Multi-Company, Multi-Fiscal-Year Accounting in the Cloud: What to Ask

Groups that run several companies, or open a new fiscal year every year, quickly hit the limits of simple accounting software: one copy per company, one file per year, and consolidated reports built by copy and paste. Cloud, multi-company accounting exists to fix exactly that; but when choosing, there are a few specific questions to ask.

What multi-company and multi-fiscal-year means

It means one installation, several separate companies and fiscal years, with every page tied to the selected company and year. In Afrandeh cloud accounting, user access is also defined per fiscal year, so you can decide which fiscal year each user may reach.

Five questions to evaluate

1. How deep does the chart of accounts go? Afrandeh supports up to 8 account levels: group, general, subsidiary, detail, cost center, project and two analytical dimensions. The type of each subsidiary account decides which lower levels are active when entering a document.

2. How strict is document entry? In Afrandeh a document is saved only when total debit equals total credit, its date falls within the fiscal year and its document group is set. Fast keyboard entry of rows is supported as well.

3. How are draft and final documents handled? A draft document is not yet final; a final document is. In Afrandeh you convert the draft documents of a period to final in one go with a preview, you can merge documents by day, and a full history of conversions is kept.

4. How is a new fiscal year opened? A new year can be created only once the opening, closing and inventory start-of-period documents have been issued for the previous one. That rule prevents a new year from opening on top of an unfinished one.

5. How far do the reports go? Account review in Afrandeh has a four-column trial balance across all eight levels, with nested drill-down and an account ledger with document detail, exportable to Excel and PDF. The debtor and creditor report shows counterparty balances down to the detail ledger and the sales invoice breakdown and quotations of that counterparty.

Details that matter day to day

• Edit lock: two users cannot edit the same document at the same time.
• Advanced search: the document list is searchable by description, number, date and amount.
• Connection to other processes: because accounting runs on the same database as inventory and invoicing, the financial document is not separate from the rest of the organization; to see that link, read the document chain in ERP.

Cloud or on your own server

Afrandeh is fully web-based and can be deployed in the cloud or on your own server. For the criteria to choose between the two, see cloud or self-hosted ERP?.

If you would like your accounting structure and companies reviewed on Afrandeh, request a demo.