Accounting
Are Accounts Payable An Expense?
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Find out more about the outlook of the connected apps industry, how your SMBs can benefit from optimising connected apps, and illustration of ROIs.
First things first, let us define what “connected apps” are.
SalesForce described it as a framework that enables an external application, whether a web or a mobile app, to integrate with your application using APIs and standard protocols such as SAML, OAuth and OpenID Connect. That said, you can easily see your data in other apps integrated with this framework. The protocols mentioned above will be used to authenticate, authorise, and provide a single sign-on (SSO) for connected apps.
No need to look too far! From your Facebook, Twitter or Google account, you can easily find the apps and websites that the respective accounts are connected to. “Do you authorise Facebook to access your account? ” should come familiar to you when you’re signing into another website or an app.
For connected apps in the B2B landscape, business data is seamlessly integrated across the platforms. Read on to find out more about the outlook of the connected apps industry, how your SMBs can benefit from optimising connected apps, and illustration of ROIs by using Spenmo as an example.
Implications of Connected Apps on Management ROIs
A tech-driven accounting era will unlock additional revenue streams for accounting firms. Traditionally, the role of accounting firms has been limited to regulatory and compliance. Moving forward, these firms will be playing more of an advisory role and having strategic conversations with customers on how to grow their business. Amidst COVID-19, many SMBs are struggling to keep their heads above the water, but we don’t want only to be scrambling to fix one leaky hole at a time, aka the day-to-day operational challenges with remote work. You want to better leverage connected apps to help your business develop longer-term strategies. We want to point you specifically to the revolutionary feature of forecasting offered within these connected apps, which would be paramount to higher-level management decision-making. Based on previous data specific to the business, coupled with external sources of data from the public domain, you can now obtain key metrics that are important for your business.SMEs on Cloud 9: How Cloud Apps have Helped to Streamline Workflows, Increase Efficiency & Deliver Smarter Insights
Firstly, connected apps improve the user experience, contrary to using these apps separately. You don’t need to be a computer scientist or a software engineer to manage these connected apps. At most, with a 30-mins’ onboarding session for a SaaS subscription, anyone – even those who are not tech-savvy – can easily use the app.Secondly, make insights more digestible for your management through visual representation. When connected apps are always talking (data) to each other, you do away with manually transferring the data from one platform to another (e.g. transferring payroll data to your accounting software to get your costing data). With this data, you can quickly generate a snapshot view in a dashboard (with bar graphs, pie charts) containing numerical estimations like financial ratios and industry-specific KPIs.
Thirdly, consider the potential of scaling up on the Cloud! There is no sky too high, no limit to how expansive your business can get. The connected apps ecosystem has made data storage and app management really easy and inexpensive. Without on-premise infrastructure, you can scale up geographically and sideways, aka online, without any constraints on your budget and space.
Spenmo as an Example
Spenmo is a payments software that brings internal spend management, corporate cards, automated bill payments, approval workflows and accounting reconciliation into an integrated view.Especially in an SMB and start-up setting where the scope of transactions that each team deals with is not delineated, the same platform can be used by any employee– whether you’re paying your vendors (operations), or that you want to reimburse your employees (HR), or that your customers want to pay you (customer service). At the same time, we recognise that you may still want to control who gets to see or approve these transactions in which managers can easily customise every user’s control with a click of a button.
Now, you can be that cool start-up boss wizard who gets a birds-eye view of the costs and skillfully manages the bottom line from the Cloud without having to be a draconian micro-manager chasing the tails of your team members!
Business Growth Opportunities for Payroll, Reporting & Payment
The rise of the connected apps ecosystem has social implications on the workplace environment as we move from silos to synergy. Connected apps aren’t limited to only applications used within the team or the department but can span across HR, accounting and finance, customer service and more.Do away with problems of double handling and delay in the process when multiple transactions are involved or more than one department head is involved in approving these transactions. Don’t spend unnecessary time and staffing chasing receipts when the process and who is responsible for approving are laid out on the platform. Keep in mind that every function within the company has implications on cost control, so it’s crucial for accounting and finance professionals to take up the baton and lead the run towards synergising digital solutions across the departments.
Lastly, we want to address the elephant in the room when converting to Cloud: Security. Yes, your data is at the mercy of your Cloud services provider, but consider that Cloud security has come a long way. We want to share with you a link to an article to make the case that the data you save with your Cloud service provider is likely to be safer than those stored in your personal computer’s hard drive.