Or at least it sure feels like it around this time of the year.
And, oh, the groups and individuals within a corporation who really do love RevPro. From CFOs to business analysts, revenue directors and stakeholders, let us count the ways. No really, we are good at accounting and could if called upon.
However, today, we take a look at the crush those in the auditing profession have for our revenue automation solution ….until they don’t, that is.
Regardless of whether an audit is internal or external, the most tedious task is almost always the process of gathering supporting documentation. We all know it is an intrinsic part of a revenue accountant’s nature – and job – to keep a good audit trail, so lack of availability isn’t the issue here. No, the typical problem is this audit trail isn’t a simple, straightforward path neatly organized from one place, just waiting for an auditor to seek it out and follow along. Better to visualize those massive hedge mazes found on the grounds of the rich and famous which, if we learned anything from the movies, is never a good place for a person to enter.
Why isn’t it straighforward? Well, often companies have adopted a variety of platforms, ERP solutions and manual workarounds, for one reason or another, which pose a challenge in gathering financial materials in a short span of time. From contracts to copies of purchase orders, allocation templates, invoices and manually deferred revenue schedules to reports with, frankly, a gazillion v-lookups and pivots, the expectations heaped upon your average auditor are anything but simple and straightforward. Until the arrival of an automated revenue management solution such as RevPro. Automating your revenue practices using such a solution as ours establishes repeatable and auditable business processes and controls, a smooth and swift audit preparation process and a transaction trail from start to finish.
By using RevPro in place of, say, manually calculating allocations in spreadsheets, revenue managers are able to point an auditor to a read-only version of the same arrangement so they can follow the calculations from beginning to end. Clearly, this is an easier option – for both the auditor and financial staffer – than reformatting spreadsheets for each specific sample requested.
With the latest version of RevPro, one of the many great new features, which we believe will become the object of affection for both auditors and revenue accountants alike, is the ‘Notes and Attachments’ tab. This allows a user to upload supporting documentation for each contract for use in customer acceptance emails, proof of delivery documents and even contracts.
RevPro also allows users to drill down into the accounting, allocation, billings and deferred revenue waterfall, all from within the same user interface window, which we know saves a whole lotta time for both accountant and auditor.
It goes without saying, but we’ll say it anyway, that by using RevPro, there’s less risk of user error. Those potentially devastating errors can essentially be eliminated with formulas and customer business rules. Auditors, by virtue of this, save huge chunks of time previously spent double-checking the math of spreadsheet calculations. When a RevPro user makes a change manually to a contract (say to defer revenue after it has been released and scheduled or to link/de-link contract lines between contracts), the product requires user comments and saves the time stamp for each and every action. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and audit reports are a standard part of RevPro’s offerings to, again, simplify and standardize the audit trail and controls.
All that simplification and standardization through repeatable and auditable business processes and controls, courtesy of RevPro, means less time – wasted or not – for an audit process, which translates to less billable time charged by an auditor.
Auditors love money as much as the rest of us. So, sorry about that.