Accounting Integration & The Benefits
Accounting Integration & The Benefits
Table of Contents
Reducing back office paperwork and duplicate data entry
Talk to anyone who has ever managed their accounting program, and they have probably found themselves lost in a sea of financial data. Things get misfiled and imputed incorrectly, which ends in a giant mess of numbers. The costs and time invested in resolving inaccuracies are alarming for businesses ever to succeed and become profitable. If this is currently your issue, you may not need to fix your system, all you need to do is to integrate your system with your project management system and field data collection app.
What is an integrated Accounting system?
An integrated accounting system can perform a wide variety of functions that makes industry professionals lives much easier. Within an integrated system, you can estimate, report on, and monitor all your job costs at anytime, anywhere. Additionally, you will be able to track and convert employee time into job-costed payroll, reduce data entry time, handle inventory purchases, and most importantly, you will be able to send information to customers easily, vendors, or back to the office from the field.
You will be able to slice and dice your information in a variety of ways to find more accurate costing, without creating a mess of your budget. Quickly implement advanced tracking features to see more and better information about what is, and isn’t, working in your business.
Why it’s beneficial to integrate the field and office?
As we have addressed before, a company’s efficiency hinges on its ability to get work done in the field. With integration between the field and the office, tasks that used to take weeks will be done in a matter of minutes. Change orders can be quickly requested from field foreman, and the accounting team can immediately update the budget after the PM’s approval, all through the same system! A 5-step process just became one fluid transaction of information. This means a significant amount of time is saved to complete your project, and time is money (sorry for the cliché).
Beyond the obvious speed & efficiency improvements, with an integrated accounting software you will never misplace or misfile information. Your foreman will log their hours directly into the system, which will be funneled into their time cards. The hours spent trying to correct hours made on time cards is something of the past. These headaches, which happen more often than we’d like to admit, can be solved with this simple improvement upon your current process. Integrating accounting to PM software isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel or usurp authority; it’s just trying to improve an existing process to make your company more efficient and profitable.
Conclusion
So if integrated systems are beneficial, why are firms still shying away? To this day, companies are dealing with double entry and guessing on their job costs all the time! The main reason is that implementing a process improvement is not often at the forefront of an owners mind. Fortunately, it’s never too late to take a step back and implement a new integrated system. Countless sources can tell you, once the process is in place, it essentially starts paying for itself by improving employee efficiency, presenting consistently accurate reports, and allowing better project management in real time. So if you find yourself constantly looking at your reports with a puzzling stare, it’s probably time to make a move to integrating core systems that run your business.
