CashFlows, a regulated financial services company, and Clear Books, the cloud accounting company, have launched the first fully integrated cloud based accountancy and online business banking service for small and medium sized businesses.

The two innovative technology companies have developed a new seamless way of online banking and accounting that will make processing unpaid bills faster, cheaper, more efficient and accurate. It will provide small businesses with greater awareness over their real time cash flow.

The solution allows small businesses to create a bill in their accounting software, log into their business account and then click a button to import unpaid bills directly from their accounting system. They then choose which bills to pay and when they have been successfully paid the unpaid bill in the accounting software is automatically updated as paid.

Some small businesses use CSVs to perform their supplier payment runs but the majority still have employees manually entering individual bills from accounting software into their online bank account. Even where a bank provides the option to use a CSV for payment runs, there is still a need for staff to export from accounts and import into the bank. Then the accounts must be updated to reflect that the bill is paid.

Commenting on the partnership Neil Graham, CEO at CashFlows, said:
“The collaboration between CashFlows and Clear Books will reduce the time small business spend manually processing invoices and give them greater visibility of their cash flow.

“The problem for many small businesses is that their online accounting and banking systems are completely separate. This means they don’t have real time visibility over their current cash flow and payment commitments.

“What we have created is a platform where the two can work seamlessly together so that small businesses have a more joined up financial eco-system in place and far greater control over their business payments and cash flow.”

Tim Fouracre, CEO of Clear Books added:
“Technology in the worlds of accounting and banking is moving online and what Clear Books and CashFlows have developed is an innovative time saver that will reduce administrative burden and save companies money. Our partnership with CashFlows addresses this problem by combining cloud technology to innovate how small businesses can manage their financial processes.

“Small businesses can waste a huge amount of their staff time transferring data between accounting software and online banking and manually entering data into different systems. This approach is inefficient and an unnecessary drain on many small businesses for what is a very common and frequent administrative task.”