Does Your Finance and Accounting Team Have the Right Tools to Maximize Value?

By Zachary Giegel, Managing Partner

There has been a noticeable shift in how meetings are now conducted over the past year.  Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Hangouts are all examples of technology available for meetings. These technologies dramatically reduce the time involved in driving to a meeting or holding a meeting in your own office. There have been reports that virtual meetings save somewhere between 3-6 hours per week per employee! For us productivity geeks, that’s 156 to 312 extra hours one team member can work during the year!

Interestingly, there’s also been a very dramatic shift when it comes to technology tools used by finance and accounting (“FA”) teams. Nowadays, your FA team doesn’t have to give you manual checks to sign, mail invoices or bills with a stamp, or have a green ledger to total the books for you. Think about how much time that saves them and you each month. It’s quite a bit. In a recent article published by Bill.com (the leader in online bill payment), your business can save 73% of the paper-based time spent on bill payment processing with an online bill payment system and ACH transfers. That’s huge! Let’s look at another technology, Stripe. If you have a business that accepts credit cards, with a large volume of transactions, take note of Stripe (although I’m sure if you do have this sort of business, you’re already using Stripe). Stripe integrates with your accounting software, has slick dashboards that give you more data and is loved by FA teams. Although it is still a private company, it is valued at over $600 million!

These are just two examples of technology in the “FinTech” space (financial services technology sector) that are helping accountants and finance professionals with our day-to-day job. There are numerous other examples of these. What makes these technologies so great is that they take away the “data entry”/”mind-numbing” work that your FA team was doing in the past and gives them extra time to provide value to you. They can slice and dice data and give you metrics, dashboards, and commentary that will help your company reach its objectives. In a sense, that’s why you hired them, so go ahead and give them the tools to do this (if you’re not already).

With the number of FinTech apps available, it can be confusing on where to even start. Start by exploring options, we strongly suggest you schedule time with your FA team to get their input. Ask what they’re using now, what tools they would like to use, how can their time be better utilized to provide value to the company, and make sure to give them some time to research the FinTech apps available.  Below are some suggestions.

• • Accounts Payable –
    • Bill.com – has an audit function, segregation of duties (your FA team will love this), and makes paying vendors a simple as it gets.
  • Payroll Providers –
    • Gusto and Rippling – probably the best tech available right now. Low cost, but limited.  If you’re company has more than 50 employees, look into ADP or another service.
    • Namely – Provides payroll and an HR platform, and has the best tech in the space.
  • Accounting Platforms –
    • Intuit’s Quickbooks Online – by far the best in the class. The ease of entry and integration with other FinTech applications will make your FA team’s life seem like a cake walk.
    • Xero – very close in terms of ease of entry and integration with Quickbooks Online, just a bit lower.
  • Time Entry –
    • Tsheets (not Quickbooks Time) – if your team tracks their time on customers, non-billable, billable work, this is the industry leader.
    • Harvest – not only for time entry, but also for invoicing, and project management.
  • Sales Tax –
    • Avalara and TaxJar – the two leaders in class. Note – Tech companies, we all know sales tax is coming to you soon (if not already), so be prepared.  Second note – your CPA is the best person to ask about sales tax.
  • Cap Table –
    • Carta – for those investable companies (i.e. companies raising funds), Carta is head and shoulders above their competition. Carta allows you to manage your capitalization table, issue and exercise options, and run exit scenarios, so you can see how you become a billionaire one day.

Hope this information is helpful.  Please reach out to the team at District Advisory if you would like to discuss further.