Has it been tough hiring accounting personnel in-house or getting your outside CPA services done? If so, it’s not a surprise. According to this recent Wall Street Journal article, there’s a national shortage of accountants—with more than 300,000 leaving the field in the last two years.
Everyone knows Baby Boomers are retiring in droves—almost 10,000 a day—but the career selections of the succeeding Gen X and Millennials are also a factor, with not as many people in the upcoming generations putting accounting and related fields high on their career choice lists.
As the article notes, the accountant shortage is resulting in greatly increased costs of inhouse and outhouse accounting services—even with overseas outsourcing—and it will get worse as Boomer retirements continue.
Short of “growing your own accountants” with inhouse training of existing staff, the most immediate option is to leverage your AccountMate system to optimize accounting tasks—both inhouse and outhouse. Here are some of the simplest options:
➤ 1. Some clients don’t use the General Ledger module and instead outsource preparation of their financial statements. What’s up with that? When you’ve got a world-class system like AccountMate at your fingertips, it will automatically feed the transactions to the financial statements—and in a timely manner, not weeks or months later when your CPA gets them back to you. Do you have complicated financials? Ask us about handling that with the awesome Infor F9 add-on that hot-links your GL to Excel, automatically displaying the freshest AccountMate data in Excel any time you hit the F9 key.
➤ 2. If you’re not using the built-in Bank Reconciliation functionality, there’s no better time than now to start. Without bank reconciliation, you don’t have immediate visibility to cash and a means to validate the Balance Sheet, so it’s a tedious manual process. For those clients that ARE using the AcccountMate Bank Rec module, few have gone all the way to importing files from banks to have the system clear the majority of the transactions, which is a real time saver.
➤ 3. Have you noticed the cost of your outsourced payroll processing going up? Once upon a time, inhouse payroll was a huge hassle, but it’s really not that tough today. And it used to be a lot of hard work to do the tax payments and report filings, but with the modern system you have at your fingertips, this is heavily automated and integrated as a seamless function with all the bells and whistles you expect, like employee direct deposit. Look up how much your outsourced payroll is costing and then let’s chat about AccountMate’s Payroll module.
That’s just a few of the ways to leverage your current system and reduce the ever-rising cost of external accounting services while reducing your inhouse staffing needs. Reach out to iSOFT with some that apply specifically to your business and we’ll get them implemented. Or let us know what else is getting in the way of you handling more accounting inhouse or faster, and we’ll see what other automations could give you that flexibility.