How to Build Your Accounting Tech Stack

Long gone are the days of managing your...

Nick Gallo

Marketing Manager

Published
November 6, 2024

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Long gone are the days of managing your accounting practice with pen and paper. Today, countless digital tools are at your disposal, capable of streamlining every accounting process from file sharing to project management. However, with so many options to choose from, it’s all too easy to wind up with bloated systems and inefficient workflows. Here’s a guide to building an accounting tech stack that covers all your bases without unnecessary complexity.

1. Client’s Ledger Tool

One of the foundations of your accounting tech stack is the ledger tool you have your clients use for their bookkeeping. As the ultimate home of their financial records, it plays a central role in your practice’s systems. As a result, it’s critical to recommend a tool that integrates with the rest of your accounting software solutions. Ideally, it should also provide the features clients want without sacrificing usability or breaking their budget. Some of the most popular options to consider include:

Intuit QuickBooks Online
Intuit QuickBooks Desktop
Xero
Sage Intacct

If a prospective client's finance team already uses a different accounting automation software, you might not be able to make them change, but be careful about accepting other solutions. Juggling multiple bookkeeping tools can make life much more difficult, especially if you don’t have a tool like Keeper that syncs with them. Not only is it often inefficient to switch back and forth between solutions, but it also requires your staff to spend time learning how to use each tool.

2. Customer Relationship Manager

A customer relationship manager (CRM) is a tool that helps your business manage interactions with current and potential clients. More specifically, it should allow you to document, organize, and analyze customer information in one location. Fortunately, you don’t have to look for a separate product that does the trick. As part of our mission to offer comprehensive bookkeeping practice management software for bookkeepers and accountants, Keeper includes robust CRM features. From your dashboard, you can view a list of all the clients connected to your account. You can also assign custom properties to each one, such as industry or service tier, which you can then use to sort and filter the list as needed. You’ll also see a summary of all the information you have on that client in one place, including:

Monthly close and payroll status
Unanswered transaction questions
Vendor requests
Client-submitted documents
Instant chats with the client
Staff assigned to the client

Consolidating and organizing your client information like this makes it much easier to stay on top of outstanding tasks for each client, respond to their communications quickly, and maintain strong relationships, which is essential to growing your business.

3. Project Management

Project management software is designed to provide an intuitive and efficient system for tracking, organizing, and prioritizing tasks. In the bookkeeping and accounting industry, timeliness is at a premium, so it’s an especially important tool to have for an effective tech stack. One of the problems with most project management solutions is that they’re entirely separate from the rest of your workflows. They require you to toggle between different apps or tabs, which may seem like a minor disruption but can create real inefficiencies. That’s another issue that Keeper can help you solve by integrating project management features into the platform. With its built-in task management tool, you can keep track of everything you’re working on and do that very work in real time, without having to leave the app. It’s no glorified spreadsheet either. Keeper can facilitate all of the following:

Workflow templates: Create reusable workflow templates for month-end closes, automatically assigning tasks and subtasks. That takes the guesswork out of recurring projects, potentially reducing your planning time each month.
Collaborative tools: Internal chat and comment features let you link directly to tasks, making it easy for team members to collaborate and solve issues quickly without having to send emails back and forth.
Task categorization: Add tags and categories to both tasks and clients, making it easy to filter and prioritize responsibilities. You can see what needs immediate attention across your entire client list at a glance.

Stop juggling extraneous apps and start keeping track of your work where you actually do it. By streamlining your project management with Keeper, you can help make your entire practice more efficient.

4. Expense Management

Managing employee expenses without a dedicated solution is often incredibly inefficient Your team members may have to track their costs with manual data entry, submit expense reports via email, and wait weeks for approval and reimbursement without updates. Expense management software facilitates every step in the process, making it much more convenient for your staff to document their expenses, submit reports with receipts attached, and track the status of their pending reimbursements. In addition, tools often allow you to create and automate customized approval workflows, which can shorten the processing time significantly. Here are some popular options to consider:

Expensify
BILL Divvy
Ramp
Brex
Navan

Since many of these tools let you issue corporate credit cards to your team or finance leaders, they can also help you accrue points or cash back rewards that you can use to offset your business expenses.

5. HR/Payroll Software

Human resources is another aspect of your accounting practice that you probably can’t afford to manage entirely by hand. Software can help automate many time-intensive tasks, including employee onboarding, payroll payment processing, and benefits administration. Just as importantly, payroll software helps protect you from human error, and payroll compliance mistakes can be costly. As a result, it’s well worth including a payroll automation solution in your accounting technology stack. Fortunately, there are many reliable options to choose from. Here are some popular options you might want to consider:

Gusto
Rippling
Paylocity
ADP Workforce
Paychex

While most payroll management software share certain fundamental capabilities, they can have significant differences. One factor you should make sure to consider is the degree to which each software solution helps with compliance. A tool with robust financial reporting features can save you a lot of time and effort, but they may cost significantly more than one that requires you to handle compliance on your own. You have to determine which makes the most sense for your needs. 6. Team Email Account, Calendar, and File Sharing Every accountant's practice needs email, calendar, and file-sharing tools. It’s easy to take this kind of administrative software for granted, but it’s fundamental to your team’s ability to communicate and collaborate with each other and your clients. Even if you use a platform like Keeper to send instant messages, organize day-to-day tasks, and share sensitive documents, you’ll still need to supplement them with these traditional tech tools to have a fully functional system. Since you’ll be constantly using these tools in some capacity or another, it’s essential that you choose intuitive, reliable products. Two of the top options to consider include:

Google Workspace: Google Workspace provides a robust suite that includes Gmail for email, Google Calendar for scheduling, and Google Drive for file sharing.
Microsoft 365: Microsoft 365 offers an integrated solution with Outlook for your email and calendar, Microsoft Teams for messaging, and OneDrive for file sharing.

Using a single cloud-based system for all three functions is usually preferable to mixing and matching your email, calendar, and file-sharing tools. There’s a synergy between them that makes navigating them much more intuitive. That said, which one you prefer largely comes down to personal preference. Play around with a few different options to gauge which user interface works best for you and your team.

7. 1099 Management

1099 management is consistently one of the most headache-inducing aspects of running a bookkeeping or accounting firm. Determining which vendors need forms and filing them by the dozen is hard enough, but requesting W-9s and following up with the inevitable non-responders can be even more frustrating and time-consuming. As a result, 1099 management software is often a worthwhile addition to a modern tech stack. It can significantly streamline many aspects of the process, saving you time and helping to prevent data-entry errors. This is another area where Keeper shines. Our 1099 document management software can make life much easier for you. The Prepare 1099s Report integrates with your client’s ledger tool and automatically identifies which vendors meet the reporting threshold, excluding credit card transactions by default. If one of a client’s qualifying vendors is missing a W-9, you can request that your client or the vendor send you a copy directly through the app. Once received, you can save it to the client’s file on the platform, where it will sync back with their ledger tool. When it’s time to file, you can also export all the financial data in your preferred format to streamline the preparation process in a product like Track1099 or Tax1099.

8. Automation Features

To build complete accounting tech stacks, you usually need multiple platforms. That typically involves some unavoidable level of inefficiency due to the need to jump between tabs or apps, but it doesn’t have to. Fortunately, dedicated automation software can help you customize automatic workflows that connect your disparate tools and significantly streamline otherwise time-consuming processes. For example, you might construct a workflow automation that triggers whenever you add a new client to your bookkeeping CRM. It could create a new folder for them in your file-sharing system and send a welcome email with an onboarding checklist. Zapier is arguably the world’s leading tool for this kind of automation. It can connect to thousands of integrated apps, providing the flexibility to construct virtually any workflow you need. Its user interface is also fairly intuitive and requires no coding, so you don’t have to be tech-savvy to make it work for you. In fact, it comes with a library of pre-built workflows called “Zaps” that you can use to automate many popular tasks. If you’re looking for a more budget-friendly alternative, Make (formerly Integromat) is one to consider. It doesn’t have as many pre-built workflows and so may require more know-how, but its paid plans are significantly cheaper.

Increase Your Productivity With Keeper

By keeping accounting tech stacks as lean as possible and automating workflows with tools like Zapier, you can minimize the inefficiencies usually associated with having to work across multiple software solutions. That said, juggling tools is still going to cost you time, even if that’s only by forcing you to set up automated workflows upfront. It can also be expensive, as each solution you add to the mix may require an additional subscription. One of the best ways to maximize your productivity with the right tech stack while minimizing the impact on your resources is to use a bookkeeping workflow software that can facilitate several processes that usually require separate products. Keeper is exactly that. We’ve designed it to give bookkeeping and accounting professionals one place where they can do all their work. For example, it includes features designed to replace software for: