Top 3 Accounting Challenges of Business Owners

Small and mid-sized business owners are already well aware of the challenges they face in running their organization. These can range from customer satisfaction to effective marketing practices to quality staffing. But one of the biggest problems has to do with the financial lifeblood of the business — accounting.

Accounting is a rather lengthy topic, with an inordinate amount of pain points, but we put together a list of the top three that our clients have experienced most often. With each, we matched case studies that show how each problem was resolved. Take a look at the list below. Do any of these resonate with you and your business?

1. Monthly close takes forever
   As your business grows, so does the process around closing the books each month. As you know, it is a multi-faceted process and can have multiple people involved, each with different tasks. This increases the level of complication, and therefore, the growing amount of time it takes to close the books each month. As a result, the business struggles with untimely reporting to both banks and investors.Case in point: With their old accounting program, security company Signal 88’s monthly close was taking at least 30 days to complete (essentially making it a never-ending process).

   Solution: Invest in a new accounting solution to improve monthly close as well as other pain points our client, Signal 88, was experiencing.

   Result: Signal 88 upgraded to Intacct. This reduced the time it took to close their books to just 11 days.

   Case study: Dive into the details here => “Signal 88 Improves Financial Management across Nearly 100 Franchises with Intacct”

2. Relying on Excel
   When your team begins to use Excel (and workarounds) for almost everything, it’s a big indicator that your accounting program is no longer a “solution” for the business. This is particularly true when it comes to your reconciliations and consolidations. Doing all of this work manually results in untimely and error prone data for both management reporting and decision support.Case in point: Quickbooks couldn’t handle the increasing number of reconciliations and complex consolidations for hospitality data provider, The Knowland Group.

   Solution: Upgrade the accounting system one that could easily handle multi-entity consolidations and other manual processes being done through Excel.

   Result: Budget-conscious Knowland chose Intacct. This saved the business both time and money by nixing all of the Excel-based manual processes. In fact, Intacct saved the business nearly 40 hours per month.

   Case study: Learn more about how Knowland’s smart investment in Intacct helped to grow the business quickly => “The Knowland Group Manages Rapid Growth with Intacct Cloud Financial Management and Accounting Applications.”

3. Duplicate entry abounds
   Disconnected systems results in tons of duplicate, or even triplicate entry. Using multiple programs that don’t integrate or “talk” to one another means your team is having to take too much time to re-enter the same data in different programs. Not only does it take time, but it can also increase data-entry errors.Case in point: Arizona-based health club chain, Mountainside Fitness Centers, had to hand-key all revenue data from its separate club management system into a spreadsheet, then check the balances, and afterward, manually input all of the journal entries into their QuickBooks program. That’s a lot of work–with a lot of opportunity for error.

   Solution: Purchase an accounting solution that would streamline accounting processes across multiple entities and eliminate all duplicate entry.

   Result: Mountainside Fitness Centers chose Intacct to handle their specific accounting needs. As a result, they were able to maintain the company’s fast growth while reducing finance headcount — saving the business $140,000 in anticipated salary costs.

   Case study: Get the inside scoop on all the other benefits that resulted from Mountainside Fitness Centers’ investment in Intacct => “Mountainside Fitness Centers Gets its Financials in Shape with Intacct’s Best-in-Class Financial Management.”

If you think your business is experiencing any of these pain points, you’ve got to alleviate them before they get worse. You don’t have to go it alone — we can help. Tell us what you are going through with your current accounting program, and we’ll be happy to offer our experienced advice on what can be done to fix it. Contact us today.