Category

Technology

Feb 17
0

Systems Review: Inventory Your Current Systems and Technology

By | Technology | No Comments
person using laptop

An important part of any digital transformation journey is a systems review. A systems review consists of inventorying current systems and technology to understand precisely what is available, the purpose of each software, and how it is used.

Let’s unpack a systems review in three steps:

  1. Identify current software systems used throughout the organization
  2. Define purpose of each system and the use of the software
  3. Understand the strategic plan around the software’s use and how the various software systems interface with one another

Step 1: Identify Current Software Systems

Before you can understand how the systems work or interact, you must identify each system used in the organization. These systems may include operations, accounting, communications, marketing, and so on. If you have an IT department, they can help you take a complete inventory of each system. It may be helpful to note whether the system is hosted on premises or cloud-based and when it was last updated.

Step 2: Define the Purpose and Use

This is a critical step. By defining the purpose and use of each software system noted in step 1, you’re thinking through the who, how, and why of software use. It is helpful to set up a spreadsheet with a column for each software that you’ve identified and then, defining the purpose and use of the software under it.

For example, you may have basic business accounting software that you use throughout your organization. List the name of the software, then include who uses it—accounting, finance, marketing, etc. Next, write down the various functions it provides such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, invoicing, check ledger, credit card reconciliation, bank reconciliation, and so on.

Step 3: Understand the Strategic Plan

In step three, you’ll add details to your software inventory about where the software fits into your organization’s overall plan. Accounting software supports all areas of the organization, providing the financial backbone from which all business can be transacted. But what about other software you use? Everything from the office productivity package that enables you to send emails and write proposals to the special software you graphics team uses to edit images should be used in some strategic way to fulfill your organization’s mission. Now is the time to document this information.

Fitting the Puzzle Pieces Together

After the inventory is complete, it’s time to fit the puzzle pieces together. Once you have everything down on paper, you may notice gaps among the software systems you are using. Perhaps you have many legacy systems that have aged and are no longer supported by the manufacturers, but you’re not sure what you need to replace them. Or, some of the software systems you’re using don’t interface with other systems, which causes bottlenecks, redundant data, and misinformation.

Note all of these on a “wish list.” Problems aren’t just roadblocks, but rather opportunities. As you complete your systems inventory, you’ll find some gaps that require special assistance to fill. That’s where working with Welter Consulting can help. Vicki Welter offers a free consultation that includes a systems review. You can schedule it by contacting her at vicki@welter-consulting.com

The right software can automate manual processes, improve efficiency, and help every department work better together. A systems review is an important step in an organization’s overall digital transformation.

Welter Consulting

Welter Consulting bridges people and technology together for effective solutions for nonprofit organizations. We offer software and services that can help you with your accounting needs. Please contact us for more information.

Feb 15
0

Getting Started with Digital Transformation

By | Technology | No Comments
person on tablet with overlay meant to show digital transformation

Digital transformation is the current industry-wide buzzword. But what does it mean? It means adopting and utilizing technology to improve an organization’s ability to support its goals and mission. Digital transformation impacts many areas of an organization beyond the obvious IT department. This technology can liberate the accounting department from time-consuming data entry. Instead, they can utilize their time to function as real accounting professionals, analyzing the data to shape and share their organization’s story.

Why Focus on Digital Transformation?

It is a common misconception to dismiss digital transformation as an unnecessary expense, just more software. Digital transformation moves beyond the mere utilization of software. It will usher in organization-wide change towards spending more time on data analysis and interpretation and less time on data gathering.

There are many reasons why finance leaders should be at the forefront of the move towards digital transformation. These include:

  • Finance leaders shape an organization’s overall story based on the data they interpret. Spending less time gathering and entering data and more time shaping the overall story equates to better support for the mission and vision of an organization.
  • Technology remains the best way to protect and secure data. It makes sense that the financial leaders in a company should not only be involved, but lead this effort.
  • Leaders define and drive change in an organization—financial leaders can define and drive digital transformation just as well, if not better in some cases, that the IT department leaders.

With the right technology support and the emphasis on how such technology transforms processes and outcomes in an organization, financial leaders will be in a better position to influence others.

Automation Is the Key to the Digital Transformation Journey

The right technology supports and facilitates digital transformation by automating mundane tasks. The best solutions make it so easy to automate routine tasks that organizations can immediately see the value. Automation frees time so that the finance team can strategize, forecast, plan and budget—all tasks critical to the success of an organization.

So, what can automation do for your finance team? Automation can:

  • Speed up monthly and year-end closing
  • Enhance and speed up the process of account reconciliation
  • Share information with people in other departments to help them make timely decisions
  • Reduce operating costs
  • Improve accuracy for transaction-based accounting processes
  • Disseminate critical information to managers and department leaders
  • Eliminate redundancy
  • Reduce manual data entry mistakes

What’s Stopping You from Accounting Automation?

As you review the list of benefits, embracing accounting automation may seem like an automatic yes. But organizations find there are several barriers that stop them from implementing accounting automation technologies.

Several reasons may be behind this reluctance to fully embrace automation.

  • A misunderstanding about the importance and need to prioritize technology and digital transformation
  • Not enough time to understand and embrace solutions—we can get so stuck in our daily activities that we lose sight of the big picture ideas that can shape and change our organizations
  • Feeling like it’s not the CFO’s job, i.e., that you might not know enough about technology to lead the digital transformation efforts
  • Resource limitations, including lack of budget and people to work on the project
  • Departmental silos—departments may not understand the positive impact that accounting automation can have on the entire organization
  • The sense that accounting is part of overhead, that it is not a department that can influence the overall course of a nonprofit’s mission or vision

One way to move beyond these perceived limitations is to assess how much time your department spends gathering information and entering it into the system versus actual analysis and interpretation. Sharing this figure as a percent or as hours with your leadership team or board, and then demonstrating the value that can be achieved by automation may convince them that supporting such an initiative is in the organization’s best interests.

Digital transformation goes well beyond the adoption of new software and systems. Yes, the right nonprofit accounting system is important. But, so is the mindset and the commitment of the team behind the transformative efforts. The CFO of the future is one who will lead their organization’s digital transformation.

Welter Consulting

Welter Consulting bridges people and technology together for effective solutions for nonprofit organizations. We offer software and services that can help you with your accounting needs. Please contact us for more information.

Jan 13
0

How to Find and Clean Dirty Data

By | Data, Technology | No Comments
broom sweeping data

If dirty data sounds like something you want to get rid of, and fast, it is. What is dirty data? It is corrupted, incomplete, or inaccurate data that is clogging up your accounting system and making it difficult to produce accurate reports. Here, we share tips for finding and cleaning such data from your systems.

A Primer on Dirty Data

One question you may ask is, “How does dirty data get into our system in the first place?”

Several factors contribute to dirty data in a system. The first is obvious: human error. Individuals entering customer information may inadvertently create duplicates by misspelling a company or customer name or using an acronym instead of spelling out a word. Other factors that can cause poor data quality include lack of internal controls, merging systems together, and inadequate processes to manage data.

Steps to Identify and Correct Data Issues

CPAs and accountants who suspect that data quality issues are contributing to poor decision making should take steps to uncover and rectify dirty data. The following process can help identify problematic data.

  1. Understand and map the business process that creates the data: Data is captured as part of a business process or workflow. For example, an accounts payable process starts with the order of goods or services, receipt of an invoice from a vendor, and payment to the vendor. By mapping the process, you can then identify where data enters the system and points to review to ensure accuracy. For example, controls need to be in place to ensure that invoice amounts match the contract amounts, and that the final payment matches the approved invoice.
  2. Analyze data sources: How is data input into the system? Is it manually entered or automatically entered? Manual data entry creates more potential for mistakes, so these should be your first areas of inquiry.
  3. Identify acceptable data elements: Another important step is to identify what are considered the acceptable data elements or data fields. By making these consistent, you’ll ensure consistent data entry.
  4. Review existing data sets and tables: Although this step is time-consuming, it is important to manually open existing data sets and data tables and review them. You may wish to break this step into smaller parts or tackle it one hour per day for large datasets. This gives your mind a break between review sessions to ensure you see things with a fresh eye.
  5. Note what data is problematic or missing: After reviewing the data, take notes on which elements are missing or incomplete. These should be fixed as soon as possible.
  6. Document the database requirements: Create a data dictionary, which defines what information goes into each field. Document the requirements for data entry as well. This ensures consistency in future when others enter information into the system.
  7. Identify exceptions: As with every rule-based system, there will be exceptions to the rules. Identify these exceptions and document them as well to provide guidelines for what is an acceptable deviation from the norm.
  8. Clean the database: Fix any errors and remove duplicates after reviewing the entire database.

Hint: There are companies that can help you clean up big databases, especially those involving names and addresses. These companies can conduct what is called a “merge/purge/suppression” by comparing datasets and identifying for manual review any potential duplicates. Then duplicates can be merged, deleted (purged), or suppressed (hidden) depending on your needs. While this may not be an appropriate step for confidential financial information, for customer databases it can be an enormous time saver.

Garbage In, Garbage Out!

Failing to clean dirty data could result in poor decision-making (garbage in, garbage out) from reporting on bad data Taking the necessary steps now to have clean data in your system will be worth the short-term costs and resources required for this effort. Contact us for more information on this topic, help with your data clean-up project, best practices on data entry and shared data between multiple systems including automation, reporting and compliance.

Welter Consulting

Welter Consulting bridges people and technology together for effective solutions for nonprofit organizations. We offer software and services that can help you with your accounting needs. Please contact us for more information.

Aug 30
0

Time Management Tips: Ditch the Digital Distractions

By | Cloud, Corporate Culture, Technology | No Comments

According to CNBC, the average American worker spends 5 hours a day managing email: reading, responding, sorting, deleting messages. That breaks down into approximately 3-4 hours checking business-related email and one hour managing personal email. Add to that tally the daily distraction from social media, instant messengers, text messages and telephone calls, and accountants may find little work accomplished at the end of their workday—except a clean, organized in-box.

With so many messages flooding our screens each day, is there a better way to manage the typical digital distractions inherent in the modern work world? The following tips may be useful to help you manage the daily electronic communications flow that threatens to engulf your day.

5 Tips to Manage Digital Distractions

  1. Turn off notifications

The first step to manage distractions is to minimize them. This includes turning off the sounds and on-screen notifications that often accompany many instant messenger programs. Most of us do not need to be notified of every single message arriving in our inbox, nor do we need notifications for instant messages.

Turning off notifications varies according to your device. This article provides basic guidelines to disable notifications on most operating systems.  

  1. Set aside blocks of time for specific purposes

One way to handle email more efficiently is to set aside blocks of time specifically for responding to emails. Keep your email program closed until it is time to log on. This helps you avoid the temptation to check email repeatedly during the day. Let colleagues know that if something is urgent, they should phone you instead of emailing you.

  1. Utilize email filters

Email filters go beyond the typical spam filters which sort out unwanted email from business emails. Again, depending on your email system, you may be able to establish rules that presort email into categories you determine. You may be able to organize your daily emails more efficiently by project, type of communication, or urgency of task, depending on the rules you set up in the system itself. Speak with your company’s IT person to learn more or search online for tips establishing and using email filters for common email managers such as Gmail and Outlook.

  1. Adopt calendar apps

Are half of your emails requests for meetings? Many people find that most of their emails are indeed meeting requests or requests for blocks of time with which to meet others. Instead of responding to dozens of requests a day, your company can adopt calendar apps or shared calendars.

Calendar apps such as Calendly enable clients to request call times without viewing your calendar. The app synchronizes with your chosen digital calendar and displays only blocks of time available for meetings. The other party can request and secure a time without having to email you in advance. Other software such as Microsoft 365’s Teams enables users to view one another’s calendars without seeing engagement details and requesting meeting time.

  1. Establish communication preferences and timelines

Alert colleagues to your communication preferences. Limit the number of instant messenger apps your company uses and establish preferred communication channels and methods for your team. Lastly, establish clear expectations around response timelines. For example, let clients and colleagues know that emails are answered within one business day. This way, people know that if they require an instant response, they should pick up the phone and call you.

Cloud Software Helps Improve Communication

Whether you’re struggling with too many emails and not enough time or instant messenger overload, one thing that helps cut down the endless barrage of digital communications is cloud-based technology. Sharing financial data over the cloud, as well as collaborating on documents in the cloud, improves communication and cuts down on emailing documents back and forth.

With a few changes to your routine and habits and support from the right software, you’ll be able to better manage your digital communications and stop the feeling of being overwhelmed.

About Welter Consulting

Welter Consulting bridges people and technology together for effective solutions for nonprofit organizations. We offer software and services that can help you with your accounting needs. Please contact Welter Consulting at 206-605-3113 for more information.