Digitalization has changed the face of the accounting industry. It has offered more flexibility and mobility to the tasks, which in turn has increased the productivity of accounting professionals.
The modern accountant requires skill-sets like emerging technologies awareness, along with professional skepticism, judgment, and critical thinking skills. Accounting technology has always played a part in making the accountant’s job just a little easier. As our knowledge of technology increased so has the accountant’s ability to analyze statistical values. Technology advancements have enhanced the accountant’s ability to interpret data efficiently and effectively.
Mobile accounting has become the norm and is replacing the traditional form of accounting. Considering the growing number of small business owners, it’s easier to conduct transactions without stepping into an office. To demonstrate the above, let us share an illustration how one of the technology transformation tool called mobile accounting can transform various tedious and time taking activities of an organization into an effective and efficient process.
Assuming that the accounting data of an organization is in the head office, which is accessible only to limited accounting team members situated at the head office. Due to this model, the operations and accounting team were facing many difficulties and were performing various tasks in their day-to-day activities, which can be easily avoided using mobile accounting, like preparing manual POs/GRN/Delivery Challans, lot of time wasted in coordination between accounting team and other teams, delays in customer collections, delays in providing MIS reports etc.
To resolve the above difficulties, a team of transformation experts suggested revamp of their existing processes by implementing mobile accounting. The same was implemented by installing a simple user-friendly application on the mobile phones of all the respective team members including managing director, finance controller, sales team, procurement team, warehousing team & HR team. After installing the application on mobile phones various teams was able to perform following activities using technology, which were otherwise performed manually:
- Sales team is sending sales orders to customers directly from mobile phones.
- Procurement team is sending purchase orders to vendors from mobile phones.
- Warehouse team are able to generate GRN, delivery challan etc. on mobile phones.
- Sales team is sending auto reminders to customers without any manual interfere
- Employee expense reimbursements are claimed and processed at the fingertips on mobile phones
- Management and various other teams can keep live track of inventory on the mobile phone
- HR team and employees were able to view data like Pay slips, employee profile, Salary registers etc. on the mobile phones.
- Management can track live business performance on their finger tips
While the use of mobile accounting made the work of various operations team’s easy, simultaneously in the back end it impliedly reduced the burden of accountant to the great extent as below:
- All the teams were using the application from remote places and the data keeps getting synchronized to the accounting software on live basis using the internet
- Now the accountant does not have to send separate MIS reports to the senior management as they could see the business performance on their mobile phones
- As the PO/GRN/SO were prepared by the operations team, the accountant could simply give reference to those documents in accounting software and generate sales invoices and post purchase entries by simply accepting the auto populated details fetched from PO/GRN/SO
- Using the access rights functions, the data could be used in controlled manner
- Now the accountant does not have to spend time in sending reminders and coordinating with the customer/vendor as auto follow-ups were sent from the mobile application
- Reduction in coordination time between accounting team and various other teams as all the operations related information is available on the accounting software.
Mobile applications are shaping the future of the accounting profession and are a valuable tool for accounting firms. They have a direct impact on the productivity of the enterprise, as it’s now easier to get more work done accurately in a shorter amount of time.
At HSCo we embrace the rapid advances in accounting technology to remain technologically updated in the accounting industry. This includes staying up-to-date with technological trends, optimizing and adapting current accounting software to meet the needs of the time, and being open to accepting and learning advancing technologies.
As it is apparent from the above illustration that now the time has come wherein the accounting and operating functions are required to be reviewed thoroughly for the need of transformation to implement a seamless and smooth function using technology which will help increase the efficiency of various functions as well as optimize costs to a greater extent.
