Close Your Accounts for the year in Style: A Guide to Helping Finance Teams Enjoy the Festive Season.

It is another end of the year and for finance teams, this can be a particularly stressful time of year.

The pressure is on to ensure that the company’s accounts are in order and there’s little time left to get everything done. Research found that one in five finance team members will take an extended leave of absence over the festive season due to stress.

If you’re reading this blog post during your lunch break or after work and not as a means of escape, then we’ve some good news for you.

It is possible to enjoy the festive season as a finance guru instead of viewing it as a source of stress.

In this blog post, we’ll take you through some ways you can keep stress at bay while also closing your company’s books in style, let's get right into it.

To get at the solution, we need to understand the problem.

Why are you finding it stressful to close your company accounts? Why is closing the company account for the year more difficult than you had anticipated?

Here are some common difficulties that finance teams encounter during the fiscal year, which make financial close a challenge:

Budgeting Issues

At the start of every fiscal year, organizations set out an annual budget and revenue plan that gets revisited quarterly, well, depending on the organization. You might find that you have exceeded the budget for the year or quarter without even knowing, what if you can actually keep track of that?

Human Error

This is bound to happen when your processes are not fully automated, you find yourself manually inputting figures into your excel sheet or workbook. This can easily lead to errors that lead to imbalanced sheets, and what's more, you find yourself starting all over again.

Invoices and Receipts

You are very organized, so you do well to put all invoices and receipts in a file so you can get back to sorting them when the need arises; like now that you need to close the account for the year. Do you know how much time that takes? What if for some reason you can't find some of these receipts, what do you do then? Even the thought of this is stressful.

Approvals/Disbursements

As if trying to close the account for the year is not enough stress, you still continue receiving emails or forms to disburse payments. It's Christmas, you have to disburse more funds and still keep track of all this at the same time. I don't envy you.

Chasing Team Members

Let me guess, you keep sending reminders to team members to share payment details of company transactions. They are probably even the cause of your delay, everything needs to be sorted, all should be in one place. It can!

The Solution

I have good news, you can enjoy the festive season just like everyone else that is not on the finance team. You only need to plan ahead.

To ensure your finance team is as productive as possible during the fiscal year, you need an actionable plan that addresses your organization’s specific challenges. This ensures that your budgeting, tracking, approvals, disbursements,and reconciliation is seamless.

Here is a checklist that will help your accounting workflow in the new fiscal year.

Financial Planning & Budgeting: Based on the financial plan and anticipated company spending for the year, create a budget for different expenses or departments. This way you can monitor if you are on track with your budget or if you are about to exceed the budget.

Expense Categorization: Always categorize all your expenses, this makes it easier to keep track of the company's spending on a particular expense.

Automate Approvals and Disbursements: Eliminate manual data entry and keeping of invoices and receipts. All these files can be uploaded and fitted to different transactions online, these will save you the stress of emails, forms, or safekeeping of files.

Communications: Improve communication with team members, and eliminate emails or written requests for payments. All financial requests, invoices, and receipts should be made and documented electronically. This would reduce human error, miscommunication, or the need to send reminders to request invoices or receipts

Corporate Spending Cards: Track spending by issuing corporate cards with spending limits to various departments or employees. This way you can track all departmental spending and be on top of your budget.

A fresh start for your company’s Spend Management next year

The above checklist will guide your financial process for the coming year and guarantee you a stress-free workflow, it gets much better when you make use of an all-in-one spend management software that guarantees you all the above listed.

Say Hi ! to Flex

With Flex Finance  you can:

✅Track and have 100% control over all company spending

✅Automate requisitions, approvals, and disbursements.

✅Create and track sub-accounts for departments and subsidiaries.

✅ Automatically Categorize your expenses

✅ Pay up to 1000 people at once with Flex Bulk payment

✅Issue Corporate cards for staff members and sub-accounts

In conclusion, the secret to a stress-free financial close is to be effective, well-prepared, organized, and open to automating your processes.

Want to learn more about Flex Finance? Head over to our website - www.flexfinance.ai now

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