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Is your financial reporting software built for multiple companies?


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As your company grows to include multiple entities, preparing financial reports for investors can become more complicated — especially if your accounting software isn’t built to scale with your organization.

Do any of these common frustrations sound familiar?

Signs your financial reporting software is hindering your growth

You spend a lot of time copying and pasting data

There are some serious drawbacks to using financial reporting software that isn’t designed for multi-company accounting.

Legacy software forces users to treat each entity within the same company as a separate business. That means many separate databases, each with their own login and chart of accounts.

Any information that pertains to more than one entity within a business — such as an invoice from a vendor that supplies food to all 12 of your restaurant franchise locations — must be copied and pasted into each database.

The tedium of this task is the least of your problems.

You have limited visibility into your financial performance

Amid uncertainty in the global economy, finance leaders can help their companies chart a path forward in several ways, including: 

  • Developing scenarios related to consumer behavior, demand, and top products
  • Keeping a close watch on the organization's short- and medium-term liquidity
  • Searching for ways to cut costs in the short term while ensuring the company remains poised for future growth

Your company won't be able to use your team’s unique expertise in these ways if they're spending hours repeatedly logging into and out of databases to copy and paste data just to keep up with basic financial reporting.

And if you’re considering adding new locations, you might have to hire more employees just to handle basic financial transactions like bank book management and invoicing.

Month-end financial reporting is also much more difficult with a legacy system, requiring your team to manually consolidate data from each entity into a single document.

You experience frequent errors

Repeatedly copying and pasting information isn’t just a waste of time; it also increases the likelihood of mistakes.

If your company orders a large shipment of clothing for each of its 14 retail locations, your finance team needs to enter that transaction into 14 different databases.

This means there are 14 opportunities to enter information into the wrong field— or fail to account for it entirely.

In those instances, the best-case scenario is that someone catches the error before reports go out to stakeholders and it doesn’t take a significant amount of time to rectify.

A less ideal scenario is that investors or the SEC receive inaccurate reports. This erodes trust in your organization. Serious inaccuracies in your financial reporting could raise red flags indicating fraud and even result in fines.

Rental car company Hertz paid $16 million to settle fraud charges from the SEC following a series of inaccurate financial statements, including misstating income due to accounting errors.

Financial reporting software isn’t just about finances

A company's choice of financial reporting software has an impact that reaches beyond its finance department.

While leaders at Ernst & Young acknowledge that investors value “a healthy balance sheet that is designed for growth and conservative enough to withstand a challenging marketplace,” they say trust in a company is also based on less tangible qualities.

"Investors want to see that an organization is using technology wisely to sustain performance today, but also leverages it for future growth," EY says. "Investors expect high-performing organizations to have deeply embedded digital processes that improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of operations."

Choosing multi-company accounting software that accommodates the needs of your growing, multi-entity organization does more than ensure your investors receive accurate, relevant reports without over-burdening your finance team.

The wise use of technology, including financial reporting software, shows investors you're a forward-thinking company willing to embrace innovation.

Alivi lived the nightmare

Alivi, a company in the hospital and healthcare technology industry, knows all too well the pain of using financial reporting software that wasn’t designed for multiple entities.

“We were constantly logging in and out of multiple applications to get the data we needed,” said Daniel Rodriguez, the organization’s VP of finance. “We needed the ability to run consolidated financials, and QuickBooks and Sage were a nightmare when it came to this. We were constantly slowed down, and our growing business needed more.”

With Gravity Software, financial reporting went from a nightmare to "a breeze," and accounting efficiency increased so much that the company was able to grow without having to hire more team members.

Gravity Software: An advanced financial reporting tool

Gravity Software has all the functionality to meet your advanced financial reporting needs, even if you need more complex financial statements without the complexity of an ERP application. With our advanced financial reporting tool, you can: 

  • Produce complex financial reports by profit center, product type, department and office, and more

  • Save desired formats for future use so you don’t have to recreate a reporting format every time

  • Preview your report while you’re still working on it, and see how it would look in its final, printed format

  • Make changes to the reporting format, perform mathematical calculations and more as you go

Take that extra dimension

Take advanced reporting a step further with Gravity’s dimensions. Dimensions allow you to categorize data by events, job, projects or any other factor that’s important to you. They are user-defined and easy to create to manage your chart of accounts. You can easily track dimensions on every transaction.

 Built natively on the Microsoft Power Platform

Gravity Software is written on the Microsoft Power Platform, also known as Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM. This  open platform allows you to choose which modules you want and pay as you go, with no maintenance fees and all your data in one place.

As one of many Power apps, Gravity integrates natively with Dynamics 365 CRM for sales, service and marketing so your team has everything they need in one place. You can extend the platform with other power apps that support marketing, billing and more without hiring a programmer.

Real-time financial data

Gravity and the Power Platform give you a 360-degree view of your operations and customers. Information is transparent based on security settings down to the field level.

Gravity’s robust business software provides all your operational information in one easy to access, highly secure database. With real-time data, you can instantly answer questions about lead sources, product margins and who your most valuable customers are. You might be surprised by the answers. 

Gravity fills the gap between entry level accounting software like QuickBooks and expensive enterprise applications like Sage Intacct.  

Simplify financial reporting with Gravity

Gravity can handle the accounting and financial reporting needs of a medium-sized, multi-entity business because it was designed with exactly those companies in mind.

A segmented chart of accounts means users can access financial information for all of a company's entities with a single login.

A shared master file means you can apply a transaction, such as a vendor payment, to all entities with a single entry. Gravity automatically reconciles revenue across locations.

If you have a transaction that only applies to certain entities, you can easily select them.

Gravity makes it easy to personalize financial reports so they're relevant to all stakeholders. Your investors might not need to know the cost of each and every inventory item, but your purchasing manager does. You can also create automated, consolidated financial reports in minutes rather than days.

Gravity’s advanced financifal reporting makes it easy to see all the data you need about each of your company's entities. For instance, you can compare cash flow for your most and least profitable locations in a single screen.

Because Gravity is built on the Microsoft Power Platform, you can use Microsoft Power BI to create dashboards that are not only informative but easy to understand and visually appealing.

If you’re ready to transform financial reporting at your growing organization, it’s time to take a closer look at Gravity's multi-company accounting software. Schedule a demo today.

Gravity Software

Better. Smarter. Accounting.

 

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