First Look Friday: Accounting Seed (Part 2)

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Insightful Accountant has been expanding our coverage of accounting mid-market products, and part of that expansion involved a reader survey in which we asked you to rank various products and tell us those in which you had the greatest interest. To provide you sufficient background information about products that our summaries, feature sets, and pros/cons contained within our comparison articles have meaningful references we are covering various mid-market accounting products that we have previously only summarized.  This article is Part 2 of one such 'background feature' intended to prepare the way for our 2nd round of the Mid-Market App Comparison series. 

As we told you in Part 1, Accounting Seed was designed with ‘business in mind’, not just the bean-counting needs of ‘stuffy accountants’, and their accounting supports the business mission rather than the business mission supporting the accounting. So, while we focused mainly on aspects of Accounting Seed that might be considered the ‘accounting’ side of things in Part 1, now we want to start looking at some more of those features that truly support the ‘business mission’.

Customers, Accounts Receivable, and More

I want to step back and cover a little more about the fact that Accounting Seed’s Salesforce IT architecture and unique ability to so closely integrate with Salesforce in so many ways, for example, Sales Cloud Customers, Projects, Orders, Inventory and Accounts Receivable gives you a streamlined way to process your opportunities and manage the related transactions. But the choice is yours, you don’t have to use Accounting Seed with Salesforce, the capabilities Accounting Seed stand on their own.

But sometimes a customer is more than just a customer and that’s where Accounting Seed’s ability to track customer engagements, projects, and events is a plus for your organization. You can easily track and manage the lifecycle of any project or event from start to finish and tie every cost back to source budgets.

Project accounting lets you record every billing, cost, and time record then displays the financials in both report and dashboard formats to keep you on track and on-budget. Every Accounting Seed feature and function is integrated with project accounting capabilities so that nothing is lost.

Whether you need the seamless data flow between Salesforce and your financials, or you need the raw functionality of Accounting Seed to stand alone, it’s simple to transition from a selling opportunity straight to a new project, an invoice, or a recurring billing plan. Easy to configure and completely customizable billing and payment options are available with Accounting Seed. The Billing ‘workflows’ below show the variables available.

Invoicing Customers

For example, a Billing, or Customer’s Invoice, can be created directly from a Quote (in Accounting Seed) or a Salesforce Opportunity or Work Order (when integrated), as well as an Accounting Seed Project, Timecards, Expense Reports, or the Billings tab. Accounting Seed offers direct-integration with Avalara’s AvaTax for the management of sales taxes so tax rates and boundaries are always accurate directly on your transaction as well as in your reporting.

Accounting Seed manages all of your accounts receivable to ensure your cash flow remains consistent and timely. You can view your A/R data on dashboards and reports from any date or time-period or any aspect of your business. And you won’t be spending excess time on collections either, automation of recurring billing with custom-templated reminders and tracking of all customer activity keeps the entire process visible over the life-cycle of outstanding invoices.

Recurring Invoices

Speaking of ‘recurring bills’, with Accounting Seed, subscription and contract billing won’t be a problem for your company’s revenue model. No longer will you struggle with repetitive manual calculations in Excel trying to compute the proper amount of an invoice, with built-in tiered payments and usage-based billing, Accounting Seed can generate the proper customer invoices on a monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, or annual basis.

Stripe Integrated Payment Processing

Accounting Seed comes pre-configured for Stripe, a leading payment processing gateway. Stripe processing is built into the core of Accounting Seed so that everything from customer payments to recurring bills to customer payments can be processed effortlessly without ever having to leave the Accounting Seed interface to process your customer’s credit card.

Revenue Recognition

And be confident knowing that Accounting Seed’s revenue recording feature lets you easily recognize revenue according to your unique requirements whether you follow GAAP or IFRS when it comes to deferred revenues.

Orders, Inventory, and More

It would seem that Customers and A/R would go hand-in-hand with ‘orders’, and in a lot of ways that is true, but within Accounting Seed the term ‘orders’ is short for Sales Orders and they are the document used to track demand for products and services you sell. 

Sales Orders

Users can create Sales Orders from the Sales Order tab, or from an Opportunity or Work Order (when integrated with Salesforce).  From an Opportunity or Work Order simply click ‘Create Sales Order’ to start the process, all the related information will flow from the prior record to the new Sales Order including any Products or Services, Quantities, and Projects.

It’s a very streamlined process that carries through into the management of these orders because once the sales order has been made, just click a button to initiate the fulfillment process and any necessary purchase orders are created. This also allocates inventory to reserve products for the customer’s order(s), records the packing and shipping details, and initiates inventory acquisitions when quantities are insufficient to meet the demand to maintain the minimum stock requirements.

But the relationship between these orders and inventory doesn’t end here.

Inventory

Accounting Seed’s inventory features allow you to customize your inventory and warehouse requirements with multi-location, multi-warehouse, serialized and non-serialized products, product kitting, and manufacture of finished goods from raw materials. And Accounting Seed gives you the choice of either Average Cost or Standard Cost for your inventory valuation.  The following graphic shows you the relationship of various inventory transactions and how they impact the Accounting Seed general ledger.

One inventory feature Accounting Seed offers is kitting. Kits are a simply way to group products for purposes of selling them as a single unit in an opportunity or billing. A product can be sold by itself or bundled together in a kit. 

Accounting Seed also offers Manufactured Products which are inventoried products that must be built from other inventoried products. Building Manufactured Products is a separate process that doesn't require a Sales Order to having been issued; in fact, the 'Build' button is found solely on the Manufactured Product record. Depending on the complexity of the manufactured product, the build can be complex in the number of steps it may take (and that’s clearly outside the scope of this discussion), but a notification is displayed when the build of the final finished good is completed as shown in the illustration below.

Purchasing and Accounts Payable

Whether your purchasing requirements are straightforward or complex, you can manage your needs with Accounting Seed with ease. You are also able to easily analyze stock levels, purchase inventory for stock, or issue purchase orders for sales order fulfillment or manufacturing requirements.

Purchase Orders

Accounting Seed supports two types of purchase orders: Standard POs which are traditional POs used to order and receive goods at one of the company’s inventory locations and Drop-ship POs used to fulfill an order from a supplier where the order is being shipped directly to the customer or the customer’s designated shipping address.

Accounting Seed allows users to receive against a Purchase Order when products arrive at the company warehouse so the products being purchased are added to inventory at the proper location and that any changes in the receiving quantity or cost can be adjusted against the order for purposes of fulfillment if the PO is being used with a Sales Order.

Accounts Payable

Now that you have purchased and received inventory, or other goods and services, you have got payables to manage. Once again, let’s take a look at the workflows Accounting Seed provides, this time for Accounts Payable (below).

A Payable is a vendor invoice and can be created from the Payables Tab or a Purchase Order, a Recurring Payable, or an Expense Report. Pretty soon the Payable is ready to be disbursed, at the click of a button, you can print checks in batch from the cloud with any laser printer, or you can make ACH payments. Accounting Seed has even provided for situations where an advance payment was required to be made to the supplier before receiving the supplier’s invoice.

My Wrap Up

Accounting Seed is tailored to meet the needs of each company they work with no matter what size, or which industry vertical they serve. The company doesn’t offer published pricing, and that’s OK with me because as most of you know I don’t like to write about price anyway. But they do profess to work with each of their potential clients to design a price offer that will fit the customer’s requirements.

As I have said several times in this 2-part mini-series, if you are already a Salesforce user, and you are considering a change in your accounting technology, then this is one product you should definitely take time to review and consider. But even if you are not a Salesforce user, this is still a complete product that has features and functions that will support the vast majority of businesses. While I may have given you a ‘first look’, that’s all this was, there is way more about this comprehensive product than I can cover in these 2 articles.

You can sign-up for an Accounting Seed Demo here, or head over to the Accounting Seed Website for more information.

Disclosures:

All illustrations in this article have been 'adapted' by Insightful Accountant from source graphical content found on the Accounting Seed website for informational and educational purposes only.

First Look Friday articles are editorial features, they are NOT sponsored content. While they may (or may not) contain references or 'inserts' that refer to sponsored content, sponsored webinars, or the vendors website(s), the actual feature is intended as an informational resource for our readers, not sponsored product promotion.