Software for Financials and Payments.

The question that usually arises with Financial software is where does the Operational side end and the Accounting side begin?

Our experience has shown us that there is a neat division between the two areas that seems to work for everyone, keeping control where it’s needed, focussing on the primary tasks and ensuring that we avoid duplication of effort at all costs. After all, we are looking for automation and time-saving, not the reverse.

Finance Process

With every system we have developed so far, we have delivered it as follows:-

• A billable event occurs such as the despatch of a product, the delivery of a service or the commencement of a subscription.
• Linked to every billable event should be an invoice – the key point here is to make it impossible to deliver anything without an invoice being raised.
• Invoices are generated automatically based on the despatch, service or subscription. A PDF of the Invoice is generated and sent via email to the Order contact (as well as a statement and/or payments contact if need be).
• Emails can also be cc’d to your own finance person/department to create an audit trail – there is something quite pleasing when re-forwarding an original email to an organisation claiming never to have received it.
• Credit notes can be raised by finance personnel and these can be produced as a PDF and emailed as well.
• Periodically (daily, weekly, monthly) the invoices and credits are then imported into finance system – such as Sage, Xero or Quickbooks. This is done by the system generating a CSV file which is then uploaded to the finance system.

With the system as outlined so far, you can then choose whether to

• Leave the credit control person/team to use the finance system to issue statements as well as record payments and refunds or;
• Import payments and refunds into your cloud-based system and use that for statements and credit control. Leaving the finance system for the accounting team for such tasks as quarterly returns, annual accounts as well as P&L and Balance Sheet tasks.

Billing and Payment

As well as the “ledger” activities such as Invoices and Credits, there is also the need to collect payment. For certain business, this can be accomplished through the receipt of BACS payments which can be automatically linked or imported into the finance system or your cloud-based software.

For some businesses, other payment methods will be required and we have developed integrations for both debit/credit card payments as well as direct debit into our cloud-based systems so this is an option for your business too.

We work with the most reliable, yet cheapest providers on the market which can be full integrated into your own brand/system, so if you are using expensive 3rd party providers which are poorly integrated and advocating their own brand image to your customers, maybe this would be a great starting project.