Why businesses are turning to unified ledgers for help during the COVID-19 lockdown

Untitled design 62 | Why businesses are turning to unified ledgers for help during the COVID-19 lockdown
By Toby Lester | 23rd April 2020 | 7 min read

During the current government-mandated lockdown, it’s more important than ever for organisations to manage their mission-critical processes. However, when you’re stuck at home miles away from your office systems, this can be a tall order. 

During the current government-mandated lockdown, it’s more important than ever for organisations to manage their mission-critical processes. However, when you’re stuck at home miles away from your office systems, this can be a tall order.

Fortunately, there’s a solution that many are now turning to – unified ledger accounting.

Why do I need a unified ledger

Unified ledgers do away with the traditional three-ledger system – and with it, a lot of the day-to-day mission-critical tasks.

As new entries come into the ledger, they’re automatically consolidated and kept in balance. With a powerful unified ledger system such as IRIS Financials, you also benefit from simplified, accurate reporting. As all your financial data is stored in the same location, you can drill down and gain insight that would otherwise be impossible.

Most importantly during the current lockdown, you can access powerful automation tools. It’s possible to greatly reduce your period end work and even automate complex tasks such as month-end cost allocations.

But how do you gain access to a unified ledger system and get it online when you can’t visit the office?

Getting started with remote implementation

Ordinarily, you’d have a full on-site implementation for a system like IRIS Financials. However, since it’s not going to be possible to do that for the foreseeable future, this won’t be practical.

We’ve been working hard to instead offer our customers a remote implementation service that covers all needs.

Talking to one of our own IRIS project managers, it’s clear that modern online collaboration tools and video calls enable us to offer a thorough design and analysis process while setting up new customers. Our team feels that in the future, we may move to a remote implementation process for all new customers as it’s more productive and reduces costs all around.

We recently walked a new customer, Bolton Cares, through a remote implementation of our cloud-based IRIS Financials software, and it’s already making a huge difference to their remote working capabilities.

Remote implementation can be as quick or even quicker than traditional on-site implementation. Lisa Antoni, finance audit and resources manager at Bolton Cares, said “We thought it would be difficult to achieve, but working jointly with the IRIS Financials team, we managed to go live on the planned date of the 1st of April.”

If you’re interested in a remote implementation of IRIS Financials’ market-leading unified ledger software for your organisation, feel free to contact us at any time.