Pre-accounting automation needed for business houses to separate business and busy-ness
What exactly is pre-accounting?
Everything that happens before accountants finally start making the financial reports every month comes under pre-accounting. This involves gathering, recording, enriching, and approving the expenses, receipts, time registrations, etc. In other words, the phase that involves the preparation and structuring of data and receipts before the bookkeeping can be done. Clearly, the huge amount of drudgery involved makes it a dreadful exercise for all accountants.
Why is the current pre-accounting system a mess?
The last quarter of 20th century introduced us to the IT revolution and with it came the benefits of digitisation. While this revolution had the most significant impact on the practice of bookkeeping, pre-accounting could not gain much. Accountants still had to manually gather source documents, create bookkeeping journal entries, enter them into the accounting recording solution, safekeep documents, resolve issues, etc. All this manual work means there is a fairly good probability of a human error creeping in at any stage. Thus, creating a lot of problems for all stakeholders.
As the manual and tedious aspect of pre-accounting was gaining traction, there was another equally strong case in point. Performing these repetitive tasks wastes a lot of time and intellect. Professionals have to do a lot of to-and-fros to make things right. This leaves them with little space to make bigger contributions to the business. It has been proven quite extensively that the time spent in updating the data could yield much greater value if it were spent analysing patterns in the data. In a highly competitive world, it is impossible for a business to succeed unless every individual is working up to their full potential. Needless to say, this is as much an individual prerogative as a business case.
How can automation help?
One look at the reports on automation and the answer becomes evident. Almost every report mentions accounting as the fastest transforming sector through automation. As manifested in the section above, there are good reasons for moving in that direction. The magnitude of repetitive, manual tasks is overwhelming – every day, month, quarter and year.
Automating accounting provides us with quicker and better insights from our financial information. Automating pre-accounting allows us the required bandwidth to spend time on those insights and employ human intellect for bigger business goals. It does so by reducing the unnecessary and time-consuming manual effort. Let’s see how automated pre-accounting is going to work.
i. Secure and seamless data-sharing: Increased digitisation has heightened concerns around cyber-security, and rightly so. Pre-accounting requires a lot of information sharing in the form of invoices, expense reports, etc. Preaccounting automation provides a systemic channel that allows for easy and secure information sharing.
ii. Cloud-based: The automated system operates on a cloud and thus provides anywhere-anytime access. This makes the entire data handling process convenient with changing work models around the world. It also allows quick data-retrieval and more importantly business continuity during troubled times like the Covid-19 pandemic.
iii. Employee-friendly: What makes pre-accounting automation successful is its employee-friendly nature. The entire point of easing the job of accountant hinges upon employees being able to share the invoices without any hassles and all by themselves. Automation allows it to happen. ML-based easy to operate systems would make it a comfortable exercise for every.
iv. Universal compatibility: Different organisations across the world use different software for accounting, employee management, etc. Pre-accounting automation brings in the additional feature of being universally compatible. Thus, it acts as a portable conduit between the accountant and the business, independent of how both these parties go about their work.
The most-pronounced advantage would lie in the time it will free up for professionals to focus on business growth. They can contextualise their foundational finance know-how and provide vital guidance to the businesses as they navigate different problems.
Is the shift urgent?
Accounting in India needed a stir and finally, it is getting one. Now, it is the professionals who have to decide on whether they continue to do things the traditional way and wait for someone to come around and disrupt their business model, or they become the disruptor. The shift is challenging but vital. Business houses cannot be allowed to keep wasting their crucial hours doing minimally productive compliance work. Automation will shift the core of accounting from “more time & less value-adding work” to “less time & more value-adding work”. Accountants, in turn, will put on the advisor’s hat and play a much bigger role in the businesses and society at large. And this is only the beginning.