Some parts of running a small business are undeniably fun. Setting your own hours, being your own boss… what else could beat it? Unfortunately, as with any job, there are also some more tiresome tasks. The administrative jobs that every small business owner or self-employed person need to complete – things such as sending invoices, completing your books and sending financial info to team members – are definitely important. After all, your business couldn’t run without them. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t get annoying quickly, especially when you’re operating a small team.
Enter Amaiz. Amaiz is a new business banking app that does more than your average account. Aside from the expected features such as card management and bank transfers, they also manage to pack in a lot of extras that will make life easier for small business owners who don’t want to waste time on financial admin.
Invoicing
Invoicing is one of those bread-and-butter tasks that needs to be done regularly just to keep your business running. Instead of using a different system to create and send your invoices, Amaiz lets you do it all straight from the app – a real time saver. You can still maintain a professional look by adding your branding and customising the template before sending it out to your contacts. Unfortunately, there’s nothing any banking app can do to ensure that your clients pay on time!
Receipt Capture
Both paper and digital receipts can be difficult to keep track of unless you have them all stored in one place. Although there are dedicate programmes out there to do this for you, we’re a fan of centralising as much as possible to avoid having to jump between different apps. Keeping your receipts logged in your banking app is a great way to stay on top of expenses, and ensure that you’re able to complete your tax return properly.
Team Notifications
Running a small business becomes more complicated when you start hiring your first employees, as you’re now responsible for others – and that means their finances as well as their work. If your employees need to have access to the business account then you can issue them their own cards, but Amaiz doesn’t stop there. It also makes it easier to share financial updates with your team, by including a Slack integration that allows you to simply ping over any notifications that you receive. Slack is an essential messaging tool for small businesses, and it becomes even more useful when it links up to your other accounts.
Accounting Integrations
Amaiz also integrates with FreeAgent, and they have Xero and Sage on the roadmap. This means that you can sync your business transactions with FreeAgent automatically – and you’ll also have the option of importing your transaction history. Manually entering transaction data when you need to complete your books is a real pain, and this could potentially save a lot of time. Even better, if you don’t use FreeAgent then you can still download a CSV with all your transaction data, to upload directly to the accounting system of your choice.
Taxes – features incoming
One of the most arduous parts of running a business is filing taxes. You need to know how much tax you’re likely to owe so that you can put money away throughout the year, and you need to actually do the work of completing a return when it comes time to pay. Traditionally there hasn’t been much you can do to make this easier, short of actually hiring someone to do it for you.
Several of the features in Amaiz’s pipeline are focussed on this specific area, and we think they’re going to be game changers. This includes a tax-estimation calculator that will help you work out what you owe as well as support for HMRC’s ‘Making Tax Digital’ initiative, which will provide you with help and support for filing your tax returns. With these additions, Amaiz will be even more of a no-brainer for small business owners looking for an account that takes some of the hard work out of company finances.
Interested in learning more? You can check out the Amaiz comparison table to see which of their accounts comes with the features you need, and for a open and transparent comparison against other providers.
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