How In-House Finance Teams Leverage Entity Management Software

Businesses that are primarily focused on the use of manual processes to drive their entity management decrease the speed of their interdepartmental productivity. The slower these companies move, the more likely they are to face a decline in revenue growth and other measurable forms of success. 

Furthermore, in your workplace, legal, finance, and tax departments must follow governance, tax, and corporate compliance via effective automated workflows, and manual processes can lead to risks for these departments.

Thankfully, entity management software can power your in-house finance teams to handle business processes, and with the right software at your disposal, your team will become compliant with key regulations and be able to properly handle audits and transactions. 

The right entity management software will also provide your teams with a central source of truth for financial data, a streamlined automation platform, and enhanced collaboration and visibility. 

You can learn more about how finance teams can benefit from entity management software by taking a look at our outline of the main transformations businesses can gain below. 

The Many Processes and Functions of Entity Management Software

Worldwide, companies need to properly manage the ways through which they securely grow their capital, pay off their debts, open various bank accounts for numerous entities, and conduct their end-of-year financial reporting. With the right entity management software, businesses can better handle their capital in an automated fashion as well as manage their financial reporting and tax filing. 

Handling Capital

A major benefit of entity management software involves the ability to validate essential attributes, such as:

• Officer and director details
• The ultimate beneficial owner
• Institutional investor and individual details
• Formation jurisdictions and formation dates
• Tax identification values

Most importantly, you’ll have access to a central source of truth when validating these details to raise capital or secure debt. Having the same data and all relevant documentation available in one place will greatly streamline workflows and benefit key departments. 

Financial Reporting

With entity management software, you can identify connected businesses and corresponding parties via organizational charts. 

Furthermore, your team members can communicate and collaborate more effectively with each other and with external accountants by sharing a virtual minute book, stock option agreements, and incorporation documents. Such collaboration is essential in year-end financial planning.

Additionally, entity management technology ensures that your financial reporting is accurate, and it validates essential capital transaction details by using source documentation, such as share certificates.

Taxation 

A centralized system and a single source of truth ensure your company’s tax and accounting functions are (or become) streamlined and automated. With organizational charts, you’ll more easily allocate and identify small business deductions. 

For Schedule 50 T2 reporting, as an example, entity management software allows for the quick identification of shareholders who hold more than ten percent of a company. You can easily share and access data while maintaining compliance with your tax filings, and handling your tax and audit processes with the right automated technology will save you time and boost your team’s productivity. 

Major Changes Finance Teams Gained from Business Entity Management Software

The most significant advantages that finance teams stand to gain from entity management software involve an identical source of data and a centralized system in which all team members can access the same financial information. Your staff will know where every relevant document gets stored, and automated processes will ensure greater accuracy. Further still, the effective sharing of financial data is truly possible with business entity management software. 

However, with all of that being said, it’s important to understand what types of work processes — as well as challenges and errors — may be in place in your organization prior to your in-house finance teams adopting such useful technology.

What Was It Like Before?

The major issues that companies face without the right technologies include the following:

• Having to remember where certain tables and details are stored
• Spending excess time reconciling inaccurate data with updated information 
• Requesting documents numerous times

The biggest challenges businesses experience before implementing effective technology also include a lack of effective reconciliation and validation along with inefficient data sharing.

Further compounding these issues is that financial professionals lack a central source of truth, and without structured, automated processes in place, finance teams are forced to use manual procedures that may lead to errors, ineffective outcomes or work processes, and above all, more time spent on tasks.

Why Other Software Solutions Aren’t Enough

Without entity management software, certain accounting software products, including Caseware, do not provide enough capabilities for finance, legal, and other essential departments. Caseware primarily acts as a repository for auditors who need storage, providing a place to store files and financial reports.

However, internal finance and tax teams cannot use Caseware products to generate reports or link data. Other tools, like Google Drive, also lack the structured space that entity management software provides. In particular, these other tools do not align with the compliance standards of our software platform.

The Measurable Benefits of Entity Management Software

You can gain numerous advantages from entity management tools, such as saving a substantial number of hours on generating end-of-year financial reports and conducting complex transactions. You’ll also see a decrease in the hours spent on manual processes due to the sharing of key folders and documents instead of auditors spending time handling, accessing, and sharing single files themselves.  

As a result, you can gain significant measurable benefits in terms of gaining efficiency by avoiding the back-and-forth between your staff.

The Right Software Improves Regulatory Compliance and Communication

Your finance, legal, and tax team members can boost communication when everyone can access identical, structured data. Doing so is especially important for regulatory compliance, such as meeting UBO and AML regulations. In these cases, access to the most up-to-date, accurate entity information is absolutely critical.

In other words, with the right tools in place, you can reduce your regulatory and compliance risks.

Athennian Entity Management Software Reduces Risk and Streamlines Productivity

Athennian Software provides you with the confidence you need to ensure your data remains compliant with regulatory standards. With our structured and centralized system, companies can easily meet compliance and decrease legal risks.

Most importantly, you’ll have greater productivity across the board due to the automated processes from Athennian Software. The automation, greater visibility, and central source of truth provide key benefits for internal finance teams in any industry.