Accounting Today: Tools and Trends

Accounting today is faster and less labor-intensive than ever before. Besides industry trends and reporting requirements, financial professionals must also be adept in the newest accounting tech. Data management and analysis are increasingly becoming a greater focus in an accountant’s role too. Let’s look at how some of the trends and tools of accounting today can benefit your organization.    

Cloud-based Accounting

Cloud-based accounting software is being used in favor of desktop applications. It’s simply a faster way to do business, enabling teams to work together at any time and location. This allows for several key benefits, such as enabling multiple team members to instantly examine current financials at once. Cloud-based accounting systems are quite secure while also highly collaborative.

Collaborative Accounting

Business leaders are recognizing the need for collaborative accounting in a rapidly moving business world. Each dimension of your business contributes to the financial makeup of the whole organization. Therefore, it’s crucial for teams to work together and understand what’s driving financial health.

Collaborative accounting empowers your whole organization by increasing data visibility for all stakeholders. This transparency creates a 360-degree view of operations to help your team make more powerful business decisions. Individuals can see how each tool, resource, project, and other variables affect the big picture of company finances. This helps teams work together to pinpoint practices with more return on investment or identify ways to lower costs. Additionally, enhanced collaboration adds more quality control to the financial management process.

Outsourcing Financial Services

As accounting software becomes more flexible and mobile, some companies are shifting to outsource some of their financial management. This doesn’t eliminate the need for in-house accountants, but it does give businesses more options. If in-house accountants are stretched thin, or businesses need specialized financial insight, outsourcing is a viable option. For example, outsourcing certain tasks like payroll and stock tracking can help the in-house team focus on higher priority tasks. Outsourcing can also conserve costs or make up for financial staffing shortages. However, it’s still mission-critical to be aware of your finances internally.         

Data Analysis

Companies are demanding more timely and informative data to understand customer behavior and make stronger business decisions. One way we see this progression is in how accounting today heavily focuses on data analysis. As accounting software makes transactional accounting faster and less labor-intensive, accountants are freed to serve more as advisors instead of just bookkeepers. Empowered by reliable accounting software, accountants can more easily drill down into the data driving the numbers. Increasingly, accountants are being relied on to further business strategies through things like cash flow and credit analysis.

Automation

Instead of doing repeatable transaction entries over and over again, automation does these for you, and on a greater scale. This frees up workflow and lets businesses focus more on operations and customers instead of bookkeeping. Automation also enables financial management to be done in real-time. Whether it’s recurring billing or recognizing revenue, automation processes these functions with reduced human error. Automation is also set to increase in the future. Harnessing automated accounting software today is a great way to remain competitive while being adaptive to growing demands.

Accounting System Integration  

Today, businesses are shifting away from integrating siloed applications – software not designed to work together – in favor of business management platforms. This eliminates the risks of using too much software and the need for integration to connect them. Applications built on platforms like Salesforce require no external integration to work together because of their native architecture design.

A Salesforce user can easily use a native Salesforce accounting software to streamline the quote-to-cash process. Only a single-platform integration is needed to connect other Salesforce tools to the accounting system. This is less complicated, less expensive, and more effective than traditional integrations. This also allows the entire business operation to be seamlessly run in one environment.