adminMr Les Allen, who is based in South Africa, was addressing a seminar hosted by his company last week in Harare.
He said the way in which accountants did their financials could be improved by making use of Pastel’s Business Intelligence Centre module, an effective reporting tool for small, medium-sized and large businesses.
The module can be added on to Pastel Partner and Pastel Evolution accounting software packages, which are both used by a large number of Zimbabwean businesses.
He said there were three steps involved in utilising financial data for decision-making. The first was collecting data, followed by analysing the data for trends, patterns and meaning. The third step was making a decision.
“Most accountants spend 70 percent of their time on Step One, when more time should actually be spent on Steps Two and Three,” he said.
A quick survey, by a show of hands, of accountants in the room carried out by Mr Allen, showed that most accountants spent between two and five days collecting financials at the end of each month.
“It does not make sense for you to spend five of your 20 working days in a month collecting financials. Wouldn’t you rather spend those days analysing and seeing what the financials mean?” he asked.
He said the BIC module had a dashboard that allowed one to see and measure the business key performance indicators at a glance.
Emphasising the importance of being able to produce financial reports quickly, he gave the example of a company that, having decided to go into liquidation, finds there is a competitor wanting to buy shares in the company and requests the financials from the accountant – only to be told a report on the financials would be ready in five days.
“Agility and the ability to quickly adapt is important,” he said. “In this case, a decision would need to be made instantly.
“BIC gives you the ability to obtain information quickly, analyse it and make a decision quickly.”
He said the dashboard made it possible to see the profit and loss account, top five customers, bottom five items, top five items and top five expenses – in a single report.
“How many reports would you have to run to get this information? Five? Right?” he asked rhetorically, adding this would include a lot of manual work.
“We don’t want you to be wasting time. For some of these, you can run a sales report, but it will not tell you who your top five customers are.
“You can save money and time by running only one report.”
Mr Allen said consolidation was a major challenge for those with multiple companies. However, BIC made it possible to compile information from different companies within the same group.
It was also possible to have multiple databases and choose to link them at the same time.
Online Reporter