Freshen up your accounting systems for the new financial year
from our Australia office
The end of the financial year can be a stressful and exhausting time for finance professionals. It’s when stress levels tend to rise as accounts are checked and all the necessary documentation is compiled.
As we head into a fresh new financial year, it’s worth reflecting on how much of the stress and strain could have been avoided with better working processes. Digital tools now provide ways of working which are faster and smarter than our traditional methods.
An example of the difference this can make can be seen with the way businesses handle employee expense reimbursements. The traditional way to do this is with spreadsheets and paperwork.
Employees make a claim by filling out a form and attaching a paper copy of any associated receipts or bills. These then have to then be manually processed and checked by the finance team.
Slow expense management systems
It creates a slow, clunky and error-prone system with the administration demands eating up company time and resources. But the problems with traditional systems are especially felt when it comes to end of the financial year tasks.
The fundamental problem is that the information finance teams need isn’t centrally linked. Everything has to be manually rooted out and collated - a slow and finicky task when data is stored across multiple spreadsheets.
It’s why digital expense management systems have the power to remove so much of the strain when end of year reports are being compiled and information is sent to the ATO (Australian Taxation Office).
By automating the process and removing the need for paperwork, information on every aspect of expenses is stored and made instantly available to finance teams.
Digital details
Rather than just recording the basic details of who, where and what is being claimed for, every step of the process is logged. This includes each individual who checks and approves each cost.
This kind of information can prove vital when it comes to showing external authorities that all proper compliance procedures have been followed. It’s the absence of this level of detail that can set alarm bells ringing for the likes of the ATO.
A system such as Webexpenses also comes with a powerful set of reporting tools which allows all of this data to be easily accessed and manipulated. Reports that would normally take hours to pull together can be created in seconds.
Report templates can be edited and custom reports created to suit the exact needs of each business. All of the information can be easily exported into any accountancy or visualisation packages.
So if this end of financial year was another strain on your business, now is a great time to look at ways to improve and streamline the way you handle financial information.
Switching to digitals system provides a quick and easy way to give your finance team the tools they need to stay on top of finances and meet all of those end of financial year deadlines.
Find out how Webexpenses is providing businesses with a smarter way to manage employee expenses by booking your free demo here.