AcctTwo Blog

Increasingly, the CFO and finance leaders in growth SaaS companies are the business model architects for analyzing and guiding the success of the company. 

ACCOUNTING TODAY--Sage Intacct plans to radically change audit. Audit is about to undergo a radical change, and Sage Intacct plans to spearhead it.“Radical change” means just that: Audit will not be what it always has been," said Aaron Harris, senior vice president and head of engineering and technology, in a keynote at Sage Intacct's annual user conference, being held this week in Nashville. Audit now is “after the fact, time-consuming and expensive — all just to gain some confidence that the controls are working and the numbers are correct.” 

The reason we conduct auditing on a cycle is because there has never been another way. It takes significant time and labor to compile the necessary accounting data and ample resources to ensure the audit is complete and correct. The overall amount of input necessary means that auditing always has to stop after starting.

In April 2016, we at AcctTwo participated in the Tech-Savvy CFO Seminar Series, an extension of the Tech-Savvy CFO concept conceived by Intacct and Brian Sommer of TechVentive, a leading industry analyst and forward-thinker. In his presentation, Brian talked about the changing nature of accounting, the rise of big data, the move to the cloud for technology, and what the future will likely hold for CFOs, CPAs, and accounting departments. 

For financial professionals, independent external audits of GAAP financial statements are an inescapable reality. For public companies, it’s a statutory requirement under SEC regulations and for many fast-growing private companies, it’s a necessity to meet the demands of lenders, VCs, and other stakeholders. There is even a possibility that the IRS could require a financial statement audit as part of a broader tax audit.

Scouring the web, there's a lot of information out there about the new FASB/IASB Revenue Recognition Standards, also known as Topic ASC 606, published in May of last year. This new standard will have great impact on software, and particularly Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), companies' accounting practices and business processes.

Whoa! What a headline! As with many news stories (and blog articles) it sounds worse (or more interesting) than it probably really is. But the truth is that one company - Vista Equity Partners - was in the process of buying another company - Tibco Software Inc - and that as the deal was being finalized, somebody produced a spreadsheet that double-counted Tibco's restricted stock as both "equity awards" and "common stock". This inflated the company's value from $4.1 billion to $4.2 billion. The mistake was corrected in the end and didn't affect the share price or sink the deal altogether, but it did mean that Tibco shareholders got $100 million less than expected.

For thriving businesses, the initial public offering (IPO) is a major milestone, as your company receives a capital infusion and undergoes a far greater degree of financial scrutiny from auditors, regulators, and investors. In most respects, the reporting, process, and control burdens fall on the shoulders of the CFO, controller, and the rest of the finance team. And those responsibilities begin well before the watershed date when shares are traded for the first time.