Financial and Accounting Systems
We have integrated into a couple of external systems (Exchequer and Xero – we’re very experienced with these) – but they are all basically the same. Our exports are solid, fast and fail safe. How? We export in a two stage process. Stage one is from the front office to a “holding database” and that’s followed by moving the data out of there into the live finance system. Doing this guarantees data integrity – you can pull the plug on our finance export and it will pick itself up with no errors.
Future revenue & travel date
Finance systems should have the checks and controls you need for both AR and AP. But as no two businesses are the same, this won’t always be enough. Particularly in the travel industry where there are so many other factors that come in to play – the biggest being the “travel date”. An off the shelf accounting system will have no concept of this, so you have to work around it if you want to recognise revenue at travel date. We can try things like:
- Manipulating invoice dates and due dates
- Including the travel date somewhere in a user defined field in your finance system
Custom reporting
We can create custom reports to:
- Reflect travel dates by querying the finance database directly
- Suggest journals to be made to post future revenue – using travel-date workarounds as described above
- Help chase customer payments or instalment payment plans. This could be internal reports or could be sent directly to clients with a link to pay
Cloud vs. on-premise
There’s a big difference with what you can do between these two setups:
With cloud systems, all the headache of backups and performance may go away. But the price you pay is having no direct access to your database – which means no custom reports. All you can do is use the built in report writer – if there is one. In Xero for example, which is all cloud based, the reporting options are very limited. If you want complete control, you need to be on-premise.