Author: Mark Byrd

Asked and Answered– 10 Questions every CFO Should Be Asking Their Controller

Asked And Answered– 10 Questions Every CFO Should Be Asking Their Controller

In the world of the CFO, there is one constant amid all the changes. The CFO must always be ready to lead and manage a successful finance team. In order to be successful, the CFO needs to collaborate closely with the Controller to define and implement financial strategies that can be supported through financial operations.

Learn the ten questions you should be asking your Controller to establish best practices and project and plan for the future growth of your organization.

  1. How many manual journal entries are we making during the close process?

Any excess amount of manual entries needlessly extend a closing period and can be an indicator of other problems.

  1. Have you reviewed compliance with local jurisdictions?

The Controller has a direct role in virtually all financial transactions that flow through the accounting structure, so they must know what risks the company is exposed to and ensure that risk exposure is minimized.

  1. How long does it take us to close the books. What is holding things up?

The efficiency, accuracy, and time to close is the best indicator of Controller efficiency. This is also one of the best ways to determine if your system is efficient and effective and if your Controller is efficient and effective in their role.

  1. Show me everything we are doing in Excel. Why are we using Excel?

Excel is a great invention, but It is also hard for groups of people to use it together. Unfortunately, it is also easy to make mistakes and often hard to find the errors. Excel is also very insecure. With security breaches happening all the time, you should be moving to a more secure solution. The best way to use Excel is to prototype new processes rapidly. Once a process is stable for three months, it’s time to move to a collaborative, automated, secure enterprise system and off of Excel.

  1. Do we have one integrated system for both our financial information and our operating metrics?

You have probably heard the saying, “ there are facts, and there are true facts.” If you have two or more reporting systems, you will spend unproductive time reconciling differences and untangling conflicting definitions. You need a single source of truth that you can count on every time.

  1. Why do we have so many reports?

It is not uncommon for financial departments to distribute hundreds of periodic reports. Many of the people who initially requested the reports move on and are no longer employed. Often the accounting team has no idea who, if anyone, is reading them or whether the reports are still valuable. Online reporting that staff can access in a self-serve manner quickly identifies which reports are used and which are no longer valuable or needed.

  1. Who has access to what functionality in the accounting system, how is this documented, and who approves changes?

A single administrator should control the system and make changes according to a documented approval process. If you do not have such a process, you need to prioritize upgrading your access process.

  1. What is the volume of transactions in our department, how many invoices are there, and how many vendor payments? 

This detailed information helps to plan staffing levels. It also demonstrates improved efficiency and quality over time.

  1. How many sales orders or invoices are canceled and rebilled, and what are the primary causes of such events?

If you see a large number of transactions or large dollar volume or both, it’s a clear sign you have a poorly designed system, and you need to fix it immediately.

  1. Where should we invest our next dollar in the finance department?

Prioritize the problem areas and focus your resources where they are most needed. Look at Staffing, training, automation, integration, and process redesign. Use the latest cloud technology tools such as Sage Intacct to simplify, standardize, centralize, and automate your processes.

These ten questions will give you a good idea of how effective, accurate, and efficient your accounting system and finance department is. It will help you identify problem areas, establish best practices, what is working well, alert you to potential security risks and financial risks and help you strategize for organizational growth. These questions are not frivolous. They are vital in leading and managing a successful finance team.

Contact Us

Improve Your Family Office Project Management Accounting

Improve Your Family Office Project Management Accounting

Project management and project accounting are complex, even for a simple project. Still, suppose your family office runs projects across multiple entities. In that case, Sage Intacct project management software can improve the accuracy of your records while streamlining your project management and project billing processes. Most importantly, you are very likely to see improved profit margins.

Let’s look at some of the key benefits of implementing project accounting and a full-featured project accounting software:

  • Provides up-to-date information on the project’s progress and profitability.
  • It helps educate project teams on how every factor can impact a project’s cost and profitability.
  • Provides your customer with accurate billing data and keeps tabs on project progress.
  • Provides important insights to project managers.
  • Allows management to identify issues with projects and make quick decisions to get back on track and reduce costs.
  • Real-time data and reporting help you gather valuable insights for making bids on future projects.
  • Improves resource management.
  • It assists you in determining the scope and pricing for similar projects by analyzing actual costs versus estimated costs.
  • Improves the overall financial management of your family office by integrating your project management accounting into the comprehensive financial accounting for a broad look across every aspect of your business.

Project accounting is a bit different from general accounting in that it is more specific and focused. The Project Accounting Software Sage Intacct offers is specifically designed to focus on financial transactions related to project management. This includes costs, revenue, and billing. You can assign financial tasks to specific projects. This makes it easy to track, measure, and report project progress and success.

With centralized reporting, you can see all aspects of your project in one place, including your time, expense, and financial and non-financial project accounting data.

Generally, you will follow the steps below to set up your project accounting.

  1. Set up a system for tracking tasks and associated costs.
  2. Create a project budget. Creating a budget can help you maximize a project’s profit margin. Your project budget should include estimates for costs, including labor, materials, and other expenses.
  3. Track the transactions, time, and resources used.

With a good project accounting foundation in place, you can begin to track costs. It’s important to emphasize how crucial accuracy is when inputting this data because it can skew the reporting. This is where AI automation helps with data accuracy.

Project accounting isn’t something you can set up once and forget. Regular check-ins and reviews on project progress ensure things are going as planned and allow your project team to identify any problems that need to be addressed. With real-time reporting, you can see whether the project costs and progression are aligned with the forecasted budget or if changes are required. Without an ongoing review of project accounting, you could find your company in financial trouble if the project starts to lose money.

The key takeaway is that project accounting and the right project accounting software, such as Sage Intacct, can help you reduce the risk of project failure by improving overall project management.

Contact Us

Multi-Location Restaurants and Franchises - The Best Cloud Accounting Solution

Multi-Location Restaurants And Franchises – The Best Cloud Accounting Solution

Many restaurant companies own and manage multiple brands, entities, and locations across multiple states. This can pose challenges when each location is running its own instance of QuickBooks and financials have to be consolidated at the end of the month using Excel. 

Management at the holding company level often waits weeks for the month-end close, and the process is slower when the Controller is slowed down by manual processes and procedures. 

CEOs and CFOs lack visibility into each location as well as across the entire business as a result. 

The challenge for these organizations is that managers only see the accounting data for the entities they manage, and feeding data into a single system can be complicated and challenging.

A cloud-based, AI intelligent accounting solution provides the real-time data you need to make smart business decisions. Additionally, it provides you with visibility across all your entities and locations allowing you to make strategic decisions rather than constantly looking in the rearview mirror. 

The ability to filter your data by franchise, source, and meal type will allow you to stay on top of prime costs so you can maximize profits. You can create custom filters to get granular data into your COGS. These filters will give you insight into how each food and beverage category is behaving compared to budget or a prior period. You can then begin to answer questions such as “Are menu items priced too low? Are our costs too high? Do we need to switch vendors?”

Instead of limiting you with a one-size-fits-all system, Sage Intacct provides an open API so you can choose from best-in-class systems that scale with you today and into the future. You can seamlessly integrate all of your restaurant systems into Sage Intacct for complete automation that can streamline your processes and workflows so that all sales data from each restaurant and entity flows directly into your accounting software, eliminating manual input and reducing errors. You can ditch the spreadsheets and recover the endless hours spent on data entry. 

With a shared chart of accounts, your firm can perform consolidations quickly. This allows you to view your financial and statistical information throughout the month. 

Accounts payable functionality allows you to create automated processes that save hundreds of hours by eliminating manual workflows. You can also set spending limits to ensure your costs stay within budget. 

With Sage Intacct, you have all the real-time financial data and statistical information you need to make quick, smart, data-driven decisions about your restaurants’ performance. You have access to over 150 standard reports in addition to being able to easily create your own custom reports to quickly obtain the insights you need to move your organization forward in the right direction. 

With a multi-dimensional general ledger, Sage Intacct enables restaurants to streamline their chart of accounts and get richer, deeper detailed information faster than ever before – all at the push of a button.

  • Consolidate entities in minutes instead of days
  • Automate inter-entity eliminations
  • Accelerate the close by up to 65%
  • Powerful report writer
  • Role-based dashboards
  • Multi-dimensional Information

Open API

Sage Intacct is the smart cloud accounting choice for multi-entity and multiple location restaurants. Why wait? Don’t lose any more time or money. Gain greater insight into your company’s performance and reap the benefits of real-time data to manage your company. 

We have your next CFO. 

Contact Us

 

  • 1
  • 2

© Trusted CFO Solutions.