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What Exactly Is Period Accounting?

To understand, analyze, and strategize your business, you need first to ensure that your period accounting is correct. Period accounting is the time covered by your financial statements in the reporting period. 

Your period accounting is correct only if you ensure you are correctly deferring revenue and recognizing associated costs. Failing to correctly claim costs will cause a spike in your profit and loss accounts, rendering your analysis null and void. Analyzing numbers without considering their relationship does not provide you with the multidimensional analysis you need to succeed as a business.

It is common for businesses to split their accounting systems between two platforms, one for invoices and one for accounting. Neither platform on its own can provide you with enough information to fully analyze your business. For example: your invoice engine isn’t concerned with period accounting, and your accounting system only indexes costs by supplier, not split between contracts and projects or against sales.

Adopting a PSA (professional services automation) tool can act as a key differentiator for period accounting. A PSA tool will offer indexing capabilities that a traditional accounting system does not. Adopting a system to connect prices and asset values for all financial transactions is a necessary step. Being able to cross-index against the project or customer on which you’ve incurred costs gives visibility to the true customer margins. 

A PSA tool allows you to capture and control business processes to provide a full picture of your company’s profitability. These accounting events need to also wind up in your accounting system.

By using a model like the ‘null’ model, the invoice line trigger model, the invoice post model, or the journal post model, you can use your PSA tool to drive accounting processes to help you fully analyze your business. 

Flexi aims to simply accounting processes

Simplifying accounting processes to make analysis and strategy easy is Flexi’s goal. Trusted by enterprises for 25+ years, Flexi is among the most experienced accounting software providers in both the cloud and on-premise markets.

Submit your information and get a demo of the Flexi suite today. 

 

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