First Look Friday: AccountingSuite™ (Part 1)

by

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 (2nd) round of the Mid-Market App Comparison series.

AccountingSuite™ is cloud-based software providing accounting, inventory, order management, bank-reconciliation, project & time tracking and even eCommerce functionality. This mid-market product is powerful and flexible enough to support a wide-range of businesses during start-up and as they grow. The Cloud-based design also provides anywhere access to financial data for business owners, employees, or their accountants needing to approve business activities or make critical decisions.

Contact Management (they call it 'Companies')

Unlike a lot of accounting software, AccountingSuite™ lets you manage all your contacts in one place, both Customers and Vendors from their Companies' feature.

The Companies feature streamlines access both to your customers and vendors by providing one central place to work with either type of contact. You can check current balances, terms, invoices, orders, payments and receipts within the right pane for each company. You can also begin the process of creating new invoices, orders, payments or receipts with ease.

Sales (Cycle) Features

Manage all aspects of sales orders and customer service transactions with processes designed to shorten your “order-to-cash” across all aspects of your business. The AccountingSuite™ Sales functionality is designed to give businesses flexibility in the sales workflow (shown below). There is no specific way or requirement to use the workflow but there are certain steps you must follow in any one procedure.

A key feature of the AccountingSuite™ Sales functionality is something they call ‘Sales Pal’ which is designed to help Salespeople make informed decisions when working with customers. This bar (shown below) appears above the line items on Sales Quotes, Order Invoices and Cash Receives to provide details regarding each item such as (1) cost, (2) profit margin on this order, (3) item total profit on this order, (4) total profit margin on the order, (5) total profit on the order, and many more characteristics essential to filling the order. Clearly this can be of great benefit to sales personnel attempting to negotiate a sale with a customer.

Another interesting feature is the ‘status indicator’ for Sales Orders that give information visually without having to actually look into the details of an order. The graphic below reflects the various meanings of the AccountingSuite™ visual order status indicators.

The same indicators are used for Purchase Orders as well. And, speaking of purchasing it's time to look at that functionality too.

Purchasing Workflows

AccountingSuite™ lets you easily manage the purchasing processes with streamlined purchase orders, inventory receipts, vendor invoicing, and supplier refunds.

Like Sales, there are a variety of distinctive purchasing workflows (shown above) designed to meet the operational needs of any business. Workflow ‘A’ is the most complex of these purchasing workflows because it involves not only the issuance of a Purchase Order but a Pre-payment as well; then, when the item is received and it’s matched to the Vendor’s Bill, the Bill Payment is made.

Each of the other workflows are of lesser complexity as can be seen in the illustration. My guess is the majority of our readers will be recommending that their clients make use of Workflow ‘B’ for their inventory-centric operations.

Inventory and Light Manufacturing 

AccountingSuite™ lets you manage Inventory with a variety of ‘advanced’ features including Multiple-location tracking and location-transfers, Assemblies/Bills-of-materials, Price-matrices, Lots and Serial Numbers, Landed Cost and Complex Units of Measure.  It will also handle what I consider 'light manufacturing'.

The AccountingSuite™ inventory system is capable of tracking multiple warehouses as well as classes, projects, and user-defined hierarchical location tracking that goes far beyond the warehouse level. You can configure warehouse regions and sections along with rows, shelf units, shelves and bins. In other words, you can get as specific as you want. Even define in-bound receiving, holding areas pending put-away, and out-bound holding areas pending shipment or carrier pick-up.

The inventory feature is integrated with both the Sales and Purchasing features to insure real-time inventory management with quantities instantly updated by sales invoices, vendor bill payments, credit memos (vendor or customer), purchase returns and inventory adjustments.

A variety of tools, reports and dashboards are designed to provide you with up-to-date inventory information and keep you abreast of what’s going on in your inventory-centric business or manufacturing business.  But what is missing is true MRP (Materials Requirements Planning) functionality to determine purchasing needs well in advance by analyzing current stock, current sales orders and open purchase orders; hopefully, this will be a future advancement for AccountingSuite™.

Speaking of manufacturing, AccountingSuite™ has Assemblies or Bill of Materials functionality commonly used for manufacturing. This is why I say it has 'light manufacturing' capabilities.

The Bill of Materials allow you to define components or 'ingredients' of the final product to be included in your inventory once produced. Assemblies may contain sub-assemblies in their Bill of Materials, and there's no (technical) limit how deep you can nest assemblies, although I suspect there really is a 'practical limit'. Like most sophisticated systems, AccountingSuite™ not only tracks the cost of raw materials, but labor, waste, and residuals associated with assemblies, it can also ‘disassemble to any level of assembly' any assembly item it has created.

I really wish AccountingSuite™ had more functionality when it comes to manufacturing, it's going to need to offer added features to really move beyond 'light' capabilities. Right now there isn't any sort of 'shop floor control' or 'staging' that can be incorporated into their assemblies (other than if you consider 'sub-assemblies' a rudimentary form of staging). 

The Landed Cost feature lets you allocate costs (like freight, tariffs, insurance, customs, currency conversion, crating and ocean transport) associated with getting products from the vendor into your costs of goods sold. AccountingSuite™ lets you enter landed costs when the item receipt is created (or the bill when item receipts aren't used).

AccountingSuite's Advanced Units of Measure (UOM) functionality maintain inventory controls based on the way you buy and sell where inventory measures vary in the purchase UOM and sales UOM. The feature does a good job of handling the conversion and keeping the inventory updated even with some complex UOM variations.

Another well thought out Inventory-related feature is their Price Matrix which allows a complex pricing structure for items and giving granular control over that pricing. With this feature users can create precise rule-based pricing for both services and product items. The price matrix determines the price appearing on Sales documents based upon the price rules in the price matrix using such matrix data as the category of the item, the customer’s price level and the sales date.

I thought this methodology was much more 'flexible' and 'dynamic' in terms of being able to achieve the desired price rules than many other advanced pricing methods I have worked with.

Projects & Time-tracking

Project & Time-tracking help businesses manage costs and shed light on profitability of work being performed. Project Profitability Reports bring the data together so a business can have a clear view of how they are performing relative to a specific 'scope of work'.

With AccountingSuite™ Project & Time-tracking tracking project profitability has never been easier. AccountingSuite™ Users can quickly tag Project and Customers to every quote, order, invoice, bill, payment, receipt and many other data-records. The time-tracking feature allows you to recording project-related time by task.

AccountingSuite™ also integrates with Timesheet Mobile, a comprehensive employee scheduling and time tracking system, allowing the upload of timesheets for customer and project time tracking. 

Project reports reflecting revenues and expenses along with profitability give you a dynamic understanding of your business operations.

This wraps up Part 1 of our look at AccountingSuite™ but we will return with Part 2 before you know it. If in the mean time you simply can't wait for the rest of our review then you should head over to their website for more details, a demo, or a free trial.