First Look Friday: Accounting Seed (Part 1)

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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. We also ask you how you would like to see our coverage of such products focused in the future.

In order to provide you with your number one 'feature type' request of a comparison of similar products, we feel that we must first give you sufficient background information about products that our summaries, feature sets and pros/cons contained within our comparison articles have meaningful references.  This article is one such 'background feature' intended to prepare the way for this product's inclusion in our next round of the Mid-Market App Comparison series.

Accounting Seed software is native to Salesforce, this means that it can connect with Salesforce in several ways, like via Sales Cloud (as shown below), if you are already a Salesforce customer, or if you are considering Salesforce for your future growth.  And because Accounting Seed is built around the Salesforce IT architecture you have their high-level data security built-in, giving you a secure cloud-based accounting system which is one of the greatest defenses you can have against intruders.

Of course, Accounting Seed runs just fine with or without Salesforce attached to it. I just thought you should know that the seamless connectivity to Salesforce has not only benefited countless Accounting Seed customers and provided solutions to make their businesses run more successfully, but it's one of the major factors why many people consider Accounting Seed as their next accounting platform.

Accounting Seed was designed with ‘business in mind’, not just the bean-counting needs of ‘stuffy accountants’. Still, that’s not to say that Accounting Seed doesn’t do accounting, it just happens that it was designed to do the accounting as one part of the entire business process. In Accounting Seed the accounting supports the business mission rather than the business mission supporting the accounting, even though the company was founded by a CPA. 

Accounting Seed’s goals are to make their customers' businesses more proactive, more accurate, and more strategic in their decisions so they can spend more time moving their business forward. To do this they want to give users the tools they can really use like automated general ledger, accounts payable and accounts receivable, orders and inventory, enhanced financial dashboards, and real-time reporting.

In our mini-series, I will do my best to give you a cursory overview of these tools so you can judge for yourself whether this is a product you should examine more closely.  After all, this is, just a 'First Look,' not an in-depth product review.

General Ledger

In this section, we will look at the advanced general ledger, multi-entity (companies), multi-currency, tax reporting, budgeting, and financial reporting.

Advanced General Ledger

Accounting Seed’s general ledger is at the center of their information resources providing extensive accessibility, scalability, and flexibility that can accommodate essentially any business type and size with almost any configuration and set-up. Users have free range over the configuration of the chart-of-accounts concerning numbering, naming, formatting, and groupings.

One of the things I appreciated was the extent of the documentation I found for Accounting Seed. They have a presentation they call their GL Account System Business Rules which is a Google Slides presentation that takes you through every possible transaction type and all of the details associated with those, one of which is shown below. This is just one of four slides depicting how the GL records a Journal Entry/Journal Entry Lines for a given transaction.

Multi-entity

Accounting Seed is designed to manage multiple entities within a single database as long as the companies have the same fiscal year-end and the same underlying Chart of Accounts. This allows you to streamline your business processes and easily consolidate financial reporting.  As part of this functionality, Accounting Seed’s Due to/Due from accounting feature allows users to track funds owed between companies. Using this feature Billing and Payable transactions are created from one company to another.

Multi-currency

Accounting Seed’s foreign currency functionality enables users to bill customers and receives payments in any currency. Foreign vendor invoices can be paid and managed no matter what currency is being exchanged. Accounting Seed automatically records gains or losses based on fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates following standard accounting practices.

Tax Management

Accounting Seed offers various tax management options for businesses when it comes to tax compliance and payment.  Whether your business has Sales Tax to manage or Value Added Tax to track, Accounting Seed has options for you.

Users can choose to make use of the Accounting Seed Native Sales Tax functionality that calculates tax on Billings, Payables, and Opportunities. Features include calculation, reporting, and payment. With this function, users are responsible for their own sales tax set-up, maintenance, and administration.

Users also have the option of Avalara’s AvaTax engine to automatically calculate tax based on the most current tax rules and legislation. You can use AvaTax to estimate sales tax on opportunities and calculate sales tax on billing invoices. Tax reports and payment can then be filed directly through Avalara.

For businesses where Value Added Tax applies Accounting Seed has compliance options available including Avalara’s VAT reporting, as well as the MTD initiative for HMRC impacted customers. Contact Accounting Seed for more details.

Budgeting

Budgets are a planned estimate of costs or revenues over a specified period which are used to compare against actual results. Users can set up as many Budget ledgers as they desire. Accounting Seed budgets are stored in the Financial Cube object and can be used by the Accounting Seed Financial Reporter as well as in Salesforce reports.

Financial Reporting

Accounting Seed provides the following list of standard pre-configured Financial Reports. Each report can be filtered to run on any Ledger, Accounting Periods, and GL Variables. They are:

  • Profit & Loss
  • Profit & Loss Versus Budget
  • Balance Sheet
  • Trial Balance
  • Cash Flow Statement
  • Ledger Inquiry

Custom financial reports/statements can be created with a users’ rows and columns. Below is a list highlighting some of the advanced features of custom financial reports:

  • Formatting for Rows and column headers
  • Budget versus actual reporting
  • The ability to report on multiple accounting periods
  • The ability to offset columns from the accounting period selected.
  • Column calculations for amounts or percentages
  • Row calculations for amounts or percentages

To provide another tool to give Accounting Seed users the ability to create robust, customizable financial reporting, Accounting Seed an integration with Xappex, a leader in providing connected solutions with Salesforce.com has been developed. The Xappex G-Connector Add On for Google Sheets allows Accounting Seed users the ability to create dynamic financial reports in Google Sheets that can be customized and updated easily.

Banking

In this section, we will look at Bank Direct Connect and Bank Reconciliation, Integration with Stripe, and ACH Debits and Credits.

Financial Institution Connectivity and Reconciliation

Accounting Seed’s Bank Direct Connect functionality allows users to connect to more than 14,500 banks and credit card companies and to batch import/match transactions. The system supports automated matching of ledger transactions to bank feeds which means that users will quickly clear transactions during reconciliation with minimal data entry. And audit trail functions track changes throughout the reconciliation process to ensure accurate, up-to-date information.

Integration to Stripe

Accounting Seed offers integration to Stripe for payment processing. Simply connect your existing Stripe account, or you can create a new account at stripe.com. 

Stripe integration supports multi-currency credit-card transactions if multi-currency support is enabled within Accounting Seed; however, ACH transaction processing is limited to U.S. Dollars.

ACH Solution via Checkbook.io

With Checkbook.io and Accounting Seed, digital checks can be sent instantly in just a few simple clicks. Checkbook.io gives you a full ACH solution as well as allows you to send all your checks digitally using email for instant delivery.

The recipient/vendor can either print the check or deposit it online, and the settlement can happen either over ACH or Check21 rails using check images. This is a complete end-to-end ACH solution, including return processing and notification. 

This wraps up Part 1 of our look at Accounting Seed, but we will return with Part 2 of this mini-series before you know it. If in the meantime you simply can't wait for the rest of our review then you should head over to their website for more details or a demo.

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.