The days of chasing down approvals, printing checks, stuffing envelopes, and entering data are done. And, in place of the “old school” way, comes bookkeeping automation.
Instead of paper checks, you have digital payments like ACH transfers, EFTs, and credit card transactions. Instead of scrambling around the office searching for people or documents, you have virtual bookkeeping workflows. Instead of spending hours creating and mailing invoices, you use cloud-based creation and delivery.
It may sound too good to be true. But a simple, efficient solution really is at your fingertips. The only question is: does your business need bookkeeping automation?
What is bookkeeping automation?
Bookkeeping automation uses cloud-based software to streamline and digitize:
- Accounts payable (AP): Bill approvals and payments
- Accounts receivable (AR): Invoice creation and collection
- Cash flow tracking across ACH, EFT, and credit card transactions
Every transaction is tracked in the cloud, creating an automatic audit trail and centralizing the documents and approvals behind each payment.
Bookkeeping automation for nonprofits: easier audits
Nonprofits exist to serve a mission, and staying compliant is what protects that mission. To retain nonprofit status, organizations often undergo regular audits to ensure regulators can confirm compliance with nonprofit rules and regulations.
Audits can mean days or weeks spent gathering documents, check stubs, and statements. It’s an administrative, time-consuming effort to track down this mountain of paper.
Bookkeeping automation simplifies auditing
How it works in an audit scenario
Imagine an auditor wants to view vendor payment transactions for a specific time frame. With bookkeeping automation:
- The auditor receives secure, audit-level login access.
- They can search and filter transactions online—no paper hunt required.
- Every ACH transfer, EFT, and credit card transaction includes a complete digital record of the review and approval process.
Because all AP and AR activity happens in the cloud, each payment can create an audit-ready trail. When the auditor arrives, the admin simply grants audit-level access. With just a few clicks, the auditor can access everything they need to complete the audit from start to finish.
Bookkeeping automation for decentralized or virtual teams: built-in mobility
If you’re a decentralized or virtual business, you’ll appreciate the mobility that bookkeeping automation offers.
Today, many businesses hire talent from anywhere. You might be in Chicago, your CFO in St. Louis, and your VP of Sales in Austin. Reviewers and approvers may be spread across different cities—or working from home offices.
With bookkeeping automation:
- Bill payments and invoicing are all managed online.
- Team members can review and approve bills from anywhere using a mobile app.
- All they need is the right authorization and a smartphone or tablet.
So Tom in Taiwan can review an outgoing invoice just as easily as Lily in Las Vegas—without printing, scanning, or mailing a single piece of paper.
Bookkeeping automation for property managers: scalable rent collection
Property management companies are often buried in a paper check mess, especially when they manage a large number of properties and tenants. Many still track payments with spreadsheets or basic software tools that aren’t built for the volume or complexity.
The result? Inaccuracies, inefficiencies, and lost productivity—especially when you’re trying to track rent payments for hundreds of properties across days, months, or even years.
Tenants don’t like the paper shuffle either. Writing checks, mailing them, or dropping them off in person is inconvenient and easy to forget.
Reimagining rent collection with bookkeeping automation
With bookkeeping automation, you can:
- Give tenants a dedicated, secure online payment portal to pay rent each month.
- Let tenants pay via ACH, EFT, or credit card.
- Automatically route digital payments into your bookkeeping automation system, attaching them to the correct properties, owners, and invoices.
- Use a real-time dashboard to see all received and outstanding payments at a glance.
Bookkeeping automation also simplifies paying vendors for services like repairs and landscaping work.
Invoices are:
- Submitted and reviewed online
- Routed through your entire approval workflow
- Paid digitally after final authorization
You get end-to-end visibility into both incoming tenant payments and outgoing vendor payments—all in one place.
Bookkeeping automation for contractor-heavy businesses: streamlined AP
If your company works with contractors and freelancers, bookkeeping automation can transform your accounts payable process.
You gain access to flexible, high-quality talent without the overhead of full-time employees. But managing payments to contractors—especially when they bill in different ways—can eat up hours of administrative time.
Contractors may invoice:
- Per project
- By milestone or percentage of completion
- As a fixed fee over a period of time
- Quarterly based on progress
Without automation, organizing and tracking all of this is tedious.
With bookkeeping automation, you can:
- Pay contractors digitally via ACH, EFT, or credit card
- Have contractors submit invoices online through a centralized portal
- Automatically route each invoice through a review and approval workflow based on your company’s policies
- Store and track contracts, W-9s, and past invoices in one secure system
In short, you streamline a complex, manual process—without hiring extra people to manage it. You’ll likely reduce the time spent on AP, while improving accuracy and visibility.
Why any company can benefit from bookkeeping automation
Any business—nonprofit, property manager, service provider, or product company—can benefit from bookkeeping automation.
By moving AP and AR into the cloud, you:
- Eliminate most manual, paper-based activities
- No longer need to pass paper around or chase down check signers
- Avoid last-minute bank runs for deposits or check cashing
- Centralize contracts, invoices, receipts, and payments in one secure system
- Gain real-time visibility into cash flow, outstanding invoices, and upcoming payments
The result is the same across industries: you save money, increase efficiency, and free your team to focus on higher-value work instead of paperwork.
Get started with bookkeeping automation
Ready to leave manual bookkeeping behind?
Get started today to see how bookkeeping automation can streamline your approvals, payments, and invoicing:
