The 3 worst accounting processes

It's an unfortunate truth that the finance department has to deal with some of the most tedious tasks. From reconciling accounts, to preparing financial statements, there are plenty of processes that can be tedious.

This article is going to focus on three of the worst finance processes - and discuss ways to make them more bearable!

Entering transactions

It's a fact, that no matter how good your bookkeeping system is, entering transactions manually usually takes the longest amount of time. Depending on the number of transactions per month and the number of finance professionals you have, entering data can take quite a long time.

New staff members are frequently tasked with entering in transactions and reconciling accounts. It's not unusual for this process to take a couple of hours each morning, just so you're back up-to-date!

While there's no way around having to enter data (yet), there are a couple of ways to speed up your entry:

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

OCR software can help automate your purchase ledger. A lot of OCR software provides the functionality to monitor an email mailbox to automatically pick up invoices, intelligently read the invoice detail and partially or fully code the invoice transaction.

This can be particularly powerful where you see a high volume of invoices which tend to be from frequent suppliers where the OCR will have a higher success rate as the OCR engine will more readily recognise invoices templates it has seen before.

Automating Transactions

Another way to speed up entry is through the use of accounting software which supports processes which will reduce the amount of manual entry required by the end-user.

With SunSystem for example we have the concept of journal presets to speed up journal entry through automatically populating some of the journal detail such as account codes on a specific type of transaction.

We also have the concept of business rules in SunSystems which can be used to speed up entry by populating fields based on the selection of another field. For example, selecting an employee code against a transaction could automatically drive the cost centre code.

Budget Creation

Budgeting has the reputation of being an extremely tedious task; it's a necessary evil however for any organisation looking to achieve growth.

Regardless of how well your team can forecast, the compounding effect of forecasting errors will eventually mean that your budget diverges from actual performance. It's a good practice to revisit and realign budgets on a regular basis to ensure you're still in line with your long-term goals.

Budgeting is a time consuming process and the idea of re-forecasting each month can be highly repetitive and mundane work.

Some accounting software has tools to help with this:

Quick Budget Creation

SunSystems for example has the functionality to quickly produce a budget by allowing you to download prior period and prior year actual data into Excel, tweak it using drivers and assumption and then quickly upload it back into the system straight from Excel as a budget.

This can then be brought out onto reports to track how you are fairing against your budget and variances can be quickly analysed and investigated.

Preparing for your annual audit

Audits can be of huge value to your organisation. They allow you to get a good understanding of where you are business-wise and find out areas for improvement.

Setting aside the cost, time and resource involved in an audit, there is also a lot of paperwork that needs to be prepared before hand - which can often drag on longer than you'd expect.

Again, using an accounting system that supports rather than hinders your audit can be a gamechanger, saving you time preparing for your audit.

Conclusion

Saving time is a top priority for any business, and that's what SunSystems does best. With our help, you can spend more time focusing on the important aspects of your job while we work with you to implement a system that can speed up transaction entry, simplify your budget creation and efficiently prepare for your annual audit.

Our experienced consultants will work with you to get you and your team up-to-speed in no time so they can focus items that will add value.

If you are spending too long on these processes, send me a message on LinkedIn or contact me on:

Email: [email protected]

Phone: +44 (0)20 7456 9830