As a small business owner, you have many things taking up your time. You manage social media accounts and marketing plans and employees. Managing your company’s accounting may seem like one of the easier things that you do, so you may not notice how much time you lose keeping track of income and expenses in an old spreadsheet—or worse, with pen and paper.

Here are some ways that outsourcing your bookkeeping services and choosing a cloud-based accounting program can make your job easier.

Maintain mental energy and focus

The phrase “multi-tasking” originated with computers, long before we ever talked about it in the context of people. As we as people pressed ourselves to do more and more tasks with fewer and fewer breaks in between, we also started talking about context switching.

Context switching is, basically, the time it takes you to refocus on a task when you’re interrupted. In the Bryan Braun article I liked to, he talks about taking a phone call when he’s working on a research paper. In that task, for him, context switching is incredibly expensive; it takes him much longer to get back to work on the paper than it does to handle the phone call. He’s better off letting the call go to voicemail and calling the person back later.

When you’re responsible for putting little bits of attention towards several different projects every day, you lose time every time you’re done one, and you have to focus on the next. We see this in terms of procrastination; we check email, social media, and go get a cup of coffee. Really, this is your brain dumping old information so that it can get ready for the next task. It makes sense that you want to spend as much of your day as possible being productive, and as little as possible being unproductive.

By keeping the interface simple and the accessible, makes it easier for you to stay focused and get through your work day.

You can’t actually do everything

There’s a myth in American entrepreneurial culture that successful entrepreneurs need to be able to do it all. They need to be experts on SEO, have intimate knowledge of tax details, and have instant and detailed knowledge of the inner workings of every part of their company.

In truth, no successful company can run this way. In the startup phase, many entrepreneurs do end up picking up a little bit of everything, but as a company grows and expands, one of the crucial steps that entrepreneurs must go through is learning to delegate to other people, so that they can focus on building and growing the company.

Outsourcing bookkeeping services is just one way that an entrepreneur can take a set of tasks off their plate, freeing up time for other work. Instead of spending time cutting and pasting into each separate invoice before emailing it out, cloud based accounting services manage the process for you. When you mark an invoice paid, that payment shows up on your balance sheet, and arrives in reports about income from different customers.

When you’re not quite ready to hire an accountant, but have enough income that you need to track it over the course of the year, cloud based accounting software is a perfect fit.

Improve performance in other areas

Unless you are actually an accountant, most people do not enjoy the process of maintaining their business’s books. Many people find it confusing, and worry that they’re tracking the wrong things, and potentially exposing themselves in the case of an audit or other complication.

When you use cloud based accounting software to outsource your bookkeeping services, you gain back not just the time you spend entering and re-entering data, but the time you spend researching, making sure that you’re tracking the right things, and worrying that you’ve got it all wrong.

That time can then be turned around and used for more productive tasks, like managing your SEO and marketing, building links to and from your website, and working with your employees to make sure they’re on track with your brand.

If you need to let go of something within your business to make time, consider outsourcing bookkeeping services to a cloud based accounting platform today.