Understanding the Role of Accountants and Accounting Systems during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Managing a business involves a lot of work, and this can be even more difficult amidst the pandemic situation. Nowadays, business owners must oversee different parts of their company, such as making decisions on products and services, formulating marketing strategies, supervising logistics, and so on. However, an imperative responsibility to sustaining a business is to keep a log of the flow of finances and to ensure the smooth operation of its accounting processes.
Proper accounting can easily inform an owner if their business is growing or failing through organizing data and presenting trends that are much easier to grasp than the raw numbers alone. In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, such a task has become gravely essential as managers, executives, and business owners rely more heavily on data and analytics to assess the sustainability of their commerce as all activity has shifted mostly to online platforms.
While accountants can handle these tasks for you, investing in a good accounting system can mitigate many of the liabilities of relying on the traditional bookkeeper. Unlike an accountant, accounting systems are significantly less prone to error and risk, and at the same time, they can almost immediately provide the data and analytics necessary to business owners at their convenience.
To see the utility of an accounting system, it is best to understand first how accounting works and what it does for a business during these unstable times.
What Does an Accountant Do?
Before anything, accountants are the ones who receive all raw data on a company’s transactions”how revenue comes in and where the budget goes to. Accounting becomes much more essential as a business further develops, which means growth in both size and activity. When this happens, the company may opt to utilize multiple bank accounts to better compartmentalize their funds for more efficient budget allocation to different branches and departments. At this point, the work of accountants serves to assure management that all internal finances are justified, but they likewise keep track of external transactions with clients and customers, particularly when payments are still pending past the initial billing.
Aside from recording all financial matters for a business, accountants are also tasked with analyzing the data from what they’ve recorded in order that they can present trends that clearly and easily illustrate the overall performance of the company. What their analyses produce are often crucial in business management, especially when assessing risks, addressing issues, and making decisions for everyone moving forward.
The Importance of Accountants
Most prominently in the business sector, accountants certify that none of a company’s funding is wasted, lost, or miscounted, so that all departments and projects are provided with sufficient budget allocations. In line with the appropriate disbursements, accountants are also responsible for spotting fraudulent expenses and any forms of embezzlement, building trust and accountability whenever money is being handled. Most importantly, the reports that they provide can help business owners understand why they are turning up a profit or simply losing money, so they can make properly informed decisions and take the best course of action.
Outside of the private sector, the value of accountants has implications even in the public sector. Because of their experience in analyzing data, accountants can assist the government and other institutions in studying and presenting population data”for risk assessments and sectoral vulnerabilities. Similar to decision-making in business, accountants can present this data as basis for suggesting more effective methods to relieve social and medical issues brought about by the pandemic.
Since accountants deal most with studying the company’s expenditures, they themselves can also propose better ways to transition a business effectively into the virtual space while minimizing financial losses and corporate vulnerabilities. Such a move is necessary as more and more businesses begin to shut down due to ill-preparation and poor transitioning into online platforms.
In line with this, accountants’ experience with external finances also gives them a firm understanding of market competition and behavior in different circumstances. This allows them to properly assess if a company’s current business may be saturated with too many competitors. To mitigate such weaknesses, accountants can propose potential products and services that aim at new demands in context of quarantine life, possibly disrupting a new market in their company’s favor.
Why Shift to an Automated Accounting System?
While the work of accountants is invaluable, it would be much more practical and efficient to utilize an accounting system alongside your team of accountants. With tons of data to handle, the probability of inconsistencies and human error are inevitable when done manually. Furthermore, different departments and personnel may be requesting reports and information from accountants simultaneously, which may become overwhelming for accountants, especially given the limited working capacities in a work-from-home setup.
With programs that can handle the more tedious work, accountants can instead focus on strategy building, playing a bigger role in overall company management. Having the most experience with the numbers, not only are they most familiar with the corporate behaviors of their respective business, but they are also already best suited to mapping out viable plans and solutions for the future of the company. More than that, they would know how best to reallocate funds for COVID-19 centric initiatives in the company. Such a skillset would be highly beneficial to sustaining a company despite the instability of business during this pandemic.
Automating the processes with an accounting system allows financial data and analytics to be available at any time to anyone in the company who needs it. In this case, ANSI’s systems promise to diminish error while producing the data in much less time. Furthermore, they can simplify transactions digitally by mitigating the jarring work of processing physical bills and invoices. Most of all, such a system guarantees greater security for any company’s sensitive financial information.
If you’re considering your options, don’t take risks and trust in ANSI’s accounting systems and solutions. ANSI has long been established with a repertoire of business solutions in a wide range of industries. Their offerings will prime your businesses for nothing less than success and development.
