When we introduced the first revenue accounting automating platform in 2015, Accounting teams were still learning about the potential of automation and what it could do. At the time, many of the solutions on the market focused on the workflow, but Leapfin was the first of its kind to address accounting data automation. Since then, we've worked with Accounting teams at companies like Canva, SeatGeek, and Reddit to help them gain confidence in their month-end revenue numbers and automate their most tedious accounting processes.
Today, accounting automation is imperative for every accounting function to meet increased demands for their business. However, many companies that claim to do automation mainly focus on workflows, causing reporting inaccuracy. As a result, many Accountants rely on spreadsheets to control what goes into their general ledger because they can’t trust the final numbers in their systems.
To address these challenges, we’re excited to announce a new, more powerful Leapfin that helps Accounting teams gain unprecedented control, trust, and transparency in transaction data that constitutes month-end revenue numbers. With the data accuracy problem solved, accountants can now focus more on advising the business based on insights derived from month-end reports.
Below, we’ll review the five new features you can now access in Leapfin.
In an October 2023 study surveying 50 Finance leaders from mid-size digitally-enabled companies, Leapfin found that 68% of Accounting leaders need real-time revenue reporting capabilities. Our Revenue Summary View makes that possible. Now, Accounting can view an accurate, segmentable visualization of revenue performance across accounts in addition to a drillable revenue ledger without waiting for month-end close or leaving Leapfin. Think of it as your revenue reporting control center that gives you transparency into your business performance. With this expanded functionality, accountants can spot real-time revenue trends and anomalies quickly and share relevant insights with their colleagues so the business can react rapidly to new findings like discount overuse, increased regional activity, or revenue decrease.
The nucleus of accounting automation starts with the Universal Accounting Record. This data record links related transaction activities from different source systems and unifies them into a single, reportable record. For example, you can link contract data from Salesforce with invoice data from your Zuora billing and Stripe payment into a single Universal Accounting Record.
Now, we’ve layered on the Journal Entry View, which allows users to view real-time journal entries associated with a particular transaction, verify the month-over-month timeline of adjustments for complex transactions, and view the recognition history for past activities. This level of transparency allows accountants to quickly see how a particular record is being accounted for and share up-to-date information on real-time actuals with their Finance counterparts for accurate forecasting, scenario analysis, and decision-making.
A Wall Street Journal article published in September 2023 states that the number of people in the accounting profession is down by nearly 16%, and fewer students pursue accounting as a career path because of the tedious, repetitive tasks, long hours, and burnout involved. Much of this decline results from manual processes that make it challenging to control revenue recognition consistency and journal entry compliance, which has downstream effects on revenue reporting accuracy, speed, compliance, and audit.
With Customizable Accounting Rules and the new Accounting Rules Library, customers can now use pre-built rules or create customized rules that Leapfin will automatically apply consistently across specified transactions for compliant reporting. Then, drill into journal entries to see the rules applied to check calculations or share them with auditors. Users can also view or adjust existing rules in the Accounting Rules Library. Leapfin gives control back to accountants to create and modify logic applied to their journal entries, helping avoid unnecessary adjustments, rework, or risk of misstatement.
Many customers come to Leapfin with the same challenges, including difficulty integrating data from multiple systems and linking related transaction activities from different systems into a unified, reportable view and the tedious manual effort, engineering, and Excel manipulation required. What frequently happens as a result of this is Accounting loses visibility into the data, giving them even less confidence in the completeness and accuracy of their data.
With Self-Managed Integrations, we’re giving control back to the Accounting team to pull the data they need into Leapfin from source systems – payment, billing, and order management systems — and connect it with related activities from other systems to generate a Universal Accounting Record. Pull in standard or custom fields into Leapfin with a few clicks without involving engineering or relying on a spreadsheet. Users can then view and modify existing integrations in the Integrations library.
Today’s corporate accounting teams spend 70% of their time manipulating and validating data in spreadsheets as part of their reporting processes. With transaction data dispersed across multiple systems, ensuring data timeliness, completeness, and integrity is frequently a drawn-out process that still leads to mistakes, inaccurate reporting, and data mistrust.
To help customers review transaction data for completeness without error-prone manual processes, we’re introducing a Data Freshness section that shows how Leapfin extracts and processes your data. In this section, users can view information like the last import date, number and type of records imported, and missing data records over the past 45 days. With new visibility into data import status, accountants can rest easy knowing that they’re reporting on a complete transaction dataset or how to fix errors to make it so.
Expect all this extended functionality to roll out in beta in December to existing customers. These features will get even more shine and polish in Q1 of 2024.
Interested in seeing a video walkthrough of the new features and functionalities? Caitlin Steel, Leapfin’s VP of Product walks through the new feature set in an on-demand product walkthrough video that you can watch here.