add another tab. Dozens of tabs later, the file has grown to a point where it is no longer usable, let alone understandable. The program begins to run slower and slower until it either can barely load or crashes mid-project. This is not sustainable long-term for any business, especially in an era where accurate, instant data is one of the keys to success.

Generating report data from your Excel business accounting spreadsheet can also be harder than with cloud accounting software. Filtering only the data you need from your Excel sheet or trying to collect data from one report over multiple pages in a workbook, can lead to a confusing report, or worse, one that contains errors. Contrast this with dedicated accounting software solutions, where you just click a button to create an easy-to-understand financial report.

Add to this the problem of multiple versions. There may be a “master version” of the accounting Excel file that lives on a company’s server, but there is no telling who may have downloaded a separate version to their individual computer. Not only does this create a risk of a potential leak of information, but it also means that someone could update their own personal copy of the accounting spreadsheet without updating the master copy, leading to breakdowns in communication and disorganized data.

The cloud solution

Cloud-based accounting software such as Automa8e solves all these problems. Small business accounting software is flexible, allowing you to use it from your very first day in business to as large as you can scale your business to be.

Automa8e is a Singapore-based cloud accounting solution that provides a full line of business accounting tools to your small business. With functionality in bookkeeping, payroll, accounts payable and receivable, purchases, invoicing, and reporting for key business metrics such as cash on hand and monthly income, you will be able to get all the information you need to keep your business moving forward. No more sorting through data to find what you need and hoping that it is the latest version of your spreadsheet. With the click of a button, you will have access to 15+ reports, giving you all the information, you need to make critical decisions for your business, from a daily cash balance to a full balance sheet for your company.

Automa8e has an easy-to-understand interface, allowing you to do your accounting in a couple of clicks or quickly onboard bookkeepers and accountants. Because it is accessible from anywhere, you are free to hire remotely, providing your employee or subcontractor with this attractive option with the assurance that you and your associates will all have access to the same updated data. You can check your accounting data in real time, without having to worry that you are reading from the latest version.

Automa8e also has functionality for multi-currency transactions – a key feature that is ever more necessary in our global economy. With Automa8e, your accounting software will be able to seamlessly integrate your international transactions outside Singapore.

How Bookkeeping in Excel Can Hinder Your Business from Growing and What to Do About It

Sarah Tan