Challenging with heavy spreadsheets

Axer Eiendom manages and develops properties through a number of large real estate projects. As an accounting controller, Plaha is responsible for ensuring the quality of the accounts, both by reviewing the work of the accountant and by providing professional support.

- Our goal is to have the best possible internal control, so that there are no significant errors in the accounts when the companies are made public and used as a basis for decision-making by users, Plaha explains.

But maintaining good internal control isn’t always easy. Plaha points out that the range of issues in the real estate industry, both tax- and accounting-related, in various companies presents challenges when it comes to balancing quality and efficiency.

- The more manual work we do, the greater the chance for errors. Excel isn’t made for balance reconciliations, even though it’s the most commonly used tool for this purpose, she explains.
It becomes a cost/benefit question, and we saw the benefit of moving away from Excel.

Do you want to remove manual reconciliation work? Click here!

Time savings and control

Plaha describes a new way of working with Accountflow. Now they can trust that the figures they base their decisions on are accurate.

- For us, moving from Excel, this is absolutely fantastic, especially with bank reconciliation. Now we no longer have to sit with the bank statement on one side and the ERP system on the other, manually checking off each transaction one by one. All we need to do in Accountflow is press the auto-reconcile button. It’s a major upgrade from how we worked before!

Plaha further explains that accountants save a lot of time by consolidating reconciliation and documentation in one system. They experience less double work and minimize the chance of making data entry errors between spreadsheets and the system. The biggest change is no longer having to work manually, copying and pasting from the financial system into spreadsheets.

- We have a large portfolio of companies, and each company previously had its own spreadsheet, which was stored in different folders in different locations on the server. If you needed to find information from the past, you had to search through another Excel file for the period in question and look backward in time.

Time savings and simplification of the reconciliation process were the most important factors when Axer decided to go with Accountflow. In addition, the fact that the company was a startup was a positive, as Axer could help shape the system.

- It’s great to be able to provide suggestions and requests to Accountflow. In large, pre-built systems, you can’t influence the system to the same degree, she concludes.