Cumulative marginal losses are the enemy of efficiency and productivity in modern business environments, and if your business is still using on-premise software or Excel spreadsheets for accounting operations, chances are that you're racking up marginal losses.
This underscores the importance of optimizing all your operational processes, including accounting and bookkeeping operations. You might want to consider switching to a more effective, cloud-based accounting system, which offers numerous benefits over your existing on-premise solution, such as remote connectivity and increased accuracy in data entry and analysis.
However, one of the most significant advantages of cloud-based solutions, such as NetSuite, is the automation of time-consuming manual and menial processes associated with accounting and bookkeeping. This has the potential to increase the efficiency of your business's financial operations while also reducing the effort and manual labor associated with performing said tasks.
In this guide, we'll discuss the benefits of NetSuite accounting automation, how it can help streamline your financial operations, and how cloud-based solutions simplify accounting processes.
Accounting automation involves using software to automate various accounting tasks such as bookkeeping, invoicing, payments, tax preparation, and financial reporting. This automation enhances accuracy and efficiency by minimizing manual input and data entry. Implementing accounting automation can significantly improve a business’s financial processes.
For businesses looking to enhance their accounting and finance processes, selecting the right software is essential. NetSuite offers a comprehensive solution that can automate various accounting tasks, including accounts payable and receivable, general ledger management, and financial reporting.
NetSuite’s accounting automation brings several advantages that can positively impact a business's bottom line. It streamlines accounting processes, saves time on manual data entry, increases accuracy, and provides better visibility into financial data. Additionally, it reduces accounting and administrative costs and improves customer satisfaction by offering real-time access to financial information. These benefits collectively provide businesses with a competitive edge in the market. By leveraging NetSuite’s accounting solution, businesses can unlock their potential and achieve higher efficiency and growth.
Implementing accounting process automation (APA) can revolutionize your business by streamlining tasks, enhancing accuracy, and ultimately boosting your bottom line. Here are some key benefits of APA:
Significant Time Savings
APA eliminates the need for manual data entry and verification, drastically reducing the time required for tasks such as bank reconciliation and quarterly reporting. This allows finance professionals to focus on more strategic activities.
Lower Operating Costs
Automated accounting processes are more cost-efficient due to reduced human intervention.
Enhanced Data Quality and Integrity
By automating data entry and processing, APA minimizes the risk of errors that are common with manual handling. This ensures that data remains accurate and reliable, even as the volume of transactions grows.
Improved Data Access
Centralized software platforms used in APA make data retrieval quick and easy. Instead of sifting through spreadsheets or paper documents, accounting professionals can locate the necessary files within seconds using simple search functions.
Streamlined Document Approvals
Documents such as purchase orders and supplier contracts are automatically uploaded and made accessible to relevant stakeholders, removing delays from the approval process and ensuring timely decision-making.
Stronger Business Relationships
Faster and more accurate processing of invoices and payments prevents issues that can strain relationships with customers and suppliers. APA enhances the procure-to-pay cycle, fostering better business relationships.
Ensured Compliance and Governance
APA software helps keep financial records updated according to regional regulatory requirements, automatically populating tax returns and creating financial statements. This not only streamlines compliance but also ensures accuracy. Improved data visibility and integrity support better governance and reduce the compliance burden on accounting teams.
By adopting APA, businesses can achieve greater efficiency, cost savings, and accuracy, positioning themselves for sustained growth and improved financial health.
NetSuite falls under the category of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions commonly referred to as enterprise resource planning (ERP). Resource management has always been important for businesses, since poorly managed resources lead to loss and reduced net profitability.
ERPs are there to centralize, optimize and automate not only your resource management but also all of your business information and processes within a single platform, offering up-to-minute information about your business's operations and allowing you to make faster data-driven decisions.
It's safe to assume that these software solutions are important to modern businesses, as they optimize and streamline both important and menial tasks, increase efficiency, improve cross-team collaboration, and reduce operational costs and losses.
Originally a bookkeeping and accounting platform, NetSuite has evolved into an all-encompassing ERP solution that ties all the aspects of your business together and presents them in a single, unified platform that streamlines numerous operations by automating different accounting processes.
However, this applies to more than accounting and financial operations alone; NetSuite can also optimize and automate other aspects of your business, including sales, services, employee management, inventory management, and plenty of other departments and functional areas.
NetSuite automates and optimizes your business' operational processes while providing you and your management team with access to real-time, accurate data, thus enhancing overall productivity across your entire organization.
The fact that it's a cloud-based solution further eliminates the need to keep on-prem hardware and the resources necessary for maintenance while also eliminating location constrictions. Quite simply, it's in the cloud, and you can access it whenever and wherever you are.
Implementing NetSuite accounting automation offers several benefits that help drive business growth and efficiency while allowing you to manage a growing list of responsibilities in your financial operations.
Automation alleviates the downsides associated with manual work, including manual data entry and retrieval, as well as menial, repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Admittedly, some of those tasks are so small that they don't seem to warrant or need automation, but the accumulation of marginal gains provided by automation over extended periods quickly adds up.
The repetitive nature of manual entry and retrieval of large volumes of data is often susceptible to human error. The importance of data for modern businesses underscores the importance of good data management systems and protocols, which ensure that you're presented with the data necessary for optimal decision-making.
Accounts payable refers to the amount of money your business owes to its supplies or creditors for the goods and services the business received but still hasn't paid for. The process usually entails invoice receipt, verification, approval, and payment stages, which might take quite some time when done manually.
However, by automating invoice capture, approval workflows, and payment processing, businesses can significantly reduce manual labor and processing times, allowing your supplies to get paid faster and fostering good relationships between your supplier and your business while also optimizing cash flow.
NetSuite's AP automation provides real-time visibility into outstanding invoices, payment statuses, and cash flow while also preventing the creation and processing of duplicate invoices that might have been sent in by mistake.
This enables better financial management and planning for your business while reducing the risk of late payments and associated penalties with your suppliers, vendors, and creditors.
NetSuite is a comprehensive ERP solution that brings together all of your business information into a single platform, which ensures better integration across the entire business and its operations and departments.
For example, this integration ensures that the accounting data is automatically updated across your entire organization. Sales orders are cross-referenced with inventory status in real-time, all orders are automatically synced to accounting, logistics can be tracked, and payments can be made in real-time.
This seamless integration is really important, as it eliminates the need for clunky API integrations, improves collaboration between different departments, and enhances the overall efficiency of your business and its many operations.
Cloud-based solutions, such as NetSuite, offer several major advantages over on-premise solutions, and accessibility and data security are among the primary benefits.
Cloud-based systems handle data security on their end, and they can be accessed from anywhere by all members of your financial team, with all the updates made on one end being updated in real time across the entire organization.
This provides access to key members of your finance team and real-time visibility into financial data for those with permission to see such data in the first place. This is particularly beneficial to businesses with remote or distributed teams.
Additionally, cloud-based accounting software also offers greater scalability compared to on-premise solutions (which are all but flexible), allowing your business to easily add or remove users and functionalities as needed.
Moreover, NetSuite’s extensive analytical capabilities grants businesses actionable insight into their financial health, and by leveraging these insights, companies can make informed decisions that drive profitability and operational efficiency. This is also important for making just about any business decision that doesn’t offer any immediate success metric.
Many NetSuite Solution Providers, firms that are authorized to sell & implement NetSuite, have onboarding services that help team members get up and running on the platform. These programs are specifically designed so that users may learn the ins and outs of NetSuite to suit the particular needs of your business.
However, many firms opt to outsource their accounting to a NetSuite accountant, allowing for a seamless transition to the new platform.
Outsourcing your accounting to a NetSuite accountant has many benefits over keeping an in-house accounting team. Apart from all the benefits provided by NetSuite and its features, opting to outsource also cuts down on expenses associated with keeping and developing your in-house accounting team.
This also accounts for office space and office supply costs, as well as onboarding, licensing of different software, buying equipment, and keeping accountants on a payroll. Not to mention that scaling on demand is extremely difficult with in-house teams.
To maximize the benefits NetSuite has to offer, it's really important for businesses to have a clear understanding of the specific accounting processes that should be automated, as well as the potential impact on efficiency and accuracy.
Businesses should strive to have their accounting data "clean" and well-organized before migrating to a cloud-based system. This will prevent any data quality issues and ensure a smoother transition to the cloud.
Additionally, if you have a large in-house team, you should consider investing in training and support to ensure that all users within your organization are comfortable with using NetSuite and its features that pertain to finances.
Businesses should always monitor and evaluate the performance of their accounting automation, as subsequent analyses often reveal additional optimization opportunities that could be beneficial to the overall efficiency and growth of a business.
NetSuite’s cloud-based software solutions provide businesses and organizations with numerous benefits that allow them to streamline their accounting operations, thus increasing their efficiency, minimizing their losses, and driving up profits and growth, among many other benefits that NetSuite provides.
If you're interested in upgrading your financial operations by automating your accounting through the use of a comprehensive enterprise resource planning solution, don't hesitate to contact ScaleNorth.
ScaleNorth is a premier NetSuite Solutions Provider and outsourced NetSuite accounting firm that can help you implement NetSuite, provide training to your in-house staff, and provide fractional NetSuite accountants to assist with your accounting operations.
