Nowadays, it’s hard to meet a company that doesn’t keep management records or, at least, tries to. Accounting helps to make strategic decisions, see the growth opportunities as well as bottlenecks. However, the way it’s organized may vary. Start-ups conquer Excel, while the more experienced companies work with other information systems. The difficulty occurs when all these systems exist, but are not connected to one another and do not show the full picture of what is going on in the business in real-time. All of this has its impact on managerial decision-making. In this article, Invento Labs experts Daria Kasperova and Eugene Shishkov explain how automation can improve the accounting process in the company.
In many spheres, business develops rapidly, so the owners, top management, and just managers need qualitative and relevant information to make the decisions needed for today, not yesterday. Accounting works with actual numbers, which show what happens in the company from the managerial point of view. It describes the current situation and allows to keep track of the changes. Accounting is based on the rules set by the business owner and top management for their own company, to evaluate the state of things and make rational decisions.
There are managers, who can make decisions intuitively, feeling the situation by the tips of their fingers. There are a few of them, but even those need reliable analytics. There should be a mathematical model in every business to show what happens if one of the parameters changes. Automation will speed up the data processing, cut down the time spent on collecting the valuable information and making managerial decisions, - says Eugene Shishkov, Deputy Director of Sales.
In any company, accounting automation can have several stages of evolution: from its complete lack of in the business to the creation of a unified system. This is how it happens:
If there is a lot of information, but no unified system in a company, there are going to be the following difficulties:
There are two ways how to do it - either by implementing a completely new system or by coordinating the interaction between the existing ones. The first variant will be more expensive for a company, but with a long-term aim in mind. The second solution will be cheaper but may last only for some time. Nowadays all the programs are suitable for integration, that’s why there should be no problems with that. You can build on a unified data warehouse, which will choose for itself the necessary numbers and work with them. As a result, we have a continuous process, all due to a single source of information.
Sometimes you can face an illusion that it’s enough to automate only some of the processes to synchronize the whole system. Warehouse and sales tasks are usually considered as the priorities, but for proper management accounting, you have to have all the company’s data in your possession. You have to orient towards the goals and strategy of a company. The main thing at the final stage is to have all the blocks deeply interconnected with one another, - says Daria Kasperova.
Everything depends on the complexity of the company’s organizational structure, its departments, and processes, which have to be automated. If a company is relatively small, everything can be done in a few months, when a project for a big business may last a year or more.
The amount of business processes and the number of users, services provided by the integrator, deadlines, and business needs - everything affects the cost and timing. Automation of one block on a turn-key basis, no matter whether it’s a system for sales or procurement, takes on average 3-4 months. If we automate several modules at once, the overall time spent decreases. A complex approach economizes on time and money in a phase of business analysis. If your company is not a big one, take a look at free solutions which are available in the public domain. They will teach you from the very beginning how to digitize all the data (which will definitely be useful in the future!), and you will use the information systems whose logic and structure have been tested by many businesses before yours, - advises Eugene Shishkov.