Welcome to “Do IT Right,” a 9-part series on how to succeed in the most important areas of IT management. In this series we introduce you to Simmons & Hawking, a fictional law firm that is scaling up its outdated IT infrastructure, and the relatable challenges faced by their IT stakeholders. In part 7, we saw James, a member of the finance team, quickly discover how to keep track of dollars spent. Now, he’s learning how to better leverage accounting to drive better business decisions—and profit!
Since all invoices are under control thanks to strong invoice management, James is confident in his accounting strategy. He knows he can implement it across the business to better assist their bottom line.
Although their invoice management is up to par, it is daunting and tedious to upkeep. James and his team have to create all the GL codes manually, which takes a lot of time and work. Manual entry often leads to errors.
The existing Accounts Payable (AP) system needs to be updated with any additional entries in the invoice management system, which leads to more copying of information, more potential data entry errors, and more time and effort from employees.
The team is also responsible for organizing all of the specifics related to drilling down cost allocations, a time-consuming process. James and his team have to build the cost allocation schema for each individual invoice manually. The process becomes tedious and employees are spending hours doing manual work instead of using a system to help streamline the cost allocation process.
Furthermore, by doing everything manually without a system to keep things properly organized, it’s easy to overlook certain details and takes much longer to nail down important specifics.
For instance, it’s taking James weeks to forecast budget for the following fiscal year, eating up lots of his time and taking his attention away from other important work. In reality, a process such as this one should not take weeks of arduous work.
Without a well-designed budget management tool for managing IT costs on an annual basis, James’s budget plans are sometimes unclear and not easily accessible to stakeholders. Budget management becomes confusing and messy for everyone involved.
But the good news is things don’t have to be this way!
Quitting the manual work and automating all of these processes is the one solution that is going to completely revamp the process and move everything along efficiently. No more wasted time, no more errors, no more confusion. When you have a strong platform that is able to seamlessly integrate with existing IT processes, it makes it much easier to jump from assets to accounting without a hitch. The result? You’ll find immediate increase in:
- Time: recoup all the hours involved in manual processes, creating GL codes by hand, and the 3-5 minutes it takes to execute each invoice
- Information: develop insights and business decisions based on organized, transparent, and accessible spend information
- Money: minimize the soft costs that quietly get absorbed, leading to incremental yet substantial increases in overhead
All of these benefits allow teams to streamline communication, understanding, and process, which is a recipe for higher margins without the added work–and who doesn’t want that?
