Accounting for Change: The Cloud-First Financial Advantage

Manage your financial management software from anywhere using any device through cloud

Financial operations are among the most complex, critical and compliance-governed of any tasks tackled by small business. From managing payroll to handling invoices, completing consolidations and regulating access, the evolving financial landscape demands more time and effort from organizations — but many don’t have room to spare.

It makes sense; financial software is often an amalgam of purpose-built internal solutions and proprietary tools, in turn frustrating efforts to find a complete and comprehensive view of revenue in, cash out and potential profit pitfalls.

Cloud financial management software can help bridge the gap between what you know and what you need, helping your small business streamline key financial services and consolidate critical processes.

Challenging the Status Quo

Accounting rules and regulations are constantly evolving. In Canada, private-sector accounting regulations are issued by the Accounting Standards Board (AcSB), which uses International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRSs) to define best practice principles. The Canada Business Corporations Act, combined with provincial corporations and securities legislation, meanwhile, sets out general preparation and reporting principles.

The AcSB also publishes regular standard reviews, current discussions and amendment revisions to help small businesses keep pace with changing digital and physical expectations for accounting best practices.

The result? Organizations often face the dual problem of ensuring current practices meet basic accounting guidelines while also future-proofing key software and services to account for emerging compliance and regulatory expectations. Best-case? Processes take longer than expected and companies spend more time than anticipated ensuring payroll, invoicing, data collection and reporting align with government standards. Worst case? Ineffective or outdated processes cause compliance mistakes or regulatory missteps.

Changing the Game

To stay current — and get ahead — of accounting expectations, small businesses need financial management solutions capable of both integrating existing processes and embracing organizational change. Cloud based financial management software provides the critical infrastructure necessary for this change — by shifting resource burdens away from local stacks onto servers managed by trusted third parties, companies are no longer responsible for regular application updates or resource scaling. Instead, businesses can focus on what matters: Gaining visibility into key financial processes and ensuring existing operations match accounting obligations.

This is the key value proposition of the cloud: Fusing fragmented processes into integrated, agile applications that are capable of scaling on-demand. But cloud financial management software also offers line-of-business benefits, including:

• Accuracy — According to a recent small business study, while 95 percent of small businesses are confident in the accuracy of their financial records, skilled assessments and audits often find missing or incorrectly-categorized data, making it difficult — if not impossible — for companies to deliver reliable results. Cloud based accounting software lets you easily collect and combine data from multiple sources for increased accuracy. 

• Accessibility — Staff need access to critical financial data on-demand. Sage Intacct empowers employees to handle multiple entries, currencies, asset types and locations from a single dashboard to deliver unparalleled accessibility. 

• Accountability — Security matters. Small businesses must account for the collection, transmission, use and storage of key financial data across their organization. While legacy tools often provide a measure of on-site security, they’re not designed to defend critical assets outside the bounds of your corporate network. Cloud financial management software lets you easily implement user access controls to ensure the right people have access to the right data for the right reasons.

This is especially critical as regulatory bodies now expect complete audit oversight — digital use histories are essential to ensure data due diligence.

• Affordability — Cost control is critical for financial processing solutions. While in-house offerings may get the job done, they often come with extra cost outlays related to ongoing maintenance, upgrading and security implementation. In the cloud, all of these tasks are offloaded to your provider, allowing small businesses to save up to 70% of average processing costs.

Closing the Gap

Ready to close the gap between current processes and changing expectations? Sage Intacct has you covered. From intuitive, real-time dashboards to custom reporting capabilities, scalable security controls and streamlined payment processing options, cloud financial management software from Sage can help companies consolidate current processes, reduce reporting challenges and embrace evolving expectations.

About Us:

Looking for Sage Intacct partners in Canada? IWI Consulting Group is an authorized Sage Intacct cloud financial software provider in Canada ready to help your business account for ongoing change and close the process gap.

Try our complimentary business review to evaluate whether our solution can solve your challenges or not.