By: Olivia Calcasola and Samantha Calvao

As a business owner or non-profit executive, maintaining financial affairs is paramount to your long-term success. Knowing what resources are available to your organization and keeping abreast of the innovations in technology can make a significant impact on day-to-day operations, affecting your staff’s daily functions and your bottom line. Technological advances such as cloud-based software and artificial intelligence (AI) have proliferated in recent years as financial service providers find ways to leverage technology to fulfill basic needs and free up staff from data entry and reporting for more strategic work.

Most organizations maintain at least one person on staff responsible for financial management. From bookkeeper to chief financial officer, there are many roles to be met depending on the size of your enterprise. While some businesses exclusively handle accounting in-house, there are many benefits to outsourcing accounting with a financial firm.

Outsourced accounting is when a business hires a third party (outside of their company) to fulfill the accounting and finance function of the organization. Outsourced accountants can handle all or some of their clients’ finance functions including bookkeeping, payroll, financial reports, management accounting, tax, accounts payable, accounts receivable, collections, and other accounting services such as audits and valuations.

Bringing in a third party to handle some or all of the financial management of your organization can offer valuable benefits.

• Saving on cost: Hiring an in-house accounting team can become a significant drain on resources, especially for smaller organizations. Every person on staff will include up-front costs for recruiting in addition to the recurring cost of maintaining staff including wages, employer-sponsored benefits and office space and materials.
  
  
• Saving on time: While quality and meticulous financial management is an essential pillar to every successful endeavor, for most executives, this work takes away time better spent on the vision and purpose of your enterprise. Not to mention, if finances are being handled by an individual whose own expertise is not in finance, even more time than is necessary may be devoted to your financial operations with the best of intentions to ensure sound financial decisions are being made.
  
  
• Ensuring up-to-date expertise: When your organization is just starting off, outsourcing your accounting can help you get off on the right foot knowing your entity is organized well based on your immediate needs and goals. For established businesses, working with outsourced accounts keeps you current on the latest changes to financial opportunities and requirements. Accounting service providers are continually improving their abilities and certifications to stay competitive in the market and continue to offer value to their clients. Top accounting firms have greater access to training and courses and are continuously discussing new accounting trends. Working with a firm that is dedicated to staying on top of changes to the financial sector allows you peace of mind, knowing you have access to a team of people with a variety of skills and knowledge.

Regardless of whether you have chosen to handle accounting entirely in-house or seek out third-party assistance, your organization may find opportunity for greater efficiency by upgrading to cloud-based accounting.

Cloud accounting allows you and your trusted financial professionals to handle basic accounting tasks like maintaining books using software that saves your data on an offsite server. It can offer flexibility and to-the-minute accuracy that is unrivaled by traditional on-premises systems. 

• Access from anywhere: Cloud accounting allows you and your team flexibility to access your financial information from anywhere so long as you have an internet connection and proper login credentials. This allows for multiple individuals, staff or outsourced accountants alike, to access and update your financial data from anywhere. As data automatically saves, all users are always viewing the most up to date version of your books.
  
  
• Data Security: By moving your organization’s financial data to the cloud, your accounts and records are backed up on multiple remote servers, reducing the risk of data loss due to disasters that storage in your onsite servers may entail.
  
  
• Automation: Allowing users to free up more time for strategic work, cloud-based software have the capability to automate many of the most time consuming and tedious tasks for maintaining the books such as posting transactions to the correct ledger in real time, produce recurring invoices and import bank and credit card transactions.

As computer capability rapidly expands, many financial tasks can increasingly be automated without human intervention, from account reconciliation to preparing financial statements. As artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more advanced, more options are becoming available for financial staff to be freed up to handle more analytic and strategic work. AI has the potential to free up a significant amount of time with the capability to perform quantitative calculations exponentially faster and more accurately than a human. AI may also assist with catching accounting errors and fraud with the ability to seek and find patterns in large datasets that may be difficult to catch with the human eye. As more research and development is created in machine learning, natural language processing, and AI’s application to accounting, we are likely to see a trend toward more and more of the data entry and basic reporting and analysis automated by computer systems, freeing up professionals to focus on creative problem solving and interpretation.

When considering the best financial solutions for your organization there are a variety of factors to take into consideration including the financial costs upfront and long-term as well as potential to integrate into rapidly growing technological efficiencies. It is essential to be aware of what resources and technologies are available as solutions for you right now and consider what your needs are in the present as well as any goals for future growth.

If you’ve been in business for decades, switching your accounting systems may seem overwhelming but can be well worth the time and cost savings to make the transition. Reach out to a trusted financial firm for assistance in finding the solution that will work best for your needs.