Your business is growing quickly. Sales are up. Operations is looking at ways to be more efficient in delivering your products and services to your clients. And your accounting team?
Well, your poor accounting team is trying to stay on top of a collection of Excel spreadsheets where they are keeping the various reports that they know someone is going to ask for but they can’t create them in the current system. They are scrambling to deal with the increase in billing, new revenue recognition requirements, and the sheer volume increase in accounts payable. Because all that wonderful growth – comes along with a ton of additional paperwork.
If you want your business to keep growing, you need to look at the tools you are providing to your accounting team as well as how you are increasing sales and ramping up delivery.
Billing Automation
How do you currently send your invoices? Where does the information come from? Is it pulled together manually, then hand-keyed into Quickbooks? If so, you can gain enough efficiency by automating your invoicing process to pay for itself in a very short period of time. You want to look at tools that allow you to, at a minimum, pull data from your operational systems and import it into your accounting system rather than hand-key. Better yet, systems that integrate to allow you to automate your billing process will allow you to grow without putting a strain on your accounting team.
Cash is king, and billing is the start of that process. Your invoices need to be accurate and timely to improve how quickly you get paid. And messing up a customer invoice is one of the fastest ways out there to irritate a customer!
Accounts Payable Automation
How do you currently process vendor invoices? Do they get mailed or emailed to whoever ordered things, and then routed around the office, until an AP clerk receives them, then has to chase someone down for approval before entering them into your accounting system? How often does a payment get missed because the accounting team didn’t even know the bill existed yet?
To keep up with the growing demands of your growing business on the AP side, you’ll want to ensure your accounts payable process is organized and easy to use. Set yourself up for success with a centralized place to capture your vendor bills, a built-in approval process that doesn’t rely on paper moving from desk to desk to manage, and consider adding in AP automation software to help out.
On Demand, Real Time Reporting
Set yourself up for success by keeping your financial results at your fingertips. You want your system to include the ability to provide you with your financial results and important metrics at any time – real-time processing is key to this option. If you don’t have your results until 10 days after month-end (or worse), there are a lot of improvements you can make to speed this process up. A solid accounting system that tracks your financial information in real-time and lets your executive team self-service their reporting is key.
Dashboards and Analytics
Once we’ve made it to real-time reporting about where we’ve been, we want to look at where we are going. Your growing business deserves an accounting system that allows you to map trend lines and track predictive metrics that help you visualize the future. Once you are collecting your data in real-time, take it to the next step, and organize it in a way that enables you to see what is going to matter next month!
