Accounting Updates and Trends for Food Manufacturers and Others: Do You Lease Equipment?

Food manufacturers and others should take note of these important accounting trends, and check out the new financial reporting standards detailed afterward. Both may help your business in the new year.

Accounting Trends: Data, Analytics, and the Accountant

Accountants have always been the number crunchers of the company, but there’s an emerging trend of marrying both accounting data and other data from within a company to inform business decisions. ERP systems such as Sage EM (formerly known as Sage X3) and Sage 300cloud (formerly known as Sage 300) provide companies with powerful data. Accountants are in a unique position to help them harness and analyze that data.

Income sheets, balance sheets, and cash flows remain important reports for any company. In addition to those standbys of the accounting world, new data reports added to these basics can provide an enhanced picture of the company’s financial health. An in-depth analysis of all of the data can give your company’s managers the information they need to make smarter business decisions

Accountants and financial professionals have the skillsets to analyze complex data problems and distill valuable information from them. By adding your skills to the data picture, you can help drive good decisions.

The Right Tools Provide Great Data: Sage 300cloud (formerly known as Sage 300) and Sage EM (formerly known as Sage X3)

With the right tools, you can generate accurate data that informs all aspects of your business. IWI Consulting Group offers many business software systems to help you collect, distill, and harness the power of your business’s data. Two such tools are Sage 300cloud (formerly known as Sage 300) and Sage EM (formerly known as Sage X3). We offer a free white paper on Sage EM (formerly known as Sage X3) that you can download from our website.

Accounting Updates: IFRS-16 for Canadian Businesses that Lease Equipment

Do you lease equipment? Canadian businesses who lease equipment should take note. New international financial reporting standards incorporated into the Canadian CPA Handbook in the summer of 2016 will impact how leases are accounted for starting in 2019.

As with most accounting changes, the new suggestions take effect far enough into the future so that Canadian businesses and the CPAs who advise them have plenty of time to make business changes for a smoother transition.

The new changes seek to add clarity and detail to how leases are reported on financial statements. In the former method, operating leases were only disclosed in the notes on the financial statements. Finance leases alone found their way to the balance sheet. That system resulted in many leases structured as operating leases for simplicity’s sake. The new guidelines make it easier to list leases exactly as they are so that they can be reported accurately.

IFRS-16, as the guidelines are called, also requires lessees to report all leases—with the exception of short-term and low-value leases—on the balance sheet as assets and liabilities. Lessors are now required to supply enhanced disclosures about the lessor’s risk of exposure.

These changes are made in the hopes that the new information will help both companies who lease and those who lease to them report their information accurately and fairly. Food manufacturers and others who lease equipment will need to make these adjustments in time for 2019 reporting.

IWI Consulting Group

IWI Consulting offers ERP consulting and accounting software systems to help you manage your data efficiently. With the right ERP systems, you’ll never feel as if you’re drowning in data. We can help you select the best system for your needs and learn how to use it for maximum benefit.

We also focus on Sage software for food manufacturers and distributors. Contact IWI Consulting at 1-866-916-3851.