The next few months will bring together an unprecedented set of events that has the potential to fundamentally shift the way delivery and shipping are handled for the foreseeable future:

• • The exponential increase of online sales due to COVID-19.
  • The 2020 holiday shopping season.

Click to Buy – Online Sales are Booming! Is Your Accounting Software Ready?

The coronavirus changed the very nature of the retail industry when companies were forced to close the doors to their traditional stores and adjust to the spike in demand from online consumers. In fact, online sales jumped from 16% to 33% within the first three months of the pandemic. 

With the holiday shopping season quickly approaching, those online sales are only going to increase. Some 70% of U.S. consumers have said they intend to make the majority of their holiday purchases online this year compared to just 59% last year. This means that delivery and shipping service providers will play a much bigger role in fulfilment during the next few months. 

Keeping track of inventory and transactions during a typical holiday shopping season has always been a challenge all on its own. The added weight of COVID will bring an entirely new level of difficulty to the already high potential of accounting errors due to the sheer volume of transactions.

Preparing Your Accounting Processes for An Unprecedented and Historic Holiday Shopping Season

To meet the unique challenges of the upcoming epic holiday shopping season, there are two things you can focus on to keep your accounting accurate and efficient:

• • Automation
  • Visibility

Accounting Automation for the Win: Make Your Financial Close More Accurate and Efficient This Holiday Season

From workflow management to removing redundant tasks, automation can improve the accuracy and efficiency of your financial close. 

By creating templates for a dependency-based checklist, you can automate the workflow giving each person on your team a notification when it’s their turn to complete their part of the month-end close. This means you don’t have to go to each person inquiring where they are in the workflow. 

Automation can also help you maintain control over your transactions from different payment types. You’ll be able to account for all necessary fees, returns, etc., in a timely manner so you have confidence in your monthly/quarterly/annual numbers. 

Plus, you can automate your low-risk tasks which means you can:

• • Reduce the risk of human error
  • Pull repetitive data entry out of your processes
  • Track and store month-to-month consistent data

Do You See What We See? Enhancing Visibility Across Your Month-End Close

With accounting automation in place, you can now focus on the holistic side of your month-end close process. 

Configurable and adaptable month-end automation should be able to give you transparency so you can keep your processes moving throughout the entire delivery cycle.

• • Get the accounting data you need when you need it.
  • Track transaction activity over multiple months, quarters, or years.
  • Investigate and correct incorrect data related to your bookkeeping. 

With full visibility and insight into your supply chain, you can create new models of best-case and worst-case scenarios so you can have a plan for whatever comes your way. 

Financial Close Control, Delivered with Automated Accounting Solutions

With the Adra Suite by Trintech, you have access to innovative solutions that work together to deliver results. Innovative solutions that work together to deliver results.

• • Task Manager creates automated templates for dependency-based checklists that create accountability in your team and reduce the risk of inaccuracies.
  • Balancer takes the repetition and redundancy out of your close by automating consistent data entry.
  • Matcher imports financial documents from various vendors and matches them in an audit-ready format giving you the ability to see and reconcile three-way reconciliations easier and more accurately. 
  • Analytics gives you reporting capabilities that give you full visibility and insight into your supply chain and finances. 

By adopting and utilizing Adra’s suite of software tools, you gain better control over your deliveries, supply chain and finances resulting in fewer challenges in the upcoming holiday shopping season.

If you’re ready to see how Adra can help, reach out and talk to one of our experts to schedule a demo.