Even with the best outsourced accountant, access to real-time information can be delayed and comes at a higher cost. Waiting a week or more to meet with your bookkeeper or receive a report can delay critical decisions—and can hurt your business. As a business owner, you need to always know how much cash you have available. Doing so enables you to make bill payments, purchase inventory, better plan for the future, and expand your business.

With Sage 50, you'll have your business vitals at your fingertips. You can:

• Manage your income and expenses through customized and built-in reports. See our tips for managing cash flow.
• Customize reporting for benchmarking and forecasting.
• Understand your business' spending trends to make decisions to keep your costs under control.
• Reduce overhead costs by having the appropriate amount of inventory on hand based on current and upcoming customer orders

A streamlined process to help you keep up with your customers and sales can be the difference between a well-run company and a struggling one.

With Sage 50, you can instantly see who owes you money and when—as opposed to waiting for a report telling you to collect overdue payments.

• Track payments and create receipts: know your income by recording the method by which customers paid. See our tips on collecting cash from customers.
• Create customer records: keep track of detailed information about your customers and set up the terms of your business relationships.
• Prepare sales invoices: generate sales invoices that list inventory or service items charged to your customer.
• Choose a price list: conveniently manage discounts or markups of your inventory and service items.

To help you stay on top of business transactions, here's a list of daily transactions small businesses should track.

Entering your own accounting data not only saves your business money, it allows you to invest the money you've saved in accounting consultative services that enhance your business' performance and profitability.

Sage 50 enables you to easily enter and organize your own data and then transfer your working files to an accountant. It also helps you optimize your accountant's knowledge and expertise to help with tax planning and compliance, financing and credit options, overhead reduction, and asset protection.

How it works:

• Get Sage 50. It's fast and easy to install and set up.
• Your accountant can show you the information you can enter, and demonstrate everything from how to generate invoices to tracking payments. Entering your own data is where you really save time and money.
• Now you can spend that time asking your accountant valuable questions, such as, "How can I reduce my overhead costs?” or "What's my profit margin?" or "What percentage of my costs is labor?'

Organized finances at your fingertips, more strategic advice. Having both can give you more confidence in how you do business—and put you on the path to success.

For advice on how to keep financial records accurate, read our basic bookkeeping checklist.