The advantages of automated accounting

But first—and before embarking on any new digital initiative—it’s important to weigh the rewards and the costs. Let’s start with the pros. Automating accounting tasks can unlock a wide range of benefits and efficiencies for your business, including:

• Saving time and boosting productivity
• Enhancing work culture and employee satisfaction by eliminating mundane tasks
• Improving data entry accuracy, resulting in fewer errors and cleaner books
• Enabling greater access to data and faster reporting
• Refining cash flow analysis for better budgeting and forecasting

Now for the downside. When implementing automation on your own, you risk biting off more than you can chew. Your options are to purchase an expensive enterprise platform, engineer and build your own custom solution, or manage a patchwork of third-party software. Bottom line: DIY may not be the most prudent route.

The more time- and cost-efficient option is to bring in a ready-to-go, fully integrated solution that aligns with how you do business. With Rho, there’s nothing to buy or build to automate key functions. Plus, Rho’s all-in-one financial platform is intuitively designed and simple to use, meaning your team won’t need to undergo intense training or juggle multiple accounts.

Consolidate and simplify spending with innovative corporate cards.

As your company grows, so does the task of spend management. With additional employees making more (and larger) purchases using various payment methods, the burden on the accounting department can quickly spiral to an overwhelming level.

A straightforward and actionable strategy is to consolidate the majority of your company spend under a single payment method such as a corporate card. Historically, this required opening multiple accounts or passing the “company card” around the office, but modern card options have replaced these outdated (and risky) practices.

With the Rho Card, you can assign unique virtual cards with built-in controls to team members and expense channels like recurring vendors and digital ad platforms. Virtual cards can be activated from anywhere and used immediately, which is ideal for remote or dispersed teams.

When an employee makes a purchase with the Rho Card, the charge is automatically recorded and categorized. Team members can even upload digital receipts via email or SMS for effortless expense tracking. All card transactions can be viewed on a centralized dashboard to monitor spend, manage budgets, and more without lifting a finger (aside from a few clicks). Plus, Rho Card transactions (and receipts) can be auto-synced straight to your GL and mapped to the right category.

Eliminate manual data entry.

Manual tasks like invoice entry and coding can be a major time drain. To make matters worse, even a seemingly minuscule mistake can siphon additional attention from your accounting team to avoid a significant problem.

With Rho’s built-in tools, it’s never been easier to automate your AP workflows. For instance, you can have vendors send invoices to a dedicated AP inbox. Then, the Rho platform takes over to automatically input billing details.

What's more, Rho's native Quickbooks integration automates your accounting processes so you can avoid manual work. For example, as soon as an invoice is recognized in Rho, a liability is automatically created in your Quickbooks instance. Then, once that invoice is paid, the payment is automatically pushed to Quickbooks to offset the liability. Easy.

Streamline invoice approvals.

If there was a ranking of the top accounting time-wasters, chasing down approvals would certainly be near the top of the list. Whether your existing process includes walking a printed invoice around the office or waiting for a manager to return an email, precious time and company resources are undoubtedly going down the drain.

Rho’s integrated AP features smart, automated invoice approvals. Using custom multi-level approval flows, you can ensure the right invoice gets to the right person every time. From there, your team can view billing details and submit approvals digitally through the Rho platform. Rest assured, you can oversee and control the entire process to strike an optimal balance between security and speed.

Sync all transactions (cards, AP, and banking) to your accounting software.

Today's accounting and executive teams have an abundance of niche financial tools at their disposal. However, unless these tools connect to one another—and, more importantly, to your primary accounting software—you’re often left with siloed data and redundant tasks.

Rho delivers advanced integrations with leading accounting platforms like QuickBooks. By syncing Rho (including your banking, corporate cards, and AP data) to your accounting, you can ensure complete accuracy for faster reconciliation and end-of-month closings.

Put your payments on auto-pilot.

Tiptoeing around a prohibitively low credit limit is, unfortunately, a common growing pain for burgeoning companies. This requires your accounting team to keep a constant eye on your credit use, so they can manually pay down the balance before you hit or surpass the limit and inadvertently cut off critical services and operations.

At Rho, we don’t think it should cost you time to leverage credit. Our autopay feature enables you to automatically pay down your balance as it approaches the limit. Simply customize the limit threshold and payment amount and Rho does the rest for you. Not only does that save you time and effort, it can also help you avoid pesky declines.

Cutting edge—without cutting corners.

All of these automations come standard with Rho, with no premium level or surprise charges. Plus, we’re here to help you with everything from onboarding to best practices when using our platform.

If you’re ready to get the ball rolling with automation and take your accounting to the next level, reach out to our team to learn more about Rho’s solutions.

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