BAASS Insights Technology Blog

In a multi-entity environment, each office typically operates autonomously, subject to varying currency, tax, and reporting requirements – such as currency translation, exchange gain/loss accounting, local reporting, and an increased risk of non-compliance. But that’s not all they have to deal with. In addition to managing organic growth, mergers and acquisitions are common in many industry. And with each new business acquired comes more separate entities, their unique challenges, and often a second financial management system. 

Presented with these challenges, finance team often struggle to perform critical tasks such as consolidation, reporting, and analyzing operational and financial information across the disparate sites. They are forced to use cumbersome spreadsheets and add-on reporting solutions along with their traditional financial systems to try to cobble together meaningful data to help management make informed decisions. Instead, the process is manual, slow and error ridden. Data from the multiple entities is collected and consolidated manually, currency conversions are calculated by hand, and the number of inter-entity adjustments and eliminations increases. 

The use of multiple systems and the lack of automation lead to two critical problems for multi-entity or global businesses: diminished operational visibility and a dramatic increase in cost. 

Read the rest over at Intacct's blog here

There can be many reasons why your current accounting system no longer makes sense for your business. Maybe your company didn’t grow as big as you first anticipated. Maybe you had to downsize and let staff go. Either way, the end result is the same. You are losing money by maintaining an accounting system that is too big for your needs, as well as the expensive upkeep of servers and workstations.

In discussion with our clients it has come to my attention that there is often a great deal of functionality that is not used in a typical ERP/Accounting system.

Examples of some of things I have heard:

• I don't use the bank reconciliation module
• We don't have security set up
• We export our Trial Balance to Excel and then produce our Financial statement in Excel
• My ERP system can't consolidate or financial statements it is to complicated
• We enter our invoices in MS-Word and re key them into our accounting system
• We create our sales and sales commission reports in Excel
• We track our serialized inventory in a FOXPRO database
• We re key all our Point of Sale transaction into our Accounts Receivable system
• there are many more....

On the other hand there are many amazing things we hear from clients in terms of how they have utilized their systems to achieve their goals and sometimes to obtain a competitive advantage.

Examples of some things I have heard:

• My ERP system manages over 500 projects simultaneously
• My ERP system recognizes revenue of our multi period contracts
• My ERP system automatically reconciles my checks and deposits in my bank account
• My ERP system provides our Executive KPI reporting
• My ERP automatically integrates 2 ways with our web store
• MY ERP system automatically integrates EDI transactions

We would like to hear more of the interesting ways you are using your ERP system to make your lives easier and more efficient and effective.

We would like to share them with others so they might understand how they can take advantage of their Accounting systems and save time and be more productive.

Cloud computing is a way of distributing software completely over the Internet, relieving you from the burden of IT expenditure and maintenance. In contrast to on-premises software, cloud computing presents a host of benefits including:

• Anywhere, anytime accessibility to real-time information about your business so your entire staff can make knowledgeable choices, no matter where they are located.
• Reduced TCO eliminating capital expenses, operating expenses and hardware and software installation and maintenance - freeing your IT staff to concentrate on more strategic projects.
• Operational Distinction, including back up, disaster recovery and a 99.8% uptime guarantee - better than what most small and mid-sized businesses can guarantee internally.
• Pre-built integrations that remove the burden and expenditure of connecting complex software products with one another.

Contact BAASS to discuss our Cloud options for Accounting and CRM.