Accounting Solutions
Align Your Accounting Function with Your Business Model.
Simplify your accounting function, reduce unnecessary work, improve financial reporting, and give management better information to run the business.
Accounting functions can be overwhelmed by growth and complexity. More customers, employees, transactions, entities, locations, systems, and reporting requirements mean more information to process, reconcile, organize, and explain.
Processes that once worked well often accumulate spreadsheets, manual steps, workarounds, and responsibilities that depend too heavily on individual employees. The accounting may still get done, but it requires increasing amounts of time and effort to get there.
The Cost of Complexity
The Month-End Close May Be Only Part of the Cost
Accounting inefficiency rarely appears as one large expense. It shows up as time spent gathering information, maintaining spreadsheets, re-entering data, correcting recurring problems, reconciling systems, and producing reports manually.
Just 20 unnecessary staff hours per week represents more than 1,000 hours of work each year. At a $60 loaded hourly cost, that is more than $60,000 annually before considering management time, delayed information, errors, rework, or missed opportunities.
And staff time is only part of the cost.
- Senior accounting people spend valuable time correcting routine issues instead of improving the function.
- Owners and executives are pulled into accounting questions and problems that should not require their involvement.
- Slow closes delay financial information and reduce its usefulness for management decisions.
- Manual processes create more opportunities for errors, inconsistencies, and rework.
- Important processes become dependent on one employee's knowledge and experience.
- Each new entity, location, customer, or reporting requirement can add more accounting work than it should.
What Good Looks Like
Accounting Should Make the Business Easier to Manage
A well-run accounting function should provide accurate financial information without requiring excessive effort to produce it. Routine processes should be repeatable, responsibilities should be clear, and management reporting should arrive while the information is still useful.
The accounting team should not have to rebuild critical reports every month, maintain unnecessary spreadsheets, or rely on one person's institutional knowledge to keep important processes working.
Management should have a clear understanding of cash flow, profitability, performance, meaningful variances, and the financial condition of the business without spending hours assembling or interpreting the information.
Done correctly, the benefits go well beyond producing more accurate financial statements.
- Faster and more reliable month-end close and reconciliations.
- Less accounting and management time spent administering routine processes.
- More timely and useful financial and management reporting.
- Better visibility into cash flow, profitability, margins, and performance.
- Fewer manual workarounds and less dependence on individual employees.
- An accounting function capable of supporting continued growth.
Make the Function Serve the Business
The Tools May Already Be There
QuickBooks may already be perfectly capable of supporting the accounting function. Excel may still be the right tool for certain analysis and reporting. And the people doing the work may already understand the business exceptionally well.
The objective is not necessarily to replace those things, hire a larger accounting department, or add another layer of technology.
The objective is to make the people, accounting systems, information, processes, controls, and technology work together in a way that serves the business.
Criterion Solutions
Make Accounting Simpler and More Useful
Criterion Solutions helps businesses improve accounting systems, processes, reporting, controls, technology, and financial operations to reduce unnecessary effort, improve financial visibility, and make the accounting function easier for your team to operate.
We can review your accounting systems and processes at no cost to you and identify practical opportunities to simplify the work, improve reporting, and build an accounting function that better supports the business you have today.