I See Everything: Fully Assured Bookkeeping With Accounting Solutions

The magic of real-time accounting

Don’t get us wrong, by transparency we don’t mean that every single soul on this world could see your company’s finances. Transparency in this sense means that online accounting solutions simply won’t let any changes you or any of your colleagues make in the system go unnoticed. This is assured by the simple fact that an accounting program auto-updates everything even if only a single data line is entered or modified. All you have to do is just take a quick look at your account’s dashboard to see that your bank transactions are auto-imported and reconciled, your incomes and expenses are duly categorized and your reports are ready to be sent to your accountant for verification.

Speaking of accountants, this is where the most important part comes in:

Audit 2.0: nothing remains hidden

All accounting solutions allow the admin to give a range of permissions to co-workers, accountants, auditors, advisors or any other stakeholders. Such an example includes the advisor role in Xero: anyone who possesses this special role will get exclusive access to special features, including cash coding (bulk reconciliation of imported bank statement lines), error fixing of past transaction lines, fixed asset management and even report templates. However, the most important feature is the assurance dashboard: with this tool advisors can monitor in real time user activities, the reconciled transactions, deleted statement lines, contacts with edited or identical bank account, and backdated invoices or bills. Since everything leaves a trail behind in all accounting solutions, we can consider the above feature a sort of audit 2.0: unlike regular audits, this method is beneficial for both auditors and clients in order to spot financial anomalies in time and apply the necessary modifications.

And if that’s not enough, accounting systems are capable of exporting all the necessary financial data to alternative sources. This usually happens via the integration of third party programs, some of which have even more advanced auditing features than the built-in version of the accounting solution. Another method is the use of good old Excel. This might seem strange at first considering that Excel is considered obsolete in modern accounting, but Digital First has a good and pretty clever explanation: if you extract data from the accounting solution to Excel, it will display hidden information like transaction IDs, which allows auditors to trace ledger transactions back to bank source transactions, creating highly detailed transaction risk profiles.