6 Ways to Integrate Accounting Into Your Retail Business

Accounting is one of the principle components of any successful retail business. If you can’t keep track of your money, how will you ever survive in the marketplace? A business’s managers need to know whether the company has experienced a profit or a loss, what assets are depreciating, and how much it has spent on product purchasing. Without these figures, you’re operating in the dark.

How to Integrate Accounting Into Your Retail Operations

Here are six ways you can integrate accounting into your retail business to make it more profitable:

1. Rules for Expense Allocation – Rather than just spend money willy-nilly on product that might not sell, why not set rules to govern how much money you spend on product replenishment and when? You’ll have a much more precise profit and loss statement in the long run.
2. Cash Audit – Drill down to each individual invoice and get real-time information on petty cash expenses, deposits, and POS transactions. Automate your bank reconciliation to reduce the time you spend on manual audits and chasing paper trails.
3. Commissions Engine – Calculate your sales associates’ commissions and bonuses more easily using fixed or scaled complex formulas. Create reports on personal volume, store volume, and/or departmental volume. Generate employee pay cards based on hours clocked at the point of sale.
4. Lease Management – Manage your store real estate better. An automated system will let you know when each store’s lease is up for renewal. Project lease renewals for up to twelve years in advance so that you can budget long term for your business.
5. Invoice Matching – Manage a more efficient payment process by automatically matching invoices to purchase orders and receiving documents.
6. Automated Bank Reconciliation – Instantly reconcile your bank accounts. Post daily POS sales (cash, debits, and credit cards) and generate with one click cross-referenced and verified deposits automatically.

Why Integrated Accounting is Important to Retailers

Before computers came along, integrated accounting was impossible. There was too much to manage to maintain the books with perfect precision. Computers gave retailers a more efficient way to account for profits, losses, sales, and expenditures so that budgeting and planning was more effective across the board.

Integrated accounting software reduces paperwork, guesswork, and reliance on manual accounting procedures. The software does all the heavy lifting for you. All you have to do is manage and oversee the process.

It’s more accurate to use a solution like ChainDrive Integrated accounting software to automate your accounting process. It’s also more efficient and more profitable.