It’s true that there are a lot of people out there who love Excel. It’s an incredibly powerful tool, but it’s also just one part of the equation.
For many organisations, they find themselves using Excel for things like fixed assets, payments or inventory management.
This is not a problem in and of itself, but Excel can create issues as spreadsheets are typically shared with little restrictions in place.
Moving your processes out of Excel could be a big decision for any finance team, but the rewards are worth it.
Here are 3 processes to move away from Excel into an accounting system such as SunSystems Cloud for robust results:
1. Making Payments
If you’re making payments, such as supplier invoices – then this is best done in your accounting system.
Typically your accounting system will have a payment process to list all items due for payment.
This way, there’s no chance of human errors or miscommunication about what’s being paid. It can also help make the process less open to fraud.
2. Bank Reconciliation
Your accounting system should be able to either take a live feed from your bank or allow you to quickly upload your bank statement from Excel.
By using this automated process, you’ll be able to reconcile far more quickly using system-based matching rules to match on a date, amount, description or other user-defined rules.
3. Integration
Excel is often used either to:
- Manually consolidate data in Excel because your systems aren’t integrated or;
- Manually reformat data into a format suitable to be uploaded to your accounting software.
Your accounting system should have an integration module/API to assist in automating this task. If you haven’t investigated already, have a chat with your software provider.
Conclusion
There are many advantages to using an accounting system such as SunSystems Cloud over Excel, especially when it comes to automating key finance processes.
Do you still use Excel for some of your finance processes? Why not get in touch and tell us about it! We might just be able to help you move away from Excel altogether. 🙂