How Accounting Software can Ensure Compliance and Accuracy
See how accounting software can automate and streamline the financial year-end reporting process.
Producing statutory accounts can be a time-consuming and labour-intensive process, causing significant stress for accountants.
With guidelines and legislations changing so frequently due to economic uncertainty, caused by both Brexit and the pandemic, accountants need to ensure that their accounts production processes run seamlessly, ensuring compliance without compromising on accuracy.
Financial software is a great way for accountants to alleviate some of the strain and pressures they face from the myriad of accounting structures and regulations, but what other benefits can accounting software offer your firm?
Automate the tagging and submission process
For accountants who use Excel or Word to prepare their financial statements, the production, tagging and submission of their final accounts is often time consuming, with hours spent checking and inserting the correct tags to ensure all is correct before submission.
Of course, the tagging process is something that gets easier the more it’s done, but, in an environment where time is of the utmost importance, manually managing the tagging and submission process is far too inefficient.
To alleviate the time pressures, many accountants outsource the tagging of financial accounts to specialist providers, so they can focus on other activities. It certainly expedites the process, but there are more cost-effective solutions that accountants can utilise to streamline the tagging of financial accounts and ensure accounting compliance.
Automated solutions, such as Caseware’s AccountsAdvanced software, can simplify and speed up the process. Accountants can automate the XBRL tagging process, produce compliant financial statements across a wide range of entity types, access powerful analysis tools and submit a multitude of accounts to HMRC or Companies House direct from the software.
Building statements is made quick and easy, as guidelines are readily available and on topics including how to populate key information – such as Director’s names, registered addresses and company numbers.
These solutions can work alongside a document manager, allowing the user to add Excel/Word documents, it may contain a breakdown of a particular figure within the accounts, and automate lead schedules.
Keep track of complex regulation updates
When looking for an accounting software provider, businesses and accountants alike must ensure that the provider’s software can handle complex account structures and covers your entity type, such as pensions, charities and academies.
A good accounting software provider will offer a wide range of templates that are regularly updated to remain compliant with the latest accounting standards.
Our software provides iXBRL solutions for UK and Irish FRS 101, 102 and 105, plus UK charities using the FRS 102 standard, and regularly reviews its templates to ensure compliance. To take a look at our Statutory Accounts solution, click here.
Consistent accuracy across your business or practice
Reporting accuracy across the business or practice is key – as inconsistent or incorrect tagging can slow down the submission process. For businesses and practices that submit certain financial accounts regularly, it’s important to have a solution that automatically records tags year on year so retagging the following year is no longer required.
A good accounting software provider will increase efficiency and support accountants by retaining previously used tags on financial statements so businesses and practices only need to tag any changed or additional content on their financial statements.
Another efficiency-boosting feature of an iXBRL tagging solution is to utilise a ‘traffic light’ system for all of the accounts. For example, if data is tagged to its standard iXBRL tag, it’s green, if it’s missing a standard, it’s red. This drastically enhances the ability to review financial statements and accounts and identify problems with the tagging.
While accounting accuracy and compliance is key for good financial reporting, it shouldn’t be at the expense of manual and time-consuming checking and matching processes. Needless to say that accounting software can take the strain of financial year-end reporting and streamline the process for businesses, saving time and money.
