Your Accounting System Checklist

Choosing the right accounting system is a critical component of your company’s sustainability and efficiency. Knowing what you need and what to look for makes a difference in choosing. To help, here’s an accounting system checklist for finding the best solution for your business. 

Start with Scalability in Mind

Most buyers look for the immediate fix: what’s the accounting tool with the functionality needed right then? While you should look for solutions that satisfy needs and resolve issues you currently have, consider how the technology will grow with you. If you just buy a solution for your current needs, it will be outdated sooner than you think because your organization will keep growing and changing.

To save money, you’ll want an accounting tool that has the flexibility to scale and adjust to current and new pain points. Let’s get into some checklists for your new accounting system.

Your Accounting System Checklist

Core Features Checklist

You’re naturally going to need to closely examine features around the following areas:

• • Accounts Payable
  • Accounts Receivable
  • General Ledger (GL) 
  • Banking
  • Financial Reporting & Dashboards

Make sure that the GL is able to handle your amount of transactions and can scale to your operation’s growth objectives. You should be able to configure these individually to your exact needs and requirements to save time and boost accuracy. When it comes to financial reporting, make sure you have the ability to drill down into relative data in order to inform the best strategies and control costs. Generating custom reports is also important.

Be sure to emphasize automation in your search as well. This will impact your financial accuracy, speed, and ability to keep up with new changes. Automation also makes you more competitive as you can simply function at a faster rate and refine the customer experience more easily.

Here are some other key qualities and features that should make your accounting system checklist:

• • User-friendly interface to save time and maximize efficiency
  • Configurable and customizable to adapt to your business processes and requirements 
  • Cloud-based to allow accessibility and faster accounting lifecycle
  • Security features to protect data from internal and external threats
  • Powerful automation features that eliminate manual, error-prone data entry
  • Customer support through phone, email, and issue tickets
  • Able to link multiple banks and multiple customers to an account
  • Able to create subscription billing and automated recurring billing
  • Robust Application Programming Interface (API) 
  • Intuitive reporting structure for analysis of past, present, and future activities 
  • Enables easily embed purchase orders with sales orders and accounts payable
  • Provides steady technology updates to improve accounting processes
  • Able to create bank reconciliation statements easily and quickly

IT Structure Qualities Checklist

In addition to other specific accounting features think about these tenets as you look deeper into the design and structure of the technology: 

• • Flexible | Easily configurable and customizable, grows with you
  • Collaborative | Enables a 360-degree view of your business 
  • Connected | Effectively links mission-critical business applications and banks
  • Trusted/Reliable | Used strong API and the system has good reputation
  • Automated | Eliminates manual entry and multiple systems

Understanding how the IT is structured within the accounting solution will indicate how effective it will serve your company. As you look for new accounting products, remember that this IT structure is ultimately what will limit you or enable you to smoothly grow as an organization. For example, accounting applications are only designed to work in predesigned manor while accounting platforms are designed to be built on top of for scalability.

Accounting Seed Checks  All of Your Accounting Tech Needs!

There’s only one accounting platform in the world, while there are thousands of accounting applications. This accounting platform is Accounting Seed. Whether or not you have Salesforce, Accounting Seed offers a comprehensive, automated accounting platform optimized to work with any business. Utilize the full functionality of your existing Salesforce management system or simply use Accounting Seed as a stand-alone product. Accounting Seed’s robust and flexible design lets you fully pilot your entire back office in the way that best suits your individual business needs.