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A guide to using Gravity Software


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It's been said that humans only use 10% of their brains and that if the other 90% could somehow be unlocked, each one of us would effectively possess superpowers. While that has been debunked, we do sometimes have trouble leveraging what we have to its fullest potential.

Gravity Software is an accounting solution with the ability to transform your business by unlocking greater efficiency, cost savings, and business intelligence that leads to unprecedented growth. But you can't take full advantage of its capabilities if you don't know what they are. This post will walk you through some of Gravity Software's most important features, complete with accounting software tutorial videos to show you how to unlock Gravity's full potential.

Getting started: Setting your company up for multi-entity accounting success

 

Even if this is one of your first encounters with Gravity Software, you likely already know it's an accounting solution designed especially for multi-entity businesses. This means setup may look a little different than with software you may have used in the past.

Because of its innovative design, Gravity Software users can access all of the legal entities within their enterprise from a single database and you can easily share information on vendors and customers across multiple entities with just a few clicks. You can also keep information separate as needed.

The rule of three

 

When setting your enterprise up to use Gravity Software, one of the first things you'll do is input three main sets of data elements, which will be integral to your financial and operational reporting.

Company code

There might be a temptation to build a company code into the chart of accounts, but with Gravity, the company code is its own data element. This is what allows multiple companies or entities, each with their own segmented chart of accounts, to exist within the same database.

Accounts

Within each legal entity, you can designate different segments, or "Accounts," that you would like to include in your financial reporting. These can be territories, locations, etc.

Dimensions

Dimensions allow you to further break down your reporting. Whereas the "Accounts" component includes elements of your company that are more permanent, dimensions are more dynamic – specific employees, for example, rather than sales territories that are less likely to be redrawn regularly. New dimensions can be turned on at any time.

Sharing transactions across companies

There are several reasons the companies within your organization may need to pass funds among themselves. Some examples include shared payroll, supplies purchased by one branch office and distributed to other offices, or an invoice paid by a customer to one entity even though employees from several entities provided services.

In entry-level accounting software, accounting for these types of transactions takes quite a bit of footwork – logging into and out of multiple databases, making "due to" entries in some and "due from" entries in others, making sure the numbers balance. In Gravity, you can automatically create balanced "due to/due from" entries. You'll lay the groundwork for this by creating tables that define the relationships between each of the companies within your organization.

Going global: Understanding Gravity's three-tier multi-currency system

 

In a multi-entity enterprise, there's a good chance one or more of those entities is in a country other than the one where you're headquartered. If not, you might have suppliers or customers in other countries. Gravity's three-tier system allows you to transact and report in multiple currencies with ease. Here's how it works:

Tier 1: Transaction level (functional currency)

No matter your company's default currency, you're likely to have instances where a vendor or client wants to be paid, or to pay you, in their local currency.

If your company uses USD as its base currency, for example, but receives payment on an invoice in euros, Gravity will automatically calculate realized losses and gains upon settlement of the transaction, and any rounding issues go into a separate account.

Tier 2: Entity level (home currency)

Each entity within an organization can select its own base currency in which it can conduct business as usual and create reports reflecting that currency for any local stakeholders.

Tier 3: Organization level

No matter what currency transactions were conducted in, and no matter what each entity's default currency is, financial reports created at the organizational level can consolidate entities with different home currencies. 

To automatically update exchange rates, you can go to Gravity's settings, choose your main enterprise, paste your Open Exchange App ID (openexchangerates.org offers a free plan) in the designated space, and choose how often you'd like the rates to be updated. You can also choose to manually update rates.

Consolidated reports: Bringing it all together

 

The ability to create advanced, customized – and, perhaps most significantly, consolidated – financial reports is a cornerstone of Gravity Software's functionality. There are a few different ways to generate reports.

Quick financial statements

In Gravity's Reports tool, you can choose from among several common report types – like an income statement or a balance sheet, for example, the report will be generated within seconds.

Advanced financial statements

From the Reports menu, you can also create more complex financial statements. This is where those previously designated segments and dimensions will pay off in a big way, as you'll use them to assign filters to each column and row of a report. You can, for example, generate a financial statement separated by office, download it in the format of your choice, and save the format for future use.

Jet Reports

Gravity's newest available integration, Jet Reports, works within Excel to pull data from Gravity to create presentation-quality reports. Within Excel, users can choose the parameters for their reports, and numbers come with drill-back capabilities so users can see the transactions that led to a particular amount.

Business intelligence: making it all make sense

 

Maybe even more important than creating or presenting reports is understanding how the information they contain stands to impact your company. Microsoft Power BI is built into the Gravity Software platform, granting each user access to a colorful dashboard that can be tailored to their individual needs. Use the dropdown menu at the top of the dashboard to choose specific companies to view, and use the slider to lengthen or shorten the timeline you want to focus on.

More accounting automation features

Gravity has many other features to supercharge your productivity, including:

While we’ve tried to offer a comprehensive overview of Gravity Software here, the best way to understand its features and functionality is to see it for yourself and have the opportunity to ask questions. Schedule a demo today to find out how your business can harness the full force of Gravity.

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