As a small business, you don't want multiple systems taking care of your bookkeeping, invoicing and financial documents. Perhaps you create your invoices in spreadsheets or word-processing documents, eyeball expenses in online banking and maintain your employee records in an HR folder in the cloud. Some data may be in a file hosting service, while others are password-protected locally on your computer.

It can be confusing to others who may need to work with those documents — and for you to lose track of what is where. When you need that information come tax time or for a loan application, you may need to reference those scattered documents. That can take forever to find, and there's a real risk of losing data or even using the wrong data.

If you've yet to encounter any serious errors or problems handling your own bookkeeping, you may be tempted to maintain the status quo. However, your financial organization needs will continue to grow more complicated as time passes. Your business may grow wildly, multiplying the number of things to track and complicating your routine. Or, if you haven't been paying much attention to bookkeeping, you're probably tempting fate.

To address your needs, you could hire a bookkeeper to organize and track all of your business finances. You could also hire an accountant to organize and track your business recordkeeping.

Or you could have all your files, invoices, transactions, bank accounts, customer payments and credit cards flow into one easy-to-use financial management system. Such a system saves time by automatically parsing through your documents or receipts. You can scan and upload everything to a central digital location, capturing essential information without ever having to think about it. No spreadsheet does that on its own. Such a system would be automatic and uncomplicated, instantly searchable on all content and would make it easy to analyze information and make decisions based on that analysis.

Gartner, a technology research and consulting firm, examined process automation in accounting and discovered that 89% of general accounting tasks were highly automatable.

Such a system would organize your data while reducing or eliminating the time you spend manually entering data. It would make it easy to identify discrepancies in your records without annoying and time-consuming searches in physical files and journals, spreadsheets, documents and boxes of receipts. Most importantly, you'd have a clear picture of your business — and financial control while spending the least amount of your time bookkeeping.