You have questions about Leapfin and accounting automation. We have answers. Below are several great questions on important topics around accounting automation that we've received over the last few months.
Have a question for us that isn't covered here? Reach us at marketing@leapfin.com and we'll get it answered fast.
About adopting accounting automation
Q: How would you position a business (i.e. investment) case for automation to senior management? And how would you position it to a CTO who prefers internal builds?
Your leaders want specific outcomes that include faster decision-making, revenue growth, improved productivity, and cost savings. These are all proven values of accounting automation. Emphasize these points, and also show how automation aligns with strategic goals of the company. For more helpful business case resources, check out this blog post and this recorded webinar.
As for the CTO who prefers internal builds, focus on the total cost of ownership over three to five years, including implementation, maintenance, and both quantifiable and intangible opportunity costs. The main quantifiable opportunity costs of not adopting accounting automation include decreased productivity, higher operational costs, and lost revenue opportunities. And the main intangible costs include staff turnover, compliance risks, and missed strategic opportunities. For example, what other projects could engineers work on if they didn’t have to invest a lot of time in building an internal solution. We’ve got a great recorded webinar on Build vs Buy with SeatGeek. Check it out.
Q: How do you overcome interdepartmental animosity based on previous poor vendor selections?
Remember you're on the same team. Understand where each department is coming from and align your goals. Effective communication and collaboration are crucial. Show these teams that you’ve got their interests in mind, that you’re asking the right questions of the vendor to avoid a repeat of the last experience. Our team at Leapfin is skilled in these conversations and can aid as an arbiter to bridge gaps between departments.
Q: How should I balance building for current business needs versus future requirements?
Have a thoughtful conversation about your org’s problem-solving philosophy. If you have a finance and accounting team, talk it out together. And seek input from stakeholders in management and other departments who will be impacted. There’s honestly no best practice here. We see customers being successful with both approaches. Some choose to build for their core revenue stream first, standardizing existing processes and getting the new project going with the familiarity of the previous/existing process (the devil you know). With a little more time to watch and evaluate the new revenue stream, they can inform and optimize the next build.
Other customers use a new project (i.e. new revenue stream) as the motivation for implementing a new solution and process. They prefer not to repeat old problems, so they start fresh – new project, new process. If they like the results, they apply that new process to existing/core projects next.
But don’t overanalyze to the point that you get stuck. Have a bias for action. Think crawl > walk > run. As long as you choose a direction and start, progress will be made.
One extra tip if you do lean harder into building for the future: don’t start building too early. Meaning, if the new project is still mostly hypotheticals and hypotheses, that creates lots of room for accounting requirements to change.
Here’s a great talk with an experienced Business Systems leader who faced these same questions.
Q: Between large processes like month-end close, and smaller tasks like invoicing, what do you recommend automating first?
Our advice is to not prioritize according to the size of the project, but to address the business challenge that’s causing the most pain. A happier, more streamlined process will do amazing things for your team and output. For many of our customers, month-end close is the biggest pain point. It’s also a critical monthly milestone and number for many stakeholders. Automation alleviates the pain of manual, repetitive preparation tasks and can unlock tremendous value for the operators on your finance and accounting team.
We hear a similar version of this question, which is "I need to prioritize between implementing automation and replacing my ERP, which should I do first?" Our answer is the same. Be Advil (or Tylenol if you prefer) and target the worst pain first.
Q: Are there any common themes among successful accounting automation implementations?
Yes, one is having a dedicated champion who is committed to the success of the implementation. This person coordinates with the vendor, unlocks roadblocks, and ensures milestones are met. Their commitment and leadership help teams make decisions, align on priorities, rally resources, and drive the project forward.
Q: What are some resources for learning more about accounting automation?
Consider continuing education focused on automation and technology, follow industry leaders on LinkedIn, and consult with your auditors. Exploring what other companies are doing and learning new skills like Python can also be beneficial. For those ‘harder’ coding skills like Python and SQL, there are free classes you can take through codecademy and udemy.
About Leapfin’s customers
Q: What types of companies does Leapfin excel at supporting?
Leapfin was built to handle the challenges of high-growth, high-transaction-volume businesses, such as subscription businesses, e-commerce companies, and marketplaces. Companies like Reddit, Medium, and SeatGeek have used Leapfin to solve their revenue accounting challenges.
Additionally, many businesses turn to Leapfin in moments when they need the highest confidence in their accounting data. Those moments include:
- Considering or approaching IPO (more on this in the next question)
- Preparing for an audit, in an active audit, and immediately after a challenging audit
- Seeking new funding
- Preparing for a merger or acquisition (M&A)
Q: Who is a typical Leapfin user?
A couple of roles tend to be primary Leapfin users:
- Day-to-day operational managers who book journal entries. This could be a revenue accountant or manager. Sometimes a business or finance systems manager or admin. They use the system to automate transactions and handle disputes.
- People doing reviews, like auditors or month-end close approvers. Not uncommon for this to be the Controller. They ensure completeness and accuracy before signing off on the close.
About automation & IPOs
Q: We're planning an IPO in the next 12 to 18 months. When should I start automating more accounting processes?
Do it now. Get out front and lead from that position.
Here’s why:
- When you go for an IPO, the first thing that will be scrutinized is your revenue. How confident are you in how you’re managing revenue recognition and reporting today? Do you experience errors most months? Are they consistent and predictable errors? How will those errors be perceived and scrutinized leading up to and after IPO? Late filing can have a negative effect on stock price and investor perceptions. Post IPO, a restatement, especially downward in revenue, can have a direct and severe negative impact on company stock. And an adverse opinion related to being unable to complete an audit is just as bad.
- Consider internal controls. Often, pre-IPO companies haven’t had to worry about this. You can cover your bases with spreadsheets, though truth be told, this is miserable from a documentation and audit testing standpoint. If you think month-end is painful today, it will get worse when you have to document all the reconciliations, reviews, and approvals with screen prints and then have to test all these manual controls with your internal audit, and then your external auditor. You need a system to allow for an ITGC audit to lower risk/audit time.
One last point. If you are working towards an IPO, that means a few things are likely true:
- You have big growth plans. You need outside public investment and have plans to put that money to use.
- Your revenue and transaction volume are going to increase, and potentially become more complex. And any revenue accounting pain you’re feeling today will increase in magnitude and come with even tighter deadlines.
- All of this adds up to your finance and accounting team’s needs extending well beyond what spreadsheets can possibly accommodate (honestly, they’re probably past that point already).
OK, one really last point. Automation is not an all-or-nothing solution. You don’t have to tackle your entire accounting process at once. We recommend you get started with one problem – or a couple of closely related problems – then learn, see results, and continue solving from there.
About how Leapfin works
Take two minutes and watch our helpful explainer video:
Q: What should I know about how Leapfin connects to NetSuite? And does Leapfin integrate with other ERP systems?
Many Leapfin customers are NetSuite customers. Leapfin allows you to customize your export so it matches your NetSuite import fields, making integration and data upload seamless.
Leapfin also connects to other ERP systems, as well as business intelligence tools, and data warehouses like Snowflake. We can export your data to just about any system on a schedule that suits you.
Q: How is Leapfin different from a Stripe to NetSuite connector?
Leapfin is more than just a Stripe to NetSuite connector. A connector merely sends data from one place to another. Leapfin transforms the data to make it accounting-ready. It ingests messy, raw transaction data from multiple systems, aggregates and standardizes it. It links related transactions and enriches the data. And it applies accounting logic based on your policies to generate journal entries for your GL system and journal entry summaries perfectly formatted for your ERP.
The enrichment that Leapfin performs with your data cannot be overstated. As most accountants are painfully aware, PSPs like Stripe aren't doing accountants any favors. Raw data is not accounting data, and even specific reports from these providers are problematic because of gaps and inconsistencies.
Read these related blog posts for more context on these issues:
3 Reasons Stripe Data Isn't Good Enough for Accounting
3 Ways Stripe's Out-of-the-Box Reporting Falls Short for Accountants
Q: Does Leapfin integrate with other payment processors besides Stripe?
We have standard integrations with Google Pay, Apple Pay, Shopify, Adyen, PayPal, and Braintree. And we have the internal resources and software API endpoints to integrate with any other payment processor.
Q: Is NetSuite still the final reporting tool?
Yes. Leapfin acts as the revenue subledger, providing detailed revenue insights. Summarized revenue data, expenses, and manual journal entries are posted to NetSuite.
About implementing Leapfin
Q: How long does it take to get up and running with Leapfin?
The average is under 30 days. We have customers who begin generating journal entries in as little as six days. Typically, it takes four to six weeks for the first major integration, after which customers can add more integrations on their own with our hands-on training.
Q: What tips do you have for getting data into a system like Leapfin so the outputs are clean journal entries?
- First, pull down some data. You don't need all of your data, just a sample set.
- Look at your columns and fields and ask if you’re collecting and using all of this consistently? Is there anything about this data that makes it unruly?
- Ensure fields are appropriately formatted so another system can consume them. Some systems allow custom fields. What kind of custom field is it? If it's a date field, does it look like a date? It doesn’t matter to Leapfin if you format by MM/DD/YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY – we can ingest it in either format – but you’ll want to know and document how to interpret the format so there’s never any confusion.
- Look for line items or rows in your data that are not transactions. Identify those.
- Make sure the data has a unique identifier. Computers need to know if data is unique. With Leapfin, it’s OK if not all your data is unique. It's good to know this ahead of time, but Leapfin can handle very messy data. We have an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) front-end that can accommodate and organize messy data, filter out non-transaction rows, and more. Some vendors expect you to deliver clean data, but we handle it for you.
If you’re not in a position to perform this preparation yourself, or you don’t want to, there are a number of low-code general purpose ETL tools that can assist. A few examples of those systems that Leapfin customers work with are Workato, Fivetran, and Alteryx. But remember, these are general purpose tools, not specific to accounting. These tools will help you automate the data compilation, but transforming the data and making it accounting-ready is where Leapfin is needed.
