It is a rapidly changing market and there have been some rich new features introduced. Some of these features mean that there is substantial intelligence at work behind the scenes before you even launch the software. I refer to this as data capture compared to the traditional data entry. There are three really helpful ways that this is being put to work:

Capturing bank transactions
Each day, transactions are fed from your bank into the software and automatically matched to transactions in the system or to previous similar transactions or according to pre-determined rules. This means that, rather than entering bank transactions, you now confirm or accept the software’s suggestions or otherwise allocate them.

Capturing bills
The time spent entering your suppliers’ bills can be drastically reduced. Bills can now be forwarded to your accounting software, either by mail for scanning or electronically to providers who will process the bills using Optical Character Recognition technology. When you next open your accounting software, these bills will have been entered according to the rules that you determine; either waiting for payment or to be matched against a bank transaction.

Capturing share transactions
Technology is also emerging whereby data contained in buy and sell contracts will be automatically entered into Self Managed Superannuation software.