Compare Top Accounting Software Leaders

Article Roadmap

• What Is Accounting Software?
• What Is Software Integration?
• Primary Benefits
• Accounting Integration Methods
• Next Steps

If this all sounds overwhelming to you, don’t worry — we’re here to help guide you through the process. In this article, we’ll go over some of the benefits of proper accounting integration, as well as some of the methods businesses use to ensure their software works well together.

What Is Accounting Software?

Accounting software is a program or set of programs designed to help a business manage its finances, monitor incoming and outgoing funds, and track performance over time. On their own, these software solutions can still improve a business’s workflow by simplifying data entry and tracking the flow of money in real time, but they’re best used alongside other business software for maximum efficiency.

Accounting software comes in several formats, built for different sizes of business and offering different implementations for a company’s specific needs. For example, cloud-based deployment is becoming more popular, allowing users to access accounting data from any connected device. Many software suites are customizable as well, offering add-ons and modules specific to what a business needs assistance with.

What Is Software Integration?

Integrating software within your company’s environment refers to making sure the programs and suites you’re using can work alongside each other, sharing data and handling different parts of the accounting process in a unified way.

Some software platforms provide a complete package without requiring integration, but many businesses operate best by mixing and matching the right software modules for their needs.

Integration also happens between separate departments that may need to share information or collaborate on tasks. In these cases, different but compatible software platforms are often used. Handling this requires you to pay careful attention to the software you adopt and whether it’s optimized for — or even capable of — integrating with your current business software.

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Primary Benefits

When done correctly with the right research and implementation, accounting software integration should feel like a natural addition to your workflow, and you should start seeing some improvements immediately. Some benefits may become more apparent in the long run, but you’ll find the investment in proceeding with care and choosing the right software for your needs will be worth it.

Short-Term Benefits

These benefits should take little to no time to improve your business workflow.

Improved Efficiency

By linking your accounting software with other business solutions and platforms, you can have a shared database between them all, so you can populate different modules with financial information as it comes in. This allows you to give higher-level tasks to personnel who would otherwise be occupied with entering data manually, and saves the time it would have taken them to enter it.

More Transparency

Monitoring finances in real time using accounting software allows any user to see their business’s performance in a readable format, giving them the freedom to act on changes as they happen and fix any inconsistencies before they become real issues. It also makes reporting between departments much easier to format in ways that users outside of accounting will understand.

Simpler Collaboration

An accounting department needs to be able to work alongside other departments in order to maximize productivity and stay on top of everything. Integrating accounting software within your working environment ensures that the software side of those departments is well-connected, so your employees can share information at the click of a mouse.

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Long-Term Benefits

These benefits may take longer to show, but will still have a significant impact on the quality of your business.

Easier Reporting

When tax season or the time to update shareholders rolls around, accounting software integration will enable you to take the reports you’ve already been using to share information with governing bodies and company higher-ups. You can easily customize these reports depending on who they’re for as well, with simplified formats and tailored information.

Trend Prediction

Using accounting visualizations to view your financial performance over time will allow your analysts to pinpoint trends and predict how market changes could affect supply and demand. With continued use over time, some software can use machine learning to make predictions for you, giving your business insights into customer behavior that help you anticipate business trends.

Customer Satisfaction

Reconciling short-term debts and providing instant updates to clients and customers is simple once you’ve integrated your accounting software with the rest of your business. This will allow you to meet customers’ needs and address their concerns as quickly as possible, encouraging repeat business and higher retention rates.

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Integration Methods

Placing software alongside other software is nothing new, but as business technology advances, newer and faster ways of accounting integration continue to spring up. Let’s go over three of the most common software integration methods: file-based, API and native.

File-Based Integration

File-based integration involves manually copying data from one software platform to another, typically using a .csv spreadsheet. This method relies on human intervention at every step, making it one of the least intuitive, but manually copying data means it can be shared between different software platforms that may not be compatible with each other.

API Integration

Using an API, or application programming interface, to integrate otherwise incompatible software uses a pre-built framework that allows for automatic data transfer between platforms. This involves less manual interaction than file-based integration, but requires some setup in advance to ensure everything works smoothly, and often means you’ll need to contract out to third parties to set up APIs for you.

Native Integration

When implementing software that’s already compatible with your current platform, you’re taking advantage of native integration — connecting software using its built-in data transfer methods without manual intervention or the need for an API. While this requires more research on the software buyer’s side, it’s the easiest to implement once the software is incorporated into your business.

Compare Top Accounting Software Leaders

Next Steps

Accounting software can do a lot for your business on its own, but making sure it’s integrated with other software in your business environment maximizes its potential benefits. It’s important to do as much research as possible before committing to purchasing a specific platform — luckily, we have plenty of resources to help you make the best software decisions and meet your business’s needs.

Our accounting software buyer’s guide can help you identify the features that are most important to you and start your software search with a few of our suggested platforms. You can also use our free comparison report to get detailed information on how these solutions stack up next to each other.

How has your accounting integration experience been in the past? Do you have any tips for other businesses looking to integrate software? Let us know in the comments below.