As a small business owner, tax time can be one of the most overwhelming times of year but it’s never too early to start tax preparation, writes Elise Balsillie, Head of Thryv Australia.

Paying your business taxes on time is important, but it’s the pre-deadline rush that can truly leave a business behind.

Struggling to combine those paper receipts? Frantically searching your inbox for invoices and pay reminders? Spending dinners data-entering for your BAS?

Time spent frantically searching for all of this can mean that as a small business operator, you well and truly feel the EOFY crunch.

To help ease the load at tax time, two simple and effective solutions are to:

1. Go digital
2. Automate

Both of these combined will help make the EOFY an easier process, instead of a stressful one.

Go digital and automate

The simplest and most effective thing you can do, and as early as possible, is to get invoices and receipts digitised.

Growing your digital presence and capabilities by making use of digital tools and software will help small business owners keep track of all transactions, payments and outstandings. Combine this with automation to seamlessly follow up on payments and you’ll have an all-around, stress-reducing solution.

Automating your taxes is a business imperative to increase efficiency and improve accuracy. It simplifies the small business process and ensures your data is accurate and complete. It will make your business more efficient by freeing up time that can be used to focus on growth opportunities.

Having automated software can help align customer purchases to invoices and payment receipts. Keeping these digital has another great effect – it means you can avoid having to enter the data and calculate everything yourself. For example, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool can track digital payments and keep them counted for your convenience.

Want to quickly see how often a particular service or product was purchased? You can track these digitally as well. Not only are you saving yourself time at EOFY, but you’re also making micro-business analyses to help you see what is working, and what’s not.

This means spending less time hurriedly putting together all the different parts of your tax and BAS, and instead, having a single place that keeps this all together.

Lastly, your payments provider should be able to link to your CRM to ensure card processes and transactions are also tracked. Not having a linked payments provider means your digitisation efforts will be wasted – you’ll need to spend time aligning payments and transactions with your receipts, wasting valuable time anyway.

Want more? Get our newsletter delivered straight to your inbox! Follow Kochie’s Business Builders on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.