Discover the Benefits – And Freedom – of Online Payments and Automated Reconciliation

While every business needs to keep a close eye on the financial details, there are some fields where business owners are less comfortable and confident in performing the accounting tasks required to keep their business in business.

Take architects and interior designers. For professionals who spend their careers designing environments that are more welcoming, efficient, productive, and calming for clients, taking time to “run the numbers” prior, during, or even after a project is not usually thought of as an appealing use of their skills.

The same is true for many in the building and construction industry, especially smaller companies with a more entrepreneurial approach to growing their business. If you’re spending your days (and many evenings!) working to ensure that permits, labor, supplies, inspections, and every other aspect of a project is kept on schedule, it’s not likely that you want to add reviewing billing spreadsheets to your “to-do” list, even if it can help with improving revenues.

While it’s all too easy to push financial record-keeping off “for a few days, or “until next week,” or “once things aren’t so crazy,” that delay is exactly the type of non-action that results in frantic, last-minute searches for copies of invoices, receipts, and associated financial statements.

It's not a well-designed approach to success, nor a sturdy foundation for building a business.

Find a Better Accounting Solution for Your Business – And Your Time!

Financial management presents unique challenges to small businesses in the architecture, design, and building sector. It’s why so many of these business owners struggle with the demands of accounting. Procrastination and avoidance can even lead to businesses failing because important money matters were put off or overlooked.

But there’s good news for those needing simplified and streamlined accounting solutions for their architecture, design or building business. From having services paid for online to automating reconciliation of financial accounts, with the right solutions and partners you can find new and better ways to make financial management a key strength of your business instead of an afterthought.

The Future of Payments Online

Paying for any and every kind of product or service online is rapidly becoming the rule, not the exception. In fact, online payments are expected to reach more than $8 trillion in 2022, and almost $14 trillion by 2026. And according to The Economic Times, “Four Megatrends Driving the Digital Payment Revolution,” consumers’ expectations for simple, user-friendly transactions are behind the explosion of consumer and business services conducted online.

Customers have become increasingly accustomed to, and comfortable with paying online for every possible purchase from dinner to furniture to vacations. There’s no reason paying for design or building services should be any different.

While you may not have considered customers paying for your services online, the benefits far outweigh the hassles. From getting paid more quickly and eliminating the need to deposit checks to staying more competitive and reducing your carbon footprint (along with all that paper), online payments enable you to spend more time doing what you do best, and less time trying to function like a bank.

Spare Yourself the Headaches of Reconciliation

If there’s any aspect of accounting that business owners really hate, the hands-down winner would be reconciling accounts. While perhaps not technically difficult, reconciliation is often tedious, and even the smallest errors or uncounted transactions can lead to countless hours of trying to find, identify or correctly categorize a bill or receipt. After a long day of working to keep clients happy and projects moving, reconciliation of accounts is rarely high on anyone’s priority list, even if it needs to be.

Yet for architects and interior designers, reconciliation is one of the most important factors in making sure your accounting practices are performing as required to keep your business healthy. For many small architecture firms, it’s essential for improving profitability. And for interior designers, reconciliation is viewed as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI), so you can keep track of the health of your business.

And for builders, reconciliation performs a vital role in protecting profit margins. A typical building project can involve up to 10 different vendors, each doing separate work at different times and submitting different types of invoices throughout the length of the job. It’s all too easy for those bills to sit idle for too long, resulting in unnecessary delays in processing across the board. In a business with such a thin line between profit and loss, reconciliation is critical to keeping the business profitable.

Look for Accounting Solutions That Serve Your Business Needs

There are technology-driven accounting solutions available today that can help interior designers and builders simplify and improve their account reconciliation process with online payments. These new, automated systems can run every transaction through a single system, ensuring all reconciliation is handled in a timely, efficient manner that eliminates the common errors of traditional or DIY accounting reconciliation.

Any accounting solution worth considering should enable you to securely accept, process and verify any credit card or eCheck payment received, no matter if it’s dropped off at your office, paid at a job site, or sent via email. It’s important for your business to make the payment process as easy as possible for every client on every project.

Choose a solution with features that can help you better manage finances and more accurately project cash flow over the course of a project, or throughout the calendar year. These types of features should enable you to:

• Browse itemized transactions and summaries
• Locate specific transactions
• Generate detailed, customized reports
• View essential payment data and key business metrics
• Identify trends and recognize opportunities to boost revenue

A good accounting solution should also provide the information you need in a format that is simple for you to review and understand, such as a dashboard that can be customized with the data that is most important to your business. You should be able to break down and analyze real-time data according to your needs, whether those are daily transactions, weekly recaps, monthly summaries, or all of the above.

There’s no reason to let the monotonous and time-consuming tasks of a CPA hinder the success of your business. All you need is an accounting solution that optimizes processes like online payments and account reconciliation, and lets you focus on what you do best, which is creating better spaces for people to live and work.

See how ClientPay solutions can help you to design and build the business of your dreams.