CFO Minute: The Phantom of Compliance

This blog is the January Edition of our CFO Minute: A Sage Intacct ERP Series.

THE PHANTOM OF COMPLIANCE— Whether you’re disguised behind a white, glossy face mask, feeling heartbreak and despair or you’re at your desk, hiding behind a handful of incorrect spreadsheets and silently yelling in frustration- we get it.

Life throws us unexpected daily challenges.

And so do new accounting standards. For many finance professionals, revenue management is among the top challenges today. With its combination of loosely defined regulations, evolving standards—such as the new revenue recognition rules under Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) 606 and stiff penalties for noncompliance, revenue management creates unacceptable levels of complexity and variability that often overmatch the resources and expertise of many finance teams. Faced with these barriers, companies are looking to automate revenue management processes to gain efficiency, strengthen compliance, and improve visibility.

Why compliance can’t wait

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) issued ASC 606 to be effective at the start of 2018 for public companies, and the start of 2019 for private companies… Which happens to be NOW! Some companies have yet to acknowledge that they need to abide by these new regulations, but the reality is that the contracts you are writing today that extend into the 2018/2019 adoption date must be accounted for under ASC 606.

Preparing your business for the shift (and staying prepared when it comes along) is a time-consuming process—especially if your accounting system lacks built-in readiness. If you have a subscription-based business, you likely enter into complex contracts and agreements with customers. The new standard requires your company to capture and report on this information, which your accounting system may not currently track.

As a result, you need to identify and remedy critical data gaps before your organization is subject to the risk of fines from the SEC, increased auditing costs, and rippling relationships with your auditor (who isn’t happy that their client didn’t adhere to GAAP guidelines!)

Overall, your company’s reputation and finance department can be negatively impacted if regulations are not implemented.

How Sage Intacct’s automation can help

Fast-growing businesses are choosing Sage Intacct’s leading cloud financial management technology to automate their subscription management and revenue accounting. This can save you and your staff hundreds of hours each month on calculations, manual entry, and reconciliations.

Check out our free datasheet below to learn how automated revenue management can help you: