How to choose bookkeeping software: invoices, accounts, and the link to sales

At an office furniture firm in İzmir, the salesperson gets the contract signed, and accounting learns about the invoice days later from the salesperson's message. When a payment is late, accounting calls sales and sales calls the customer; nobody can say straight away which contract the invoice belongs to. That firm's problem is not issuing invoices; it is that invoices are born cut off from sales. Before you start, write down today's path: where the contract is, who issues the invoice, where collections are tracked, and in what form the accountant receives the data. The new software should shorten the longest link on that path.

• Electronic documents: if you are required to use e-invoices and e-archive invoices, does the software support this directly or through an integrator.
• Customer accounts: can customer and supplier balances, due dates, and receivables ageing be read on one screen.
• Cash and bank: are movements tracked separately; can a bank movement be matched to an invoice.
• Stock: do you really keep stock; if not, do you have to pay for a stock module anyway.
• Accountant: in what form is the data handed over; does the accountant retype it into their own software.
• Permissions: can sales, accounting, and management see the same data with different rights; is who changed what logged.
• Link to sales: is the invoice born tied to the contract and the customer record, or typed separately.
• Exit: can your data be exported in a form another program can import.

Discuss the first item with your accountant. Which electronic documents you must issue depends on your business, and that should be settled before you choose the software. Data sharing with the accountant is settled in the same conversation: the format and frequency of the reports they need are set next to the formats the software can export.

The rows of the table split by type of business. In a service firm without stock the invoice ties to the contract and the collection, in a trading business with stock the stock and delivery notes come first, and in project-based work each invoice is tied to the project it belongs to. If you want to see how collections meet sales, you can read how overdue receivables are made visible in the collections tracking article.

A demo run on the vendor's sample company does not show your month end. What shows your business is an invoice that was part-paid last month, or a returned item. Bring a few real records like that to the demo. Follow step by step where the remaining amount on a partly paid invoice shows up and how the invoice is corrected for a returned item.

• Issue the invoice and collect part of it; how do the remaining balance and due date show on the customer account.
• Match a bank movement to an invoice; where does an unmatched movement wait.
• Check whether a salesperson can see the customer's open balance.
• Take the month-end export for your accountant; how will the accountant use it.
• Restrict one user's permissions; which screens can the restricted person still see.

Bookkeeping software does not replace your accountant; it gets clean, complete data to them. Involve the accountant from the start. Put in writing in what form data can move into their software, how the items in your program will match their chart of accounts, and who checks what at period close. Without that conversation, someone at the accountant's office ends up entering the same invoice again at month end.

In that meeting, also ask your accountant what they most often find missing from you at period close. The answer is usually a bank movement's description or which job an invoice belongs to; the software you choose should close that gap when the record is made.

At an advertising agency in Kadıköy, invoices are issued in the agency's own program, and the accountant re-enters the same invoices into their own software every month. A short meeting with the accountant before switching shows how that double entry will go; the software alone does not solve it.

In Corex360 the customer card's tabs include Quotes, Contracts, Projects, Finance, Files, and Drive. A contract record holds its type, amount, and start and end dates; files such as the signed document are kept in Corex Drive inside the record they belong to. The Accounting module issues sales and purchase invoices. We describe how the accounting team's day runs on the accounting and HR page.

The Accounting module's list of integration options includes e-Invoice and e-Archive (the Revenue Administration portal) as well as DİA, Logo, Mikro, Netsis, and Paraşüt. Which connection your business will use, and how Corex360 will work with your current accounting software, is decided together at setup. Your electronic document obligations, statutory books, and tax returns are matters to settle with your accountant; before setup, write down which data your accountant expects and in what form.

If all you need is to issue invoices and track collections for a small shop, a simple bookkeeping program built for that job is the better choice; a customer card, quotes, and contract records add weight that such a business does not need. Whatever software you choose, statutory books and tax returns run through your accountant. Corex360's contribution shows where the invoice must sit on the same core as the quote, the contract, and the customer record.

You can see how the quote, the contract, and the customer record are kept together on the sales side on the Corex360 CRM module page.