No accounting professional wants a month-end close process that extends beyond 15 days, but this unfortunate reality is more common than you think. If you’re constantly digging through documents or waiting for late payments, you’re likely experiencing delays in closing the books.
Gravity’s multi-entity accounting software simplifies month-end close processes so you can spend less time catching up and more time focused on the opportunities ahead.
Here are five ways you can speed up your monthly closing process with Gravity.
Streamline your month-end close checklist
What makes the month-end close process so time-consuming is that it isn't just one or two tasks, but a whole list of items, including:
Chasing down invoice stragglers
An important part of closing the books is making sure all of the money in accounts receivable has been received and the money in accounts payable has been paid. Holding open receivables and payables for late transactions places your entire close process in limbo. The best way to avoid this is to stay on top of invoices and expenses throughout the month. That can be easier said than done, as invoicing involves the unpredictable element of human behavior.
By automating elements of accounts payable and accounts receivable, including using AI-powered invoice processing, Gravity removes many of the manual steps in this process. With Gravity, you can:
- Automatically create an invoice from an opportunity, quote or sales order.
- Email or print the invoice with a few clicks.
- Process ACH and credit card payments directly within the software to make it easier for customers to pay on time.
- Automatically send billing reminders so your team doesn't have to waste their time with collections tasks.
- Automatically recognize recurring revenue in the correct month with revenue recognition.
- Bundle multiple cash receipts into a single deposit ticket for easier bank book reconciliation.
With Gravity Software's automated invoicing process, you can easily maintain your general ledger throughout the month instead of being surprised by missing payments at the end of the accounting period.
Handling inter-company transactions
While inter-company transactions can occur at any point in the month, they may be a prominent part of your accounting procedures if one company handles payroll for an entire multi-entity organization. Allocating payroll across entities in legacy software requires creating separate "due from" journal entries to record each company's share of the payroll, then logging into and out of the other companies' databases to create a "due to" entry in each one. All this manual data entry is time-consuming and prone to errors.
Gravity is unique among similarly positioned accounting software in that it's targeted specifically for multi-entity accounting. While legacy accounting software requires you to keep separate databases with separate logins for each company within your organization, Gravity stores financial information for multiple companies in a single database while allowing each to be treated as an individual entity. Because of this, a single transaction can be applied to multiple companies with the click of a few checkboxes. Due to/due from entries automatically balance, ensuring accuracy without any second-guessing.
Managing diverse assets
When your team is calculating depreciation for every company vehicle or piece of equipment at the end of each month, the term "fixed assets" probably seems like a misnomer since those numbers are anything but fixed. Managing your company's assets is even more chaotic if you have information in multiple places, using one software for your company's everyday accounting, another system for fixed asset management, and still another for managing other types of investments.
With Gravity’s fixed asset and investment management modules, you can track physical assets alongside other interests to create a single source of truth for all of your company's financial data. Here's how Gravity can support your team in managing fixed assets:
- You can transfer asset information to the Fixed Asset module at the same time as you enter purchasing information, allowing you to begin managing your asset from the moment you acquire it.
- You can keep multiple books corresponding with multiple tax scenarios.
- With the Microsoft Power Platform, you can access applications that streamline operations and further eliminate repetitive tasks. This gives your accounting and finance teams more time for tasks requiring their unique insight and expertise, such as calculating depreciation and complying with tax codes related to fixed assets.
- You can use Gravity’s multi-currency capabilities to automatically calculate realized and unrealized gains and losses for foreign investments.
Reconciling the bank books
Without the right technology, reconciling your bank books and credit card statements is one of the most tedious tasks on the month-end checklist. Poring over statements from multiple bank accounts and comparing each and every transaction listed to the transactions you have in your records can take hours, requiring you or your team to stay late into the evening just to keep up.
If you're a multi-entity company with legacy accounting software that requires you to repeatedly log into and out of multiple databases, or if you're pulling statements from multiple sources, such as checks, bank websites, and email, this process becomes even more tedious.
Mastering account reconciliations is a breeze with Gravity Software's bank book management feature. With Gravity, you can:
- Set up automatic downloads of your transactions and view them side-by-side with the transactions recorded in Gravity.
- Automatically reconcile transactions with the same check number.
- Automatically categorize transactions with specific vendors or recurring monthly payments such as mortgages and insurance.
With the ability to complete bank book reconciliation in as little as three minutes, your team will be finished reconciling the books before they even have time to dread the task.
Preparing financial statements
Financial statements are an important part of the month-end close process as they're a chance to reflect upon the past in order to do better in the future. But like so many other month-end close tasks, preparing financial statements can be tedious and inefficient without the right technology. That's because every piece of information you want to include in your financial reports must be copied from your accounting system — for each company — and pasted into a separate spreadsheet in order to create consolidated financial reports.
With Gravity, your team no longer needs to log into and out of multiple databases to copy each piece of information into a separate spreadsheet. The information is all in one place, ready to be compiled into a spreadsheet with just a few clicks. Because data is so easy to access and available in real time, you can keep tabs on KPIs throughout the month rather than being surprised at month-end close. And Gravity integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Power BI so you can easily turn information from your statements into colorful data visualizations that will enhance your decision-making capabilities.
Gravity offers speed without sacrifice
In 2014, the typical month-end close process was so cumbersome that the American Institute of CPAs published a paper arguing for the "soft close." The organization advocated for businesses to evaluate their month-end close procedures and assess whether they really needed each and every step, to move some procedures outside of the close process, and even to employ estimates in certain cases rather than taking the time to calculate exact numbers.
Thankfully, the past decade has brought great technological advances. Innovative accounting solutions allow companies to tend to key aspects of the month-end close on a consistent basis, automatically, rather than letting the work accrue into a series of burdensome tasks. Gravity Software drastically reduces month-end close times without sacrificing those aspects of the process that enhance decision-making and optimize business operations.
Dr. Tavel Family Eye Care cut its month-end close time in half with Gravity, from more than 30 days to 10-15 days within a few months of implementing the software.
“With all the time we’re saving on bank reconciliation, month-end close, and other routine tasks, we can do more financial analysis, budgeting, and providing valuable feedback to the company on strategic direction,” VP of Finance and HR Tera Carpenter said.
Read the full case study here.
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