How a Company Can Solve Their Accounting Problems

Successfully growing companies often, ironically, end up with a back-office mess. How and why does this happen? Let’s find out and look at how Accounting Seed, powered by Salesforce, is designed to help you avoid such pitfalls and scale for success.

Accounting often becomes dysfunctional and accounting problems proliferate when the company experiences growth or major change. This is natural, even common. The pattern goes something like this:

The Journey Towards Dysfunction and Accounting Problems

Accounting often becomes dysfunctional and accounting problems proliferate when the company experiences growth or major change. This is natural, even common. The pattern goes something like this:

1. Successful companies naturally grow in complexity and uniqueness, which drives up the rate of accounting transaction volumes.
2. More people get involved in creating and using the data.

• • Company leaders
  • IT Administrators
  • Accountants

3. Marketing, sales, and operational data increases. This not only relates to accounts receivable and accounts payable to account for, but also, the data needs to be assessed from a financial dimension to understand the profit and loss of new initiatives. Financial health is a critical factor of every business decision.
4. Change happens iteratively, so companies make small changes to accommodate growth.

• • First, they add another app. 
  • They open up another spreadsheet to track more data. 
  • This group of applications and data sources are called “the app pool”. 

5. Meanwhile, all these independent apps require the same data to function. Such as customer, contact, transaction history. This complicates both operations and accounting.
6. So then the problem of logistical IT chaos begins to morph. To accommodate all the different apps acquired, IT integration and accounting problems form.

• • Companies hire expensive integration firms.
  • They buy expensive middleware to sync software applications. 
  • They hire highly skilled and expensive IT staff to make it all work.
  • Then, the fragile integration is revealed to be unreliable as it breaks often and is in a constant state of repair. This makes your accounting solution extremely difficult to scale and adapt.

7. Congratulations, you have arrived at the land of accounting dysfunction! This brings a lot of problems for the whole company, including:

• • A frustrated company leader who is over-budget on their overhead.
  • Stressed out IT administrator(s).
  • An ill-equipped accountant who needs timely and accurate data to do his or her job, but is not getting it.

8. Organizations often repeat the loop all over. They say the problem is too big to solve so they repeat the same cycle over and over again by pouring money into:

• • “Better” apps
  • “Better” integrations
  • More staff and IT consultants

9. Of course, these don’t address the root cause of the dysfunction. So problems grow and continue. Expectations of a dysfunctional solution start to set in. Companies just accept the dysfunction of ineffective accounting software and integrations.

• • The CEO gets used to the large budget
  • The IT administrator gets used to high stress and system dysfunctions
  • The accountant gets used to unreliable and untimely data and must constantly double-check everything

So, How Do Companies Fix Their Dysfunctional Accounting?

When it comes to modern, cloud-based accounting, it starts with how you approach technology itself. To begin, whenever possible, avoid integration. IT integration is costly, and between maintaining the technology and the potential for errors, inconsistencies, and disruptions that occur, it is the key driver behind dysfunctional accounting. 

Instead, set yourself up for success by consolidating as many business software processes onto an IT platform like Salesforce. This lets you smoothly run all your operations in one secure IT hub. Instead of bouncing around to different apps databases, data can be shared instantly and reliably between the native platform software. From an accounting perspective, this means faster accounting and more accurate data. This also means far more strain. 

How Can Accounting Seed Solve My Accounting Dysfunction?

In 2008 Accounting Seed figured out a better way to do accounting and avoid the dysfunction. What if, instead of a bunch of independent apps that don’t talk to each other or share the same data, you could have an accounting solution centered on a shared IT platform that houses this valuable data. By building our solution on Salesforce with the native Salesforce architecture, that’s exactly what we did. 

The Top-Rated Native Salesforce Accounting Platform

Accounting Seed is a platform built to consolidate all of your back office data sources into one unified source on Salesforce. Besides easy accessibility, our inherent IT flexibility and focus on automation are designed to free your time and help you scale, all while ensuring you have the best accounting data. Here’s how:

• • You have user-friendly tools that completely configure the user interface and automate any process that you need to from front to back end. All with clicks, no code.
  • Accounting Seed is powered by Salesforce.com so if you are running your sales, service, or operations on Salesforce, these are also just additional layers using the same core data model. All the data has its appropriate place and use all on the platform. So now you have a single source of truth for your entire business management solution.
  • Once your data is organized and all in one place you can then automate any process you like since it is all on one platform, using the same toolset and neatly organized.

Your happy ending with Accounting Seed sees your journey away from accounting dysfunction to efficiency and ease. Here are some things we help you achieve:

• Company leaders achieve the lowest total cost of ownership through accurate and timely financial reporting.
• IT administrators optimize, automate, and add value to the IT network rather than just serve as a repair technicians.
• Accountants gain accurate, real-time data to analyze and prepare for the company leaders to guide them in key decisions.

Ready to get away from accounting dysfunction? Sign up for a free demo to learn how Accounting Seed can help!

Author: CEO Tony Zorc

A native Salesforce accounting app, Accounting Seed, provides a full 360-degree view of your business’ performance to help you and your team make the best decisions possible. Not on Salesforce? Our software can be customized to work with any system you have through a reliable connection.