The fully automated future of accounting isn't quite here yet, as manual work still dominates the month-end close., according to a recent report from accounting software firm
The study — which involved a survey of 697 full-time employees of small, mid-market, major and enterprise-sized organizations from within the retail, accounting and nonprofit sectors in the U.S. — found that 82% of companies must still run manual monthly reports for each e-commerce platform they're on, either always or some of the time. More than one-third of respondents always manually consolidate e-commerce revenue data with other transaction types like credit cards, and manually recalculate sales costs, taxes or other items into standard journal entries.
This takes a lot of time and resources. The report said this work amounts to nearly 100 hours, or 2.5 full-time-equivalent weeks, of manual processes across teams per month. Individual staff members average about 38 hours of manual work per month.
Some of the most common manual processes include running or outputting monthly activity reports for each revenue source, using data from each ecommerce payment source, adjusting this data manually to properly associate product or SKU order details with correct payments and dates, and manually consolidating finalized e-commerce revenue and cost details with revenue and cost data from other transaction types (credit cards, etc.).
Depending on the firm size, these can cost between $8,900 a month to as much as $16,400 per month, at large companies with 500 or more employees. Nearly half of firms outsource their manual processes, though these too create costs. On average, firms are spending a median of $3,500 a month. Collectively, firms spend about $550 million a year on such services.
