Your accounting and finance process is essential for all of your company operations. It provides a clear picture of where funds are being allocated and how your IT business is doing financially. When leveraged effectively, accounting and finance processes are an excellent indicator of how much revenue you’re making every week, every quarter, and every year.
All businesses run better when upper management has complete visibility in accounting and finance, but IT businesses can’t afford not to. Your IT business lives and dies by its numbers.
A lack of visibility in your accounting processes causes inefficiency, an incomplete view of the levers of profitability, the inability to identify macro trends, time lost to tracking down information, and—possibly worst of all—the inability to adjust strategy for new market conditions.
Therefore, it’s increasingly important that visibility is a top priority, and gives your team an accurate view into the processes that produce, correct, and report
There is no silver bullet to achieving flawless accounting synergy and visibility, but there are several ways in which you can streamline your processes, enable real-time reporting, and leverage accountability.
Accounting Automation
Accounting automation can rapidly improve visibility and build confidence in your processes. Rather than outright replacing the need for in-house accountants, automating aspects of the accounting process allows for a system of checks and balances that can easily spot irregularities, over-expenditures, or mistakes that may have happened that would otherwise be potentially overlooked.
This information is invaluable to accountants who are used to seeing all the numbers on spreadsheets and are asked to trust in processes that happen outside of their view. Combining process visibility and reporting tools helps regulate the analysis capabilities of the teams who perform day-to-day accounting, and keeps important information at top of mind, especially when dealing with thousands of invoices, documents, and ledgers.
Automation saves time, reduces the risk of data inaccuracy and mistakes, offers instant data retrieval and secure file storage, and allows your team to integrate payroll and AP tools directly, streamlining your processes and giving unparalleled access to all your financial documents when and where you need them.
Accountability
When your accounting processes are visible, it’s much easier to accurately gauge your organization’s financial health. As your company expands, you and your team need to be aware of your financial health to allocate funds and manage budgets effectively. By having your accounting processes truly visible in real-time, there is the assuredness of accountability throughout your company in achieving goals and documenting finances correctly. This, in turn, helps your team achieve consistent performance and develop lasting good accounting habits that are demonstrably beneficial to your bottom line.
Resource Management
Having your entire team contribute to monitoring and understanding your business finances, gives a clearer, objective view of your expenses. Vendor costs and department expenses can be examined, compared, and grouped to provide a better return on investment through up-to-the-minute reporting and analysis.
When your team can assess each tool and resource, the whole company has concrete numbers to work with. This allows you to be agile in determining how to allocate funds, eliminate processes that aren’t paying dividends, and accurately strategize for your company’s future.
Scalability
Your accounting system needs to accommodate the growth you experience as your business expands to new markets, takes on new clients, and generates more revenue. Having a visible and collaborative accounting process ensures that you have tools that continue to provide insight into the new challenges that come with growing your team and maintaining productivity.
Visible accounting systems allows your team to collaborate on guiding your growth and improving your business processes as needed, developing new processes to decrease workload and increase productivity.
Real-Time Reporting
When your financial reporting is done in real-time, you get visibility into spending to be proactive about cash flow. You can immediately see how much of your budget is being spent as it’s being spent. The result is that actual spending isn’t a mystery when you get to the end of the month, and planning is more agile than ever. Automated accounting tools allow you to set real-time spending limits and enforce pre-approvals for purchases.
For example, team members get access to virtual corporate credit cards to make purchases for a project. Still, they are given a specific budget, and the manager can set limits on which vendors they make purchases from and avoid the misuse of funds. Having this type of real-time reporting system and technology in place, your accounting team can be proactive about protecting your cash flow rather than reacting after the fact.
Real-Time Accounting You Can Trust
When you have precise, accurate, and timely information based on real-time data, everyone in the company can operate accordingly. This means the management team spends less time worrying about the numbers, and more time problem solving and improving results.
Finances are too important to wait on quarterly reporting. Understanding your profitability is essential in mapping your path to success, but can be a bear to measure and calculate consistently. At Sierra Pacific Group, our expert finance consultants will not only take on your busy work, but also help you interpret your numbers so you can make informed decisions backed by data.
