Accountants are the most important people in your organisation. Every single area of your business is affected by money that’s coming in, going out or being managed and processed.
With everything touched by the accounts department, we’re now seeing the coming of the age of the accountant. To support their vital roles, they need accurate information that allows them to provide trustworthy advice that means the company can make time-sensitive decisions. Here’s a look at the importance of the accountant in business.
Cash Flow
Having a positive cash flow is a sign that your business is healthy. It means you can meet your payroll, buy goods and services, and invest in your business to bring growth.
Accountants help maintain a good cash flow. They closely manage accounts receivable to ensure payments are collected promptly and they strategically pay invoices, spreading outgoing funds or receiving discounts for early payment.
By staying on top of the money due to come in and go out, they also have a forward-looking view of cash flow to ensure you can meet your upcoming working capital needs.
Regulation and Compliance
You don’t want to fall foul of the law, so with an accountant managing your financial reporting and compliance, you can be sure you are correctly reporting to the authorities and filing your accounts to meet deadlines.
With your financial staff to organise and manage the data, everything is orderly when it comes to auditing or inspection.
Tax and VAT
It’s the accountancy team that ensures you pay the right tax and VAT. They can ensure you save money by claiming allowances you’re entitled to or by finding legitimate tax savings tax.
Accountants can also help your business to take advantage of government support schemes, such as the various Covid recovery schemes and energy relief efforts that have been introduced over the past few years. By keeping up to date with financial legislation, they can help you to benefit from these kinds of incentive.
Payments
Accountants are important when it comes to managing your outgoings. They make sure your business pays its suppliers on time to avoid late payment fees and to maintain supplier relationships.
They can also help you pay less by taking advantage of early payment discounts or other flexible payment options.
Management Accounts
One vital role accountants play is in preparing management accounts and reports. These are crucial for internal departmental budgeting purposes and for helping allocate company expenditure.
Your accounts team is key to so many different aspects of your business here. There’s headcount and associated payroll and staff expenses; overheads like property, facilities management and utilities; expenditure on sales and marketing campaigns; operational costs for warehousing or manufacturing or client and project management. All of these areas rely on accurate reporting of their functions for budgeting and forecasting.
And through preparing profit and loss accounts, balance sheets and cash flow statements, it’s your accountant that helps keep you and your management team keep abreast of business performance.
Business Decision-Making
Of course, it’s one thing to understand the state of the business through management reports, but it’s another to act on that information.
Accountant-prepared reports can help you make critical business decisions. You might need to adjust your pricing to cope with higher outgoings, in which case your accountant can model various pricing strategies and how they might affect your sales and profits. Or you may want to expand, so will want to see how adding headcount or a new premises might affect the business.
By providing accurate and time-sensitive data, accountants help you make these informed decisions that influence business success. They can help you spot opportunities to both make money and to save it. They can help you seize an advantage before your competitors do.
The Right Technology for Accountants
Ultimately, your accountant can help you to grow and prosper. But only with the right information and the right processes. And to get this, they need the right ERP system.
With NetSuite ERP, your accounts team can generate and customise your reports. These will give you the insight you need manage accounts receivable and ensure invoice payments, generate the reports to meet governance and compliance requirements, create forecasts, models and budgets, manage tax and VAT, handle payroll, improve cash flow and much more.
For an ERP system that facilitates the age of the accountant and will help you grow, get in touch for more information about NetSuite today.
