NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Abacus, the real-time expense management pioneer, today introduced an automatic accrual accounting feature that ensures expenses are recorded in the month incurred or earliest open month, regardless of when they are filed. With this new feature, businesses now have more accurate insight into cash flow and profitability, and will be able to make more informed decisions about future spending. As Abacus increasingly serves larger organizations, it is imperative for the company to enable businesses to align their expense management practices with the rest of their organization’s accrual approach, the most commonly used accounting method.
Accrual accounting is the standard accounting practice for many companies, providing the most accurate picture of the company's profitability. Most expense management software solutions on the market are unable to offer an automated accrual sync because they still rely on a traditional “expense report” to capture and record information. Due to the lag time and format, important expense data gets trapped inside arbitrary silos and restricts finance teams to only syncing expense data into their accounting software on a cash basis, sometimes spanning many months rather than when the expense is incurred. Companies that want to ensure expenses are accounted for under the accrual method must do so manually, requiring hours of time on spent on data entry.
By introducing the accrual accounting feature, Abacus now automatically ensures each expense is recorded when incurred regardless of when it is submitted or processed. It is also able to record each individual expense on exactly the right date, referencing the vendor, client, class or any other custom field that is important for a particular company to track.
Sift Science, the leader in advanced automated machine learning fraud detection and prevention software, has been using Abacus for real-time expense management for over a year and recently began leveraging the accrual accounting feature to automatically align its expense data to the appropriate period. “Connecting the dots between expenses and the resulting revenue used to be extremely difficult,” said Samir Rao, finance manager at Sift Science. “The timeline for when expenses are incurred, paid and recorded all happen months apart from each other. The addition of the accrual accounting feature in Abacus allows us to quickly and easily see through this cash flow chaos to understand our real-time position.”
Another Abacus customer, Kruze Consulting, has also seen value from the accrual accounting sync. Kruze, a leading startup-focused accounting and finance CPA firm, has been using Abacus for real-time expense management for over a year and recently began leveraging the accrual accounting feature to automatically align its expense data to the appropriate period. "Abacus takes the pain out of expense reporting,” said Vanessa Kruze, founder and CEO at Kruze Consulting. “The app is a joy for everyone from the employee to the CEO to use, and now that they have a seamless accrual accounting sync, it fits perfectly into how our clients expect us to manage their accounting.”
“Employee expenses are not only often the largest cost center in a company, but also the hardest to collect data on given that the entire organization must coordinate to effectively gather and record this information,” said Omar Qari, co-founder, Abacus. “Our customers felt like they were operating with blindfolds on, only being able to sync expense data into accounting software on a cash basis. Accrual accounting capabilities eliminate that challenge and put finance teams in a far better position to both understand their profitability and make more informed future spending decisions by knowing what levers to pull.”
Users are able to select between using an accrual accounting method or the existing cash flow accounting basis. The feature is now available to all Abacus customers using QuickBooks Online, with additional accounting software platforms to quickly follow. For more information about these platforms, please email us.
About Abacus
Abacus is replacing the expense report with the
first real-time employee expense solution. By leveraging the data
collected as expenses are submitted, managers get instant visibility
into employee spend. Abacus processes next-day reimbursements, enforces
your expense policy, reconciles corporate cards and syncs with your
accounting software. Businesses like Foursquare, Greenhouse and
Pinterest use Abacus to simplify their expense management.
