Financial professionals at growing organizations face a ton of challenges. From ‘doing more with less’ to ‘taking on more roles to support the company and inform executives,’ there is little time to waste. Unfortunately, with this rapid growth comes the fact that there will only be more work to do in the future, and with the talent gap that exists, it’s unlikely you will have the help to do it. This is why it’s important to save time wherever you can and improve the speed and confidence in the way you make decisions.

The Need for Speed

One of the biggest challenges that growing organizations face is that employees need to do more without adding staff. However, as an organization grows, there are more transactions, more requests from stakeholders, and more numbers to crunch. This means more work inputting data into the accounting software (or worse—spreadsheets), manipulating the data into something useful, and creating actionable outputs in the form of reports.

Speed and automation were just a couple of the eight things you should look for in an accounting software solution. Click the aforementioned link to see part 1, and read part 2 of that blog here.

Three Reasons You Need Accurate Real-Time Information At Your Business

We briefly recognized lack of speed as one of the top challenges in our blog on knowing when QuickBooks no longer makes the cut, but would like to talk today about why speed and real-time decision-making is so important for organizations looking to jump on new opportunities when the time is right.

The Agility You Need

The beauty of working at a small business is that you can move faster than an enterprise. Unfortunately this agility can’t be recognized without the right information at the right times.

If you are spending too much time crunching the numbers that your company can’t recognize the first-mover advantage that exists when there are no committees and sub-committees of decision makers and influencers. Real-time decision making requires real-time information, when you need it, where, you need it, and how you need it:

• When You Need It: With smarter accounting from Intacct, organizations can generate reports with the click of a button—no downloading of files or manipulation of data within Excel.
• Where You Need It: Out of the office? Generate a report. On your phone? Approve an expense. Thanks to its cloud-based design, you can access Intacct securely wherever and whenever you need.
• How You Need It: Slice and dice your information how you see fit. Intacct is the only mid-market cloud financial application that shows business and operational metrics by any dimension that matters to your business.

Accuracy You Can Rely On

Did you know that nearly every spreadsheet contains errors? If you are driving the decision making at your business with financial metrics, you need to make sure that the numbers are right, as an incorrectly calculated number could mean that you are jumping at an opportunity that you can’t fund, or taking a holding stance when you actually could make a move.

With over 11,000 customers, Intacct has a repeatable, accurate, and efficient way of stacking up the numbers, and has the development capabilities to provide the answers you need.

Time Savings to Deliver Better Strategy

With APQC estimating that nearly half of a financial professional’s time being spent on transaction processing—making sure the lights are on—they also estimate that only 18% is spent on control, 17% is spent on decision support, and 16% on management activities.

With all this time spent on basic activities, and so little being spent improving the business, there is a lot of room for improvement. Executives want fast, reliable, and concise information about how decision A will impact outcome B.

APQC found that successful companies have worked hard to boost the productivity of their transaction processing, simplifying systems, reducing the number of vendors, employing workflow automation for processes like invoice approvals, streamlining ERP environments, and standardizing to a single chart of accounts.

If you hope to take the steps to reduce the time spent processing transactions so you can get back to improving the business, you need to automate what you can so you can put those skills to better use.

Learn Even More

Our latest whitepaper, Taking Your Accounting System to the Next Level, explores some of the warning signs, challenges, and opportunities that organizations face when they outgrow entry-level accounting software. Download the whitepaper here, take your understanding even further by reading the 2017 Buyer’s Guide to Accounting Software on Intacct’s website, or learn more by reading the preview of our whitepaper below.