Ask any finance professional about year-end, and you'll get the same look. It’s month-end on steroids, and finance departments are working late nights and weekends to close the books.
Most finance teams have battle-tested processes that work, but there’s always that one little error that slips through the cracks.
– That’s usually when they call us. With a problem that shouldn’t exist, says Eirik Haukåssveen, finance consultant at Vince.
– I remember one time. We were working with a customer when we found a mismatch between their general ledger and their balance sheet in M3, recalls Eirik.
After some digging, he and the rest of the team found the source. A mistake that had been sitting there for quite some time.
– The culprit was a little error that dated like 15 years back. That’s 15 years of reporting the wrong numbers. The mistake wasn’t huge, but still, it was a good thing we caught it!
Here are Eirik’s three best tips on how to stay afloat:
This one's simple but brutally effective. Costs should be recorded in the period they're consumed, not whenever someone decides to send a bill.
If you don't, you might end up with discrepancies between what's been expensed and what's actually been paid. Worst case, you risk failing your audit.
Your job is to make it crystal clear to suppliers that they need to invoice you for the correct period.
M3 is always changing, and some of the updates will make your life in finance easier. But only if you know about them.
One example is GLS385, the new reconciliation tool for M3 users.
Previously, you could only automatically reconcile at the account level. With the new tool, you can define rules across all dimensions.
Let’s say you use store location as your second dimension. You’d get a much more detailed reconciliation automatically. It saves time, gives you better control and might even cut dependency on external reconciliation tools you've been paying for.
The finance departments handle a lot of information. Business intelligence tools do a fantastic job of making it easy to view and understand such information. But then what? How do you act on it?
This is where Vince's platform work differently. You can take all this BI and put it into actionable dashboards where you can both see all the information and act on it instantly.
Spot an error in your data? Fix it right there. See a transaction that needs action? Trigger the workflow directly from the dashboard. Need to update records based on what you're seeing? Update them on the spot without jumping between systems.