Accounting practices across various industry segments including Retail and Wholesale, from times immemorial have been very well defined, are logically structured and hence have a limited room for innovation. Also, to add, Accounting as a function lays a lot of emphasis on certain fixed and nonnegotiable aspects like accuracy, integrity, and timeliness of data. In the light of this proposition so what is “New Age Accounting” all about? It is about streamlining, optimizing and automating processes, speeding up decision making, scaling up with growing business needs, doing all this while keeping the core fundamentals intact.
- Core Accounting – Traditional Practices, New Techniques
- Governance Structure and Role Based Control – Approval Cycles
- Timely Compliances – GST, Statutory filings
- Predictive Analytics
Core Accounting – Traditional Practices, New Techniques
As mentioned above the core principles of accounting and the need to accuracy in calculations remain the same but with digitization the means and tools to capture and manage the data and information has changed significantly in the past 10 years.
The following are some of the recent trends where IT systems have made a difference
- Variety of ways of Costing the goods using the PO value or FIFO, Net Landed Cost (NLC) including the freight handling charges, tracking the Post-Dated Cheques (PDC)
- Global Transaction Management – Multi Tenancy/ Currency, Support for multiple Accounting Systems and Practices across the globe
- Powerful Drilldowns and Traversals – Starting from Account summary all the way to a ledger level
- Consolidated Balance Sheet Across Regions
- Automated Bank Reconciliation Statements
Governance Structure and Role Based Control – Approval Cycles
With the implementation of a Unified and integrated IT System, Retail owners usually face challenges on having a streamlined workflow, approval chain wherein the needed checks and balances are in their right place. A good system helps in creating the ‘maker’ and ‘checker’ roles with possibilities of value or type of transaction-based controls.
Timely Compliances – GST, Statutory filings
Having a comprehensive system that takes care of the indirect taxes in an end-to-end manner makes a big difference to the overall well being of the Retail Organization. A good system for Goods and Services Tax (GST) compliance for example need to have provisions for maintaining the applicable taxes with HSN codes at the product master level. It should have provision for applying the required taxes at every sales transaction with proper documentation of the GSTIN numbers, and eventually help in the generation of monthly reports for filing returns and claiming tax benefit. Compliance with the GST related regulations becomes an uphill task in the absence of a GST compliant Retail ERP solution.
Predictive Analytics
Applying the Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), Data warehousing, Big Data and Machine Learning concepts for creating actionable insights for unlocking the business benefit by way of multidimensional analysis of high-volume data for aiding and helping in taking the right business decisions.
The following are some of the dashboards that can be created for the purpose
- Revenue / Sales Analysis
- Expense / Purchase Analysis
- Stock / Inventory Analysis
- Cashflow - Receivables and Payments Dashboards
- Financial Control
Extensive Automation
Automation of the accounting process is one of the latest trends in the accounting software world today. One can automate the processes related to cash receivables, payables, reporting, and compliances. In the article ‘How to Automate Your Replenishment and Purchase Process’ we have seen how purchase process can be automated. A similar approach can be adopted for the automation of accounting related areas like the receivable for credit sales invoice generation, laybuy EMIs, auto communication of invoices and receiving of funds.
Accounts Payable can also be automated with the use of online mechanisms, auto authorization of vendor invoices, transaction notifications, daily account summaries and more.
You need to be dealing with matured solution vendors and the right implementation team to have robust systems and agile processes in place.
Posibolt is a leading provider of Retail ERP including end to end Accounting, Inventory and Point of Sale (POS) solutions across retail formats and variety of Distribution Centers whose customers are spread in 10 countries across Africa, Europe, Middle East and Asia.