Cloud accountancy solutions such as Xero can make the job of managing a school’s finances far simpler, by giving you back more of your most precious commodity - time. This is one of the biggest advantages over alternative desktop software, and is largely thanks to improved automation and the ability to customise.
How to save hours through automation
The automation and artificial intelligence of cloud accounting software packages removes the need to manually process large numbers of transactions. This can have huge repercussions for the way your school operates, for example:
1. Purchase Invoices
The old way: Purchase invoices were left in someone’s intray, sometimes for a number of weeks, before being posted up into the accounts software. Posting them consisted of someone sitting in front of their computer and manually typing up the invoice.
The cloud way: Technological developments mean it is now possible for computer software to read invoices and automatically recognise suppliers, amounts, descriptions and dates as well as allocate them to the correct nominal code.
Whenever an invoice is received via email it is automatically added as a draft purchase invoice without anyone needing to type up the data. Any physical invoices received can either be scanned or even snapped using a mobile phone camera and they will be posted automatically to your accounts.
How much time is saved?: UHY recently helped a client process over 1,700 purchase invoices in ten hours and allocate payments against them. This would have taken many more days using the traditional processing approach.
2. Bank Reconciliations
The old way: Physical bank statements were posted up manually into the accounts software. Once this was completed the payments and receipts had to be manually matched to outstanding invoices to complete the reconciliation.
The cloud way: Bank statement data is automatically pulled into the software using a bank feed. This completely removes the need to post up the statements, and they are 100% accurate. The software is also smart enough to match outstanding invoices against bank payments and receipts, speeding up the reconciliation process further.
How much time is saved? On average one month’s bank reconciliation that would have taken eight hours is reduced to three hours, reducing input time by over 60%.
How to benefit from customised reports
Cloud accounting packages make it much easier to customise and tailor reports, allowing you and your finance team to get more out of them. This has several benefits, for example:
- reports can be tailored to meet the Education Funding Agency’s (EFA) reporting requirements, without the need to send data into a spreadsheet and spend more time inputting data;
- even if reporting requirements change year on year, updating reports in Xero is a straightforward and pain free process. This is due to the user friendly software - you will not need to learn any code, which is a common prerequisite for desktop alternatives; and
- Xero also offers powerful and accurate reporting of budget vs actuals, as well as being able to produce a separate chart of accounts for audit purposes, without the need to send any data to Excel and manually adjust.
Additional benefits
- Straightforward fund and GAG accounting;
- secure multi-user access;
- peace of mind that your data is backed up and secure at all times;
- regular automatic updates; and
- quick and easy correction of posting errors.
If you are an academy considering a move to cloud accounting, please contact Kay Flevill or Stuart Hurst for further information and a demo, or your local UHY expert.
