Why You Should Move Your Business Off Spreadsheet Accounting (and onto Zoho Books)

Almost every successful business starts its accounting in a spreadsheet program like Excel.

Almost no successful business keeps it there.

As time passes, businesses of any size accumulate data and complexity. Very quickly, your handy spreadsheet that got you started in a jiffy becomes a genuine hindrance to growth and change.

Here are the three main reasons to make the switch. (If these don’t convince you, nothing will!)

1) Spreadsheets are opaque and confusing

One of our clients left a note in a cell of his accounting spreadsheet that said Deduct from total. At the time, the meaning of that phrase was probably perfectly clear, but by the time he got back to his accounting after another hectic month (or two) of running his own business, he had no idea what that meant, even though he was the one that wrote it. Deduct from what total? Before tax or after? And for what period?

Many small business owners are perpetually behind on their accounting because they are the only ones who know how to use the spreadsheet they built, and in any one month, it would take more time to train someone else than simply to work on the books over the weekend or at the kid’s soccer game, leaving it as yet one more thing they have to do themselves, because the spreadsheet they built is not clear—often even to themselves.

That alone is a good enough reason to migrate. But it gets worse!

2) Spreadsheets are siloed and labor-intensive

What if you wanted to see a report of year-over-year revenue by quarter? Where in your spreadsheet would you get those numbers? And how sure are you that they’re actually correct?

Unless expertly formatted—or exceedingly simple—spreadsheets don’t always make it clear where a number is supposed to be entered or what certain outputs represent. There is no repository of vendors, customers, or contacts, meaning even simple tasks like invoicing or contract creation require constant switching between applications in a never-ending hunt for emails and mailing addresses, previous invoices, outstanding balances, and the like.

Spreadsheets don’t automatically share data with other applications, such as inventory, shipping, banking, or tax filing software, which means everything has to be entered manually across multiple platforms—and of course manually reconciled as well.

Outside of all the time that wastes, how confident will you be in three months that all of those manual reconciliations were handled correctly? And what happens at tax time?

3) Spreadsheets are frustratingly error-prone

In a folder on a well-used laptop are dozens of Word and Excel files. Three of them are named:

2022-budget(updated).xlsx
2022-budget.xlsx
2022-budget(old).xlsx

To make matters worse, each was last updated at a different time.

The latter would seem to be unimportant, but then why wasn’t it deleted? Was there something in it that might be worth saving, such as a discarded but potentially useful what-if scenario? And why is it that the “updated” file was last updated months ago but the file simply called “budget” was updated recently? Which is correct? And were any of them ever finished?

Calling it data integrity makes it sound fancy, but that phrase just means you have a clear answer to those questions. With a single system of record, there’s no confusion about which numbers are correct (or what needs to be changed if they’re not).

After data integrity comes data loss: What would happen if you accidentally typed over some critical cells in your spreadsheet but didn’t realize it until later? What if you accidentally deleted your accounting spreadsheet? Could you get it back? And if your computer was stolen or your hard drive failed, how would you run your business?

An Affordable Solution

Small business accounting software like Zoho Books solves all of these problems and more.

It’s easy to use.

Zoho Books was built for small business. Create invoices, estimates, sales orders, price lists, and more with just a few clicks right out of the box.

Store all your customer, contact, vendor, and product information in one place so there’s no need to hunt through emails and updates only have to be entered once.

It’s worry-free.

With a single system of record, you always know what the correct numbers are. Zoho Books even has a number of native features that prevent you from making mistakes. And since it runs in the cloud, all your data is backed up and accessible from anywhere. You can even store it locally if you prefer.

It plays well with others.

With a few clicks, Zoho Books connects several popular financial apps, including payment processors like Stripe and tax apps like Avalara.

You can import existing data or start fresh with a clean Chart of Accounts.

Zoho Books can connect to your bank feed, which makes monthly reconciliation a snap, and it can track and manage inventory through a native integration with Zoho Inventory.

And of course, there’s a mobile app.

Books also integrates perfectly with Zoho’s world class CRM, giving your sales team the ability to create and send estimates without touching the accounting system. Convert estimates to sales orders or invoices with a single click!

Finally… reports and more!

Balance sheets, income statements, profit & loss, and more are available any time and run with the click of a button.

Zoho Books can track time and bill automatically against projects or retainers. It can set alerts and reminders, provide your customers a branded payment portal, and allow your accountant access at no extra charge.

You can configure user-specific permissions, create workflows and approval processes, handle subscriptions and contracts, and so much more.

Reach out today to schedule a free demo!