Last month we looked at a handful of the most common problems that we at 4PointZero solve to ease the stresses and strains felt by businesses, their owners and finance functions. As a continuation of this, we wanted to share some additional areas where we have helped companies to automate financial processes and ease real-time decision making with accurate real-time data.
· Complete Financial Reporting with customisable design or reporting structure.
Many accounting systems will prepare your Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet in a standard way presentationally. Often this is not the way the business owner or finance director want to view their numbers in terms how they are labelled, grouped, ordered, as well as including various percentages and/or ratios etc. To get around this, businesses will often have a link to excel so they can prepare a management accounts file and fiddle around with formulae to get the exact presentation they want. The issue with this is that the resulting reports will only be as good as the person who builds the excel file, and there can be issues with continuity if that person leaves as there may be something in there the new person might not be familiar with. With our flexible reporting solutions, we can create your reports to any view or specification required. This goes beyond just a list of revenue and expenses and how these are labelled, as we can also enable an analysis of totals as year to date, quarters or any range of time as required.
· Reconciliations between different Data Sets, Supplier Statements, or Intercompany Balances.
Accountants and auditors can spend hours and hours ensuring items/systems reconcile between different reports and are therefore accurate. With our systems, we look to automate the building of these reconciliations so you can see balances tie together daily and then resolve any issues. This could be anything including supplier statements, debtors’ reconciliations, till to payment or stock. As long as there are any 2 pieces of data where we can receive the information on a daily basis, we can automate the reconciliations process. From this perspective where we prepare the reconciliations, we also collect all the data from both sides/systems which means from an audit trail perspective we collect all the same data auditors need and attach it to the transaction, so it is available at the click of a button with no need to re-run a report and check it works. Everything is filed, stored, retrievable and reconciled automatically in the cloud.
· Entirely flexible Corporate or Dimensional Consolidation of Regional, Departmental or Project performance to understand individual business units or benchmark performance.
Furthermore, from a reporting perspective businesses will often want to see performance in relation to individual sections of their business. This could be a department, project, site/location, manager, or grouping of any of the above into a region or even maybe a collection of the above across multiple companies. Our reporting is completely flexible in this regard. We can segregate any element of revenue and costs with unlimited possibilities and then group, add or subtract any elements to and from each other to get any presentation of the business segment you want. You can use this data to then benchmark (compare) or consolidate (aggregate) in any way you see fit.
· Accurate Accounting Treatment for Corporate Consolidations and necessary Revaluations in line with relevant Accounting Standards.
Accounting, like many things, is made up of certain rules and standards that need to be followed in a specific way. There is often alongside this subjectivity around what we call “materiality” i.e., how accurate a number needs to be but our goal is always to take this element of subjectivity out of the equation altogether and work with absolutes. The numbers should be right, and it should be automated as far as technically possible. End of conversation. Certain systems or add on apps will take data and do mathematical calculations that aren’t technically correct and are therefore open to audit adjustment. This is a problem our solutions avoid.
· Various Profit and Loss plus Cash-Flow Forecasting Solutions and Options.
Forecasting can be an open debate in many circumstances, as whilst token phrases like “cash is king” are very common, many accountants will prepare cash flow forecasts in different ways. Does your forecast include: the variable debtor and creditor days, quarterly VAT adjustments, asset purchases and disposals, loan repayment schedules, adjustments for non-cash items like depreciation, and so on. This is also just from a cash perspective but before this, you need a budget, how many times does your company re-budget and as a result re-forecast? As such this can be quite a complex and variable area. With our solutions, we can create standardised forecasting tools for various aspects from rota’s to departmental budgets to cash. These are built in a very structured way with key assumptions agreed beforehand. This way you know exactly what you are looking at and what is taken into consideration.
If you need help with any of the above, please do not hesitate to contact us at www.4pointzero.co.uk.
