6 min
Processing of primary documents takes time and requires a high level of concentration. Any mistakes made may subsequently distort accounting and corporate reports. The 1С tools that allow accurate automation of data handling are described below.
LOADING VOLUME DATA INTO 1С
Most of the accountant’s work consists in accounting. A major challenge facing the specialist in this respect is creating primary documents in the base. Data entry may be simplified if primary documents are kept in a different accounting system or can be loaded from any Excel file with necessary data.
“Processing” is a type of 1С program expanding the standard configuration capabilities. Processing operations are often used to load data from the file into the 1С base in the required format, such as Excel, delimited text format, xml, so that documents, postings and manual records could be created in the base. Generally, the user chooses the right file (in Excel or Word) on the processing form, fills in additional particulars and loads data from the chosen document. Then the accountant checks if everything has been loaded and if there are any file errors, and posts the documents after the check. Thus, the accountant does not have to fill in hundreds of lines manually. It seems that there is nothing complex about it, but such automation of routine operations makes life considerably easy.
Loading data from the advance report accounting service is one of such processing operations. Employees can fill in advance reports themselves from anywhere in the world. The accountant checks and confirms the advance reports entered. The confirmed documents are uploaded into the file that can be then loaded automatically or manually into the 1С base. If a company has a lot of employees and, consequently, advance reports, such processing greatly reduces the amount of work. In case of automatic loading, the accountant does not participate in the process: every morning the service sends the file and the system loads it itself.
International institutions whose legal entities are located all over the world use the Hyperion (HFM) system to consolidate their corporate accounting. In this case, the subsidiary accountant has to manually prepare a file with corporate accounting data every month. Since the details of local corporate accounting can differ from the those of consolidated data, the accountant may have to perform additional report processing work. It is often time-consuming. Processing to upload the data into HFM enables automatic generation of such file.
AUTOMATING GENERATION OF ACCOUNTING POSTINGS
Computer-assisted data entry using OCR helps optimize processing of transaction documents. OCR is an optical character tracing technology that recognizes handwritten or printed text and converts it into ready text data on a computer. The OCR technology considerably facilitates generation of accounting postings due to automation of the entry of data from the documents received from suppliers into the 1С accounting system.
The traditional posting generation process requires manual entry of data from the documents sent by suppliers (invoices, certificates, VAT invoices, etc.). It takes a lot of time, as to display the financial transaction in 1C, the accountant has to transfer all information, such as the name of the supplier, commodity nomenclature, amounts and VAT amount, themselves.
The OCR technology substantially cuts the data entry time: interacting with the 1С system, it recognizes scanned copies of documents, allocates them into one of the four categories, such as invoice, certificate, delivery note or VAT invoice, and creates a digitized version of the paper document that can already be “posted” or accounted for by generation of the accounting posting. As an additional advantage, OCR can “collect” documents from the transmitter’s website, which saves even more time for processing of paper media.
However, the OCR system is limited by a small number of document types that it can handle, namely the above listed invoice, certificate, delivery note and VAT invoice. Normally, a wide variety of documents, such as agreements, additional agreements, offers, etc., are used during interaction with suppliers.
RECONCILIATION OF INDICATORS FOR REPORT PREPARATION
Cash flow statement is another useful feature of 1С. Standard reports provide total payment amounts, and to generate VAT reports one needs to understand at what rates the payment was effected and what the payment VAT amount is. The cash flow statement singles out the rate and the VAT amount from the payment data and, therefore, decreases the time for “clearing” the total amount of the taxes. It is much easier for the accountant to prepare a VAT return: the employee handles ready data, in particular the rate breakdown and total amounts. The report allows finding accounting errors, so the VAT return reconciliation and completion process becomes far less difficult.
The accountant often needs to make sure that certain indicators in the income tax return and the VAT return coincide. If amounts in the two reports differ, then some errors have been made in accounting or when preparing the reports. Tax inspectors look at those indicators and reconcile them; if they do not coincide — it is a red flag to perform a more detailed check. Processing to reconcile indicators of the two returns may materially curtail the workload, and the specialist will not have to meticulously verify figures in the two reports — a computer will do it for them.
CORPORATE ACCOUNTING MODULES
One more auxiliary tool for the accountant is settings for maintaining corporate accounting under IFRS and GAAP standards — they may be bought or developed independently. Otherwise, corporate reports will be generated manually. Such settings resemble a construction kit that sets up the rules for translation of RAS postings into the corporate accounting system and eventually generates reports in a simple form when indicators are calculated and added to each other. If more complex reports are required, they are tailored for each client.
When setting up corporate accounting, it should always be borne in mind that there is a distinction between Russian accounting and corporate accounting of the client. Due to the difference between them, corporate reports cannot always be produced manually using RAS data. If the discrepancies are significant, additional modules should be applied.
A design organization easily exemplifies the inconvenience occurring due to the difference in accounting. In Russian accounting, the company cannot recognize the revenue until it signs the certificate with the client. In IFRS, on the contrary, the project completion percentage is calculated every month and the revenue is recognized in accounting even before the client signs the certificate. So, the revenue amount and the recognition period are different. The same may be true for expenses in Russian accounting: expenses incurred in February are recognized in corporate accounting as expenses for January. It is very hard to collect all that data manually.
For some clients, such as remote warehouses and online shops, there is an additional option to set up exchange of documents without extra operations on uploading or downloading data (orders, delivery notes, VAT invoices, etc.). For example, people buy something in online shops, and information on such actions goes to 1С. Colleagues see those orders, generate shipping documents and then send them all to the delivery services.
Such accounting optimization tools make it possible to drastically cut the time for loading and processing of documents and to shorten the cost of the company’s work. Instead of spending two hours for processing a file, an employee will do it in two minutes, redistributing the freed-up time for more important tasks.
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