Manage Finances Faster and Easier With Online Banking
Run your business's day-to-day finances and manage your bank account with ease and convenience, thanks to online banking.
For small businesses, the feeling you get from online banking is the same one you get when using a 24-hour ATM or a microwave oven. Once you start, it's hard to remember how you lived without it. Online banking provides a monumental leap forward in terms of how easily and transparently small businesses can track and manage their business and personal accounts, and how much time they can save from the way they did banking in the past.
When small businesses reconcile accounts on a monthly basis, there can be an uneasy feeling for the rest of the month that stems from not knowing exactly what's there. This is where online banking comes in.
Improve visibility
From your computer, you can look up your bank accounts at any time, day or night. If you're frustrated with how long a monthly reconciliation takes, you or your bookkeeper can do it weekly. The result: You gain a clearer sense of your financial position on a more frequent basis.
But regular reconciliation is just one small part of the flexibility and transparency that online banking brings. You can also:
- Transfer your money from checking to savings or money market accounts to take advantage of the higher interest rates
- Customize your account names in ways that are easily recognizable
- Set up online bill paying so you don't have to write checks
- Schedule the payment of bills so your money remains in an interest-bearing account as long as possible and you still avoid late fees
- View and download images of paid checks so you don't have to physically store canceled ones
- Receive e-mail updates when online statements are available for downloading
Enjoy more time and flexibility
One of the biggest advantages that small businesses report about online banking is the time they save being able to download their statements automatically into commonly used software applications, such as spreadsheets or accounting packages.
In addition to saving the time you or your employees spend logging and tracking checks, this process also avoids re-keying errors. It makes it significantly faster and easier to balance checkbooks so you have a precise sense of your finances immediately. It may also save you money on bookkeeping fees.
The key advantage to all these features is flexibility. You can conduct your banking at the time that's most convenient for you, whether it's during typical working hours or not. Because you handle banking transactions without going to the bank, online banking means you can also manage your accounts from your laptop, your home computer or anywhere you have Internet access.
If you travel frequently, you never have to worry about losing track of your finances either. And if a bill must be paid quickly while you're out of the office, you can do so through online banking.
Because information is stored electronically, it's now more cost-effective to access and request certain documents. For instance, your bank statements, images of checks (both front and back), and images of returned items are available online (with the proper passwords, of course) for a certain period of time. Whereas in the past you might have had to pay to get this information because of the manual process involved in retrieving the paper, with online banking, most banks allow you to download them at no charge.
Safe and secure
With online banking, it's also easy to open new accounts, stop payments and reorder checks. If you're concerned about security, remember that online banking has a multitude of safeguards. A few years ago, you may not have wanted to use your credit card online for e-commerce transactions because of security issues, but everyone does that commonly now. By using online transfer of funds rather than checks, you reduce the likelihood that checks will be lost – or worse, stolen – while in the mail.
In addition, a number of multi-step protections, from passwords to firewalls, are in place to prevent unauthorized access to your account. These safeguards ensure not only the safety of your money, but also the security of your passwords. Such protections enable you to know that you and your designated employees are logging into your business's account(s) and not a Web site that's trying to take your information.
By increasing the visibility into your bank accounts, online banking gives you a higher degree of control over your company's finances and your own time.
Also In This Issue
- Social Networking
- Try these online tools and see if you will gain new business opportunities.
- Know Your Best Customers
- You don't need fancy software to analyze your customer base in hopes of bringing in more sales. Here's how to do it on your own.