First Look Friday: AccountingSuite™ (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, AccountingSuite™ is a complete double-entry accounting system providing General Ledger, Journal Entries and hierarchical Chart of Accounts that can be easily customized.

What's in it for Accountant's & Bookkeepers?

While we looked at a lot of the day-to-day features of AccountingSuite™ in our prior article, let’s look at some of the ‘accounting specific’ features that will appeal to the bookkeepers and accountants who may use this product in conjunction with their business clients.

By connecting AccountingSuite™ to your bank and credit card accounts your transactions will flow automatically into your account records.

AccountingSuite™ connects users to thousands of banks and credit card companies to eliminate time-consuming tasks of manually entering transactions. Transactions accepted via Cloud Banking appear with the cleared-box checked making the reconciliation process practically accomplished at the end of each bank statement period.

For purposes of receiving payments, AccountingSuite™ has an integration with Stripe for credit card processing right inside the application. On a Cash Receipt or a Cash Sale, clicking the Charge with Stripe button will process the charges listed on the document. For security reasons, the actual card number is not stored in AccountingSuite™, it's stored by Stripe.

AccountingSuite™ enables users to run businesses around the world with multi-currency capabilities. Financial Reports can easily reflect the applicable multi-currencies in use. Multi-currency reporting presently includes the Income Statement, Balance Sheet, A/P Aging, A/R Aging, and General Ledger reports.

Keeping track of Sales Taxes be a difficult, AccountingSuite™ offers two options for Sales Tax collection, tracking and payment. The first option is a built-in Sales Tax feature that incorporates Sales Tax Agencies, Sales Tax Rates and Sales Tax Payment functions. Under this option, the user must be aware of all sales tax laws impacting jurisdictional taxing and make necessary adjustments to keep the feature and settings accurate. The second option involves an integration with AvaTax, a Sales Tax solution which is fully maintained by Avalara on a subscription basis.

The AccountingSuite™ Budget tool allows users to forecast and allocate funds across accounts. Accrual-based budget reports reflect company performance with regard to revenues and expenditures in comparison to budgeted values.

The AccountingSuite™ Audit-log tracks changes to the all accounting data including which users are making changes along with the date and time of each change. Changes are tracked automatically, and the Audit-log cannot be turned-off or changed by anyone, including the administrator.

AccountingSuite™ lets the administrator set a closing-date for the company books to prevent changes to an accounting period on a ‘global feature’ basis. AccountingSuite™ also has an option to allow the administrator to close the books as they relate to some feature modules, but not others (for example, the administrator might wish to continue to receive against open purchase orders).

Who Needs to Know ? - Reports Give the Answer

A lot different people need to have answers from an accounting system. There are management people, and sales people, and purchasing people, and investors, and accountants, financial consultants, bankers and other lenders. Each of these share certain information needs in common, but they also have differences in the data they want to see.

AccountingSuite™ includes a large number of standard Reports. Complete financial statements, such as an Income Statement and Balance Sheet can be easily run from the Reports option on the home page.

Users can also access reports by module including: Accounting, Bank, Inventory, Projects/time-tracking, Purchases and Sales.

With the AccountingSuite™ Multi-entity Financial Reports feature, users can run Income Statements and Balance Sheet reports for more than one Accounting Suite 'company'. These reports will show a column for each company with an additional column representing the totals for all company columns on the report(s).

In addition to the reporting options offered by AccountingSuite™ there are also a variety of integration options. The integration with EazyBI provides powerful reporting, charting, and dashboard capabilities. It features easy-to-use drag-and-drop functionality that makes the analyzing and visualizing of the data form AccountingSuite™ readily available to almost any user without sophisticated query skills.

Similarly, AccountingSuite™ also offers integration with Zoho Reports which is a powerful online reporting and business intelligence service that also offers an intuitive drag-and-drop interface enabling in-depth analysis and easy reporting.

Both EazyBI and Zoho Reports are 3rd-party products that are NOT included with AccountingSuite™, but must be acquired separately.

Growing Beyond - Up-n-Away

Maybe COVID-19 has made us all realize that there is 'more than here'... and that's why so many businesses are turning to cloud accounting anyway, but the reality is they are also 'turning to cloud' for more than just their accounting... they are turning to cloud for their livelihood. Those businesses that did business in a store, or over the phone, or by sales personnel visiting another business are now using the internet more than ever for all their business, or at least a big part of it.  That's why if you are looking to migrate to a different 'accounting' you may want one that also has eCommerce functionality or integration built-in.

Using the AccountingSuite™ Cloud Commerce feature it's possible to connect your Sales Channel to your online store or eCommerce aggregator/shipping manager using ShipStation. Your business orders then will flow from your website and automatically be recorded as sales orders, shipments, invoices and cash receipts within your accounting data.

Wrapping Things Up

AccountingSuite™ offers a variety of plans designed to meet the needs of differing businesses and since I don't get into discussing pricing options I'm not going to start, but I will say some of them are very reasonable for the level of sophistication you get with this product. You also need to realize that several of the features I have discussed include 3rd-party products 'integrated' with AccountingSuite™ and each of those products would not be included in any price reflected in the marketing materials you would find at the main website, those products would be additional. Of course, a lot of 'cloud based' accounting systems rely on 3rd-party Apps to provide add-on capabilities over and above their base-line functionality.

All appearances are AccountingSuite™ has a very good program for new users including an available 'academy' of training, webinars on software topics and related material, a valuable on-line user guide, and qualified/accessible customer support.  They offer a Partner Program for Accountants & Bookkeepers that allows them to stay involved with their own clients who use the product, and in fact all versions of the the product (except 'write-up') include unlimited CPA/Bookkeeper 'seats' so that users can let their professionals have access to their company file(s) at NO extra cost.

If you would like to sign-up for a free trial of AccountingSuite™ you can do so here, or reach out to the company website for more information.