Tax time can be a headache for many small business owners. It’s not just that business tax rules can be confusing and arbitrary. Spring is the time when you have to go through a year’s worth of saved receipts and paperwork, trying to find a specific number or form, and hoping you didn’t accidentally throw out or misfile an important piece of paper.

At ATM Network, we understand this very well. Every year at this time we get a lot of calls from our customers. Usually it’s because their accountant needs to know how much money they made on their ATMs last year, and they didn’t save all the monthly statements we sent them with their checks.

It’s an even bigger headache for people who own a lot of ATMs. Someone with 80 machines has to keep track of — and add up — nearly 1,000 different monthly statements. The headache can be enormous.

Then there are the checks themselves. Paper checks can get lost, stolen or damaged. They take days to arrive. And machine owners have to take them to the bank, physically endorse them and deposit them.

At the end of 2009, ATM Network took a big step toward making things easier for customers by switching from paper checks to electronic payments. Customer profits are deposited directly in their bank account — automatically, without risk, and usually 10 days or so earlier than with paper checks.

Now ATM Network has taken the next step with Webstatements, its online statement archive.

Instead of receiving and storing a paper statement, customers can login to their Webstatements account to view their machine’s financial results.

They can see total activity for all of their machines, or view each machine individually. They can sort results by month and year. And if they do want paper copies, they can print out individual statements for all of their machines with a single click of the mouse.

The online statements contain all the information that used to be on ATM Network’s paper statements: profit information, daily activity, network activity, and more. So it’s easy to see at a glance how a machine is being used and how profitable it is.

Webstatements works in conjunction with ATM Portal, an online reporting service that tracks up-to-the-minute activity and keeps track of daily operating items like how much cash remains in each machine. ATM Portal provides daily reporting; Webstatements provides monthly summaries, as well as customer-specific financial information unavailable through ATM Portal.

It’s just one more way that ATM Network provides its partners with top-of-the-line service and accountability.