Guide to Data Accuracy
Stop questioning, start acting
How to achieve accurate financial data across every area of your business.
Table of contents
Part 1: Got trust issues (with your data)?
Part 2: Start making confident decisions
part 1
Got trust issues (with your data)?
Repairing the rocky relationship with your company’s financials
The room is quiet. At the end of another quarter, leadership gathers to review the company finances. The CFO presents the cash flow and P&L statements but lacks confidence in their accuracy. Discrepancies between sales and finance figures raise doubts. A frustrated team spends the meeting questioning the numbers rather than acting on them.
This scene may resonate whether you're a CEO receiving these reports, a CFO in charge of a company’s financial health, or an accountant crunching the numbers. Nearly 40% of CFOs—and half of senior finance and accounting professionals—don't fully trust their organization's financial data. And it leads to trouble making decisions at the top: for instance, 95% of small business owners make financial decisions based on a partial view of their cash flow, relying primarily on their bank balance.
So why are so many businesses struggling to get accurate financial reports for informed decision-making? Let's take a closer look at the underlying data issues at play.
Two systems, double trouble
Many companies still operate with a disconnect between their customer and financial data, which is where issues usually start to creep in. Here’s what the setup typically looks like:
Front office (customer-facing operations):
- Contains sales records, customer interactions, and client services data
- Typically uses a CRM like Salesforce to manage opportunities and closed deals
- Generates the majority of the company's revenue
- Overseen by department heads such as VP of Sales or project manager
Back office (behind-the-scenes financial and administrative operations):
- Manages financial data—including invoicing, revenue recognition, and expenses
- Often uses separate systems like QuickBooks or even spreadsheets (especially for manual reporting)
- Handles administrative, financial, and operational tasks
- Usually managed by the CFO or operations manager
When an organization sets up their infrastructure this way, data issues can arise in the form of:
- Data delays: Front-end data like sales opportunities and expenses either must be manually recorded in the back-end or transferred with third-party integration tools, which can break or cause delays. As a business grows, this process becomes more time-consuming, creating a lag in financial reporting. Additionally, 27% of finance professionals mention reliance on spreadsheets as a major hurdle, often leading to further delays when complex analysis requires data stitching.
- Data errors: These can take many forms, from simple typos and misspellings to more complex issues like non-normalized data, missing fields, outdated information, data in wrong fields, and duplicate entries. For instance, a $12,000 sale recorded in Salesforce might be mistakenly entered as $1,200 in the accounting system due to an accidental typing error. The scale of this problem is significant, and 68% of finance professionals believe manual work leaves their organizations vulnerable to errors.
According to one survey:
- 18% of accountants make financial errors at least daily
- A third make at least a few financial errors every week
- Over half (59%) make several errors per month
- Multiple data sources: As businesses grow, so does the complexity of their data. IT teams often manage hundreds of apps within an organization, with the average software portfolio now comprising 342 apps. In a survey of senior finance and accounting professionals, 31% cite data from too many sources as a key reason for their distrust in the data.
The cost of poor data quality
Inaccurate financial data causes issues at multiple levels of an organization. Here are some of the top impacts and concerns:
1. Poor cash flow and a lack of real-time visibility
When front-office activity (such as sales opportunities) must be rekeyed into an accounting system to register on the back end, it inevitably creates delays. Whether you have a finance team manually transferring data from one system to another or a third-party tool running tasks between platforms, it becomes much harder to reliably access financial data and see trends in real-time. By the time the financial data reaches the right people, it’s already outdated, wrong, or both—and the best window of opportunity to act on that data has already passed.
2. Inefficient accounting systems and wasted time
Data accuracy issues go hand in hand with manual accounting processes, which consume a finance team’s valuable time and resources with repetitive jobs. Tasks like duplicating data from one system to another, manually reconciling payments, and fixing data errors in retrospect take away opportunities for highly educated staff to provide input on financial strategy and analysis. Among finance executives, 76% agree that manual tasks still absorb too much of their finance teams’ time and effort.
3. Stress, anxiety, and frustration
The stress and anxiety caused by unreliable financial data can take a serious toll on business owners and finance professionals alike. One survey found 66% of business owners admit that cash flow challenges cause stress, anxiety, and burnout, with 71% reporting personal well-being impacts such as lack of sleep.
Meanwhile, accountants want to be seen as trusted advisors through their ability to provide accurate financial data to their company, but they may have too many manual processes to manage or have been told there's "no fix" to the company's data issues. At the manager level, 76% of finance leaders say access to the right technology is critical for the finance team to achieve their key goals. Yet, 43% cannot invest in their team culture and worker happiness due to preoccupation with low-value tasks.
The path to regaining trust
The trust issues plaguing many organizations’ financial data are widespread and deeply impactful. Whether it’s a CFO lacking confidence in their reports or a business owner making decisions based on partial information, the consequences ripple through a business and get harder to manage as a company grows. These problems stem from disconnected systems, manual processes, and the resulting data delays and errors.
To address these challenges, many companies are turning to a "single source of truth" for their financial data that brings sales, finance, and operational data together in one unified platform. By eliminating the need to transfer data between front and back office, businesses can reduce errors, save time, and gain real-time visibility into their finances.
A single source of truth also lays the groundwork for technology like accounting automation, further reducing manual tasks and freeing up finance teams to focus on strategic work.
At Accounting Seed—a provider of cloud-based accounting software—we recognized this trend over a decade ago and have helped hundreds of businesses achieve accurate, real-time financial insights by unifying their data in a single platform on Salesforce.
If you're struggling with data accuracy issues or want to learn more about creating a single source of truth for your financial data, we're here to help. Our team can assess your current setup and show you what a single platform would look like for your business. Reach out to learn more today.
part 2
Start making confident decisions
With accurate, real-time financial insights on a single platform.
- Which products, services, or segments generate the most profit?
- What are the top cross-sell and upsell opportunities to create lifetime value?
- Where should we cut costs or expand?
Business leaders can try to answer these questions using their gut and intuition, but it will only take them so far. Today you need fast, accurate financial insights to make smart decisions that grow an organization. Not to mention, any go-to market plan requires support from reliable data. Research from PwC shows highly data-driven organizations are 3x more likely to report significant improvements in decision-making (PwC research). Additionally 80% of companies report revenue uplift due to real-time data analytics.
However, many organizations can't trust their financial data or get access to it fast enough to feel confident in their next move. The heart of their data issues often stems from a disconnect between a company's front office (where sales opportunities are recorded) and back office (where payments and revenue are processed and reconciled). This setup requires that data be transferred from one system to another, which opens the door to errors and makes it difficult to implement automations.
For this reason, reports indicate a shift from a multi-platform to single platform approach to company data. But what does that mean in practice and how does it work?
Getting to one version of the truth
The concept of a "single source of truth" for your data is crucial for organizations seeking to improve their financial decision-making and operational efficiency. In fact, one survey found that 76% of CFOs agree that objectives cannot be met without "one version of the truth."
What is a single source of truth?
A single source of truth means having one data repository that serves as the primary, authoritative source for every functional area of your business—finance, sales, marketing, and operations.
The current disconnect
Many companies struggle with data accuracy because their accounting software isn’t built on the same platform as their CRM. For example, you may be using Salesforce to manage your sales opportunities and QuickBooks or NetSuite to manage your accounting. That means you are working off separate data tables to manage your finances.
An embedded solution, such as Accounting Seed, is different in that it can integrate tasks like payment management directly within your sales platform and support the long-term growth of your company. Our cloud-based solution is built on Salesforce, ensuring your sales and financial data truly live in the same house and eliminating silos of missing or inaccurate information. This means you don't have to leave the platform to collect cash, manage your bills, or run your financial planning reports.
Using a single source of truth, you’re operating with...
One data table for everything
Update a customer once, and it's updated everywhere (and instantly reportable across your entire system). No need for costly code to connect separate solutions.
Single vs. multiple account records
Run reports on one customer record rather than multiple inconsistent entries. This eliminates confusion and errors that can arise from having duplicate records with slight variations.
Improved AP & AR workflows
Reduces or eliminates the need for manual intervention on tasks like invoice matching, payment collection, and bank reconciliation.
Real-time insights
Enables automation and real-time reporting of the numbers through customizable, drag-and-drop dashboards.
Trusting your data is just the beginning
At its core, a single source of truth improves data accuracy by removing the need for transferring data from one place to another, cutting down on manual keystroke and data entry mistakes.
But what doors does that open for your organization? Quite a few!
For instance, many want to automate manual processes in their accounting system but don’t know where to start. When your business has a foundation of clean, reliable data, you’re in a much better position to implement accounting technologies like automation and AI—advancements that might otherwise require expensive code and unreliable integrations to piece together.
These improvements lead to several key benefits:
1. Save dozens of hours per week
Manual and duplicate data entry tasks, which your accounting staff often handle just to keep AR and AP running, can consume a significant amount of their time at the cost of doing more valuable work. One survey found that 98% of financial leaders are putting off important strategic work due to low-value tasks like administration, data collection, or reporting; and 54% of finance leaders spend more time on tasks that don’t add strategic value to the organization.
Instead of contributing to financial planning or analysis, CFOs often find themselves fixing data errors or piecing together reports in Excel. This has consequences, as 38% are deprioritizing long-term growth and planning. With a unified platform, your organization not only saves time by reducing bad data, but everything you layer on top—like automations—has the potential to add efficiency and provide your business with valuable insights.
2. Make better, faster decisions
Accurate financial insights are invaluable when your business is trying to discern questions like:
- Which marketing campaigns deliver the highest margins?
- How could you optimize spend across different departments?
- How could a key area of your organization become more profitable?
But currently, 89% of finance leaders admit they’re making monthly decisions based on inaccurate or incomplete data. With that data can be easily surfaced with accounting technology, your business gains better visibility into its finances and can track the numbers in real-time using dashboards and other analytics tools.
3. Act with confidence
An organization looks to its finance leaders for guidance on performance, but what happens when they can’t get the answers they need? Confidence is shakier than you might guess; in fact, 56% of finance leaders have been asked to make decisions and forecast for departments over which they lack visibility. A unified data platform repairs broken data and helps to bridge these gaps.
For CFOs, it means having accurate financial data for every part of the business—finance, sales, marketing, and operations—and going into meetings knowing the numbers they’re reporting are correct.
For accounting teams, it means the ability to locate and update customer data without digging through multiple, often conflicting records. They can trust the numbers in their system without having to double-check against other sources, allowing them to deliver accurate financial information more efficiently.
And with access to real-time financial reports, CEOs and business leaders can stop second-guessing and start acting on the data in front of them. This gives you the insights and support they need to do their job: keeping the business healthy and growing.
Solving your data issues for good
When you can trust your financial data and know your business is providing an accurate picture of performance, it’s amazing what can happen as a result.
Take Gordon James Realty, a full-service property management company in Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Maryland. When co-founders Tom and Matthew Carcone first entered the property management industry, they quickly saw the potential for automation to enhance client satisfaction and simplify property management’s complex workflows. They started out using separate platforms—QuickBooks for accounting and Propertyware for client activities—but faced continual data accuracy issues and inefficiencies. The disconnected systems required constant manual data entry. After moving to Accounting Seed on Salesforce, they created a unified, automated workflow resulting in 99% data accuracy and a 99% client retention rate.
And that’s just one of the hundreds of companies Accounting Seed has helped make this type of shift successfully. If you’re tired of dealing with constant data issues, we’d love to talk about how we can help you fix the root cause of the problem and start trusting your data again. Book a demo with us anytime and get started on your path to better data accuracy.
Interested in taking the next step?
See firsthand how our solution can streamline your accounting processes and give you faster access to accurate and actionable financial data. Book a demo with us today!