WITHIN one year of moving its accounts to the cloud, one small food and beverage (F&B) company surpassed its $1 million sales milestone.
Its business advisory partner, InCorp Global, helped the firm achieve this by implementing two automation tools for the client to verify payments and sales data.
This resolved inaccuracies in financial reporting, allowing the company to gain better visibility of its true financial position and cash flow. As a result, accountants can shift their focus from correcting ledger errors to identifying opportunities for business growth.
These benefits helped the business expand from two to four outlets in Singapore by the end of the same year.
Accountants today, like those from this F&B company, are not merely bookkeeping anymore. Preparing balance sheets and income statements is increasingly automated, says Alton Neo, InCorp’s deputy chief executive officer for Singapore. “They are moving up the value chain and doing more analysis work.”
InCorp’s position echoes the Ministry of Finance’s recent assessment of Singapore’s accountancy workforce, highlighting that the industry will continue to digitalise and offer benefits to practitioners.
With automation tools, for example, accountants can reduce repetitive work when preparing financial reports. They can also leverage real-time analytics to generate richer and deeper financial insights for quicker decision-making.
This is crucial for responding quickly to market changes and staying competitive. Having the right solutions plays a key role.
While the use of digital tools allowed the F&B company to improve the way it tracked its finances, it was its integration into cloud-based accounting software Xero that gave the business full visibility and better management of its accounts and cash flow.
The F&B company uses Bluesheets, which automates the manual data entry process for documents, such as invoices, and pushes them into the Xero ledger. The other is Sapaad, a point-of-sale and restaurant management system that connects to Xero and automatically syncs daily sales with the accounting platform.
Serving over 15,000 small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) and large businesses across Asia-Pacific and offshore jurisdictions, InCorp provides such bookkeeping and accounting services to a third of its clients, recommending Xero as the go-to solution.
Neo explains: “Xero is the most progressive accounting platform among those we’ve used, which is why we selected it to be our preferred vendor.”
Digitalisation as a scalable solution
While Neo’s SME clients are new to digitalisation, many are interested in automating accounting processes to improve efficiency and reduce manual errors.
These clients recognise the potential of moving to the cloud when scaling operations across regions and actively seek digital solutions for their businesses.
For instance, in 2018, a leading payment provider in Singapore that was overwhelmed by the manual entry of its high-volume, multi-currency transactions turned to InCorp.
After analysing the SME’s business model and processes, InCorp streamlined its client’s accounting workflow using Xero templates, making it easier to handle high transaction volumes and complex accounting tasks like commissions and client account balances.
Moving to Xero not only accelerated bookkeeping processes. It also helped the client avoid hefty investments in enterprise resource planning systems.
InCorp also trained the client’s finance staff in using Xero’s advanced functions, including tools for raw data entry and data import, to facilitate cash flow management.
The client was so impressed with the solutions that they asked for the process to be replicated for its offices in Hong Kong and Indonesia.
“This expansion shows how effective the solutions are and how well they can scale,” says Neo.
Walking the talk
InCorp uses Xero for its own accounting and bookkeeping processes, demonstrating to clients the platform’s real-world benefits firsthand.
“Leveraging Xero’s automation capabilities, we have significantly sped up our service delivery to clients by using tools like Hubdoc and Xero Expense,” says Neo.
Hubdoc allows companies to take photos of key documents on their mobile phones, and email, scan or upload them into the application. There is also Xero Expense, a claim management tool that helps businesses reduce the time spent tracking and managing employees’ expenses.
InCorp also uses Xero Practice Manager to create tasks such as monitoring staff performance and assessing client profitability while tracking ongoing jobs and works-in-progress in real time.
Incorp has even integrated its customer relationship management (CRM) system with Xero’s application programming interface (API) for its internal finance team.
This setup automatically pulls large volumes of sales invoices and receipts from the CRM and inputs them into Xero daily, saving the team’s time on data entry and avoiding duplicate records.
“The implementation of these tools has significantly improved our processes, enabling us to achieve a higher level of efficiency and serve more clients effectively,” says Neo.
Knowing that accounting technology is also developing at a fast pace, InCorp’s accountants participate in Xero events, including Xerocon and webinars, and undergo regular training.
This helps the team keep up with Xero’s many in-built functions and third-party apps, so they can continuously provide the best solutions for clients.
“The knowledge and fresh perspectives gained are seamlessly integrated into our practices, keeping us at the forefront of industry advancements,” Neo adds.
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