Top 6 Best Bookkeeping Apps for Nigerian Small Business Owners

 

Many small business owners struggle with accounting and more specifically, bookkeeping. Usually, these small businesses are wholly run by only the owner in order to save funds. Hence, they find it hard to retain a professional’s services for bookkeeping. Bookkeeping apps can help with bookkeeping for small business owners.

What is bookkeeping?

Bookkeeping is the act of keeping your business records or private financial transactions on a daily basis. Usually, the ‘books’ to be kept will be organized under different headings. Bookkeeping could easily be confused to mean the same thing with accounting, but bookkeeping is merely an aspect of accounting. 

Ordinarily, bookkeeping would involve: recording financial transactions, posting credits and debits daily, generating invoices, completing payroll and maintaining and balancing current accounts, historical accounts and general ledgers. 

Importance of bookkeeping

As a business owner, bookkeeping helps you stay aware of your financial state, as well as make operating, investing and financing decisions in line with that financial state. 

In addition, bookkeeping is usually instrumental to the calculation of taxes and if you aim to get sponsorship or loans from financial institutions, bookkeeping is a necessity for you because those financial institutions will want to take a look at your books in order for them to judge the viability of your business.  

Bookkeeping also helps business owners measure their performance; this will result in better decision making to improve the business revenue and expenses goals. It helps to ensure that the business is run on a consistent and sustainable financial pattern. 

Why bookkeeping apps are an improvement on traditional paper bookkeeping

Accounting records help you keep track of your financial information and they come in handy when you need a quick statement on the state of your business or to make a business application. Traditionally, a lot of business owners would have nothing to do with math, so they just employ an accountant to sort out needs like bookkeeping. For bigger businesses or companies, it is even easier for them to outsource all their accounting needs to an accounting firm. 

However, as a small business owner, you have limited funds to spare even while gunning for excellence. Bookkeeping will also aid you in efficiency and customers will definitely want to keep patronising an efficient business. 

You don’t want to be the online vendor asking a customer to send a debit receipt twice for a payment made weeks ago. You want to be the vendor who records a credit immediately when the customer sends you a debit alert. That way, you don’t keep disturbing the customer with small details that you could have managed better. So, your best bet is to find a way to do the bookkeeping yourself. 

Image credit: pexels

On the other hand, you may have a phobia for even attempting to undertake the task of bookkeeping for your small business because you may get weary of bulky and intricate calculations. For those who do bookkeeping offline or in hardcopy; those books run the risk of distortion and destruction, especially when unauthorized persons get access to the books. 

So, that’s where digital bookkeeping comes in. With bookkeeping apps, you don’t need to know how to work with excel sheets or be the pristine mathematician calculating sums and multiplications while under pressure and within short periods. 

With bookkeeping apps, all you have to do is make entries under the appropriate headings or logs. The apps will do the mathematics for you, send you reminders and save information in a permanently retrievable form. What’s better? Your books are secure and stored permanently; only you can log in and you can access your records even when you change devices. 

Here is a list of top six bookkeeping apps for Nigerian small business owners. The list is in no particular order. 

• Kippa

Kippa was designed with small businesses in mind. The app presents an all-in-one financial solution for bookkeeping and business banking products for African business owners. 

It helps users record sales and expenses. With Kippa, you can also generate customized invoices, record payments of invoices and send payment reminders. Aside from maintaining an inventory, the app also notifies users when they are running low on stock. If you like, you can give the app permission to automatically alert suppliers before you run out of stock. 

 This free app also offers users a Kippa bank account which will be fully integrated into the bookkeeping app for users to receive and make payments. 

• Sabi- Bookkeeping & Receipts

Sabi is a digital bookkeeping app that allows business owners to monitor and manage transactions with customers, issue receipts to customers, manage debtors and get insights into the business cash flow. 

• Dukka

Dukka is another free bookkeeping app that helps businesses track cash flow. The app features a barcode scanner for checkout and inventory. It allows business owners to track expenses and income including customer behavior. Customer behaviors which can be tracked on the app include how much customers spend per period- daily, weekly and monthly. 

With Dukka, you can set reminders for debt collection, have all your customer information in one place and it also features the integration of multiple payment options from customers such as bank transfers, debit cards and cash. This ensures the automation of data entry once an integrated payment platform records a credit. 

Invoices and receipts generated on Dukka are free and may be shred directly on WhatsApp, Bluetooth and email. 

• Accounteer

Accounteer allows small business owners to create invoices, track expenses and follow up on their finances. The follow-up is possible because Accounteer is designed to be integrated with third party services like banks, e-invoicing platforms and e-commerce. 

With this app, you can upload or email your invoices and expenses directly to your profile. This will allow you to have a retrievable digital archive for those documents. Accounteer also allows you to keep track of transactions in more than one currency. 

• BMAC Assistant

BMAC aims to help any person (not just business owners) with record keeping. It is so easy to use that you would need no previous background in or accounting knowledge. It helps keep track of expenses, income, invoices, bank transactions, cash transactions log and details of products purchased or sold. 

• Luca 

Luca app is also freely available for business owners in Nigeria. It was created not just for bookkeeping but to also provide users with a quick way to generate financial documents whenever the users need to secure loans. With the Luca app, you can create customized invoices, send out automated reminders to debtors, share PDF reports and upload CSV spreadsheets for inventory management. The app also generated weekly and monthly reports for users.

Luca sends automated payment reminders and allows business owners to manage more than one business separately on one account. 

Related: 6 Most Popular Electronic Law Report Platforms In Nigeria