In any business, good financial controls are key for ensuring continued success.  Now is the time, at the start of a new year, to focus and sort out your finances.  One of the most important aspects of being successful is your cash flow - most businesses that fail, do so due to lack of financial controls. Even more importantly, as South Africa starts its climb out of the recession, it is essential to be in the best position to take advantage of improving economic conditions.  Practicing good accounting and using the right technology systems is the first step to starting 2010, the year of recovery and opportunities!

So says Hilary Levenstein, CEO of EconoAccounting, manufacturer and seller of the EconoAccounting software package.  She adds, "Making use of user friendly and financial technology is essential for small & medium businesses who wish to be on top of their game. Using a fairly simple, quick and effective system will help your bank balance and will benefit as you save yourself hours of accounting hassles.  It's when smaller and medium companies are faced with complicated or long and drawn out accounting practices that they set themselves up for failure.  Essentially, does the entrepreneur have the time and expertise to spend on long accounting sessions? No".

With the right system in place, your accounts will be kept up to date, so that your accountant need only skim through them before signing them off - this will result in significant savings of accounting fees. Likewise, when the bank requires monthly financials, you can generate the necessary information with a click of your mouse.  In addition you know on a daily basis what's in the bank, how much you're owed, what you owe suppliers and more.

There are many ways in which small and medium businesses can work more efficiently and effectively when it comes to the financial side of the business. For example:

-          Even when times are tough, keep up-to-date with your financials; that way, when things improve and business starts booming, you won't have to spend valuable time and money catching up on your accounting - you can concentrate on making money instead

-          Make sure that you always have the right information at your fingertips, including how much money you have in the bank, how much you owe your suppliers and how much your customers or clients owe you

-          Collect payments due timeously

-          Do your key financial tasks daily, such as:

o         Make out invoices when you make a sale and print statements

o         Check and reconcile your bank account

o         Make payments - write out cheques or do electronic fund transfers in good time to save on interest payments

o         Check on the status of payments due to you

o         If you're in the business of selling ‘time', keep a daily record of how much time you spend on each client so that you can reconcile your time for accounting purposes immediately when needed

o         If you sell products, keep your stock sheets current at all times

-          Make day-to-day business decisions as they come up - putting off a decision can lead to costs being incurred, such as interest due or interest lost

-          Buy and implement an accounting package that will help you to do all of these financial tasks quickly and easily. It is important to find the right package to suit your business's particular needs, such as invoicing, financial statements, etc

EconoAccounting is one of them. Levenstein says, "EconoAccounting is a package that enables you to import your bank statement and instantly reconcile your bank account, allocate expenses, calculate VAT, help allocate invoice payments, and produce all your financial statements. For great convenience, you can print your financials every day if you wish, which enables you to remain on top of things at all times. The system allows you to check how much profit you are making, in a mere five minutes per day. The biggest benefit is that, working in this manner, you will be in control of your business and on top of your accounting."

EconoAccounting is a simple easy to use accounting package that saves time by automating the tedious accounting tasks while removing the complexities of accounting for small business.