Accounting Seed has unveiled the latest release of its ERP solution on the Salesforce Platform, Magnolia. Enterprise Times spoke with Mitch Gerwin, Solutions Engineer at Accounting Seed, about Magnolia. The release is the first of three iterations. This first iteration provides a new multi-entity engine for Accounting Seed. It also delivers a new consolidation functionality for customers. There are also several other updates included in the release.
At the heart of this update is the ability to better consolidate financials. When asked what his favourite part of this update is. Gerwin explained,
“Consolidations! I am very excited about this, for our customers and for the sales cycle, to be able to let them know that this is something that we’re going to have out of the box and just progressing in this phased approach. I’m excited to get this completed.”
The foundation for Multi-X support
Accounting Seed already supports multiple entity organisations. However, this release sees a re-architecture of the accounting solution that will provide better support for complex organisations going forward.
With the first iteration of Magnolia, Gerwin explained, Accounting Seed introduces elimination ledgers. Each entity will have an elimination ledger to record into entity journals. The change will enable customers to use out of the box financial reports to run consolidated financial statements.
The first iteration does not support automated elimination entries, but the basis will enable Accounting Seed to add this in a future release. It means that for companies requiring multiple intercompany journals, the basis to automate many of these is now in place.
Gerwin explained further, “This first iteration is only going to support ledger’s or subsidiaries that all operate in something like USD. It’ll go ahead and handle that. It’s not going to handle anything like refactoring from a base currency standpoint to the parent company’s currency to run these consolidated financials. That’s something that we can still support right now.
“What we’re doing with that is pushing it into Excel and after the reports have been run. From there, we’re doing the refactoring in Excel. That’s obviously not ideal, and that’s why this is very important to us. But this is a phased approach to ultimately completing what we’re looking to do here for our clients.”
Gerwin clarified that although multicurrency consolidation is on the roadmap, it will not happen in the next two iterations of Magnolia, but a future release.
Another benefit of the elimination ledger is that it will also simplify the process for consolidation to the main corporate entities, rolling up transactions to the master elimination ledger and accounts.
Is this a major change for customers?
This is not a simple update. Enterprise Times asked Gerwin if the new ledgers are set up automatically?
“There’s going to have to be some interaction with our product support team to do that once they get upgraded to Magnolia.”
Would that be chargeable?
“With areas like this, in the past, this has just been covered under our free support. When we changed to header level posting from line-level posting, this was covered in our free support. A lot of this is going to be just around setting up the ledger hierarchy. These are going to be fields on the ledger object that we never previously had before.
“We do a really good job with release notes and putting out instructions on how to do this. That’s all going to be available to our customer base, who will want to take advantage of this functionality. Of course, with any questions, they can utilise our free support.”
Other updates
The consolidation capability is the only major change in this release. However, there are several noteworthy smaller feature improvements, including:
- Bank Direct Connect: Accounting Seed now surfaces information from the source record where bank transactions are not automatically matched.
- Bank Reconciliation: The ability to confirm whether the user wishes to clear or unclear all reconciliations. A new business rule requires the date on a Journal Entry Line to be less than or equal to the journal date on the journal entry.
- Several bug fixes: It includes a change to the bank direct connect file import. The date limit is removed, but the maximum number of transactions in a single file is 500.
Enterprise times: What does this mean
This is a significant update for Accounting Seed. It will certainly help existing customers expand as they add or already have added additional subsidiaries. Core to this update is the consolidation capability that the new ledgers provide. For multi-entity companies, this will save significant time.
With an increasing number of companies also looking to expand internationally, it also promises a future where companies can leverage Accounting Seed across their global operations. It is not there yet, but this certainly offers the promise of what might be possible in the future.
The key is how quickly AccountingSeed can roll out the remaining iterations of Magnolia and then look to support multiple ledgers in different base companies. Gerwin indicated that this might happen later in 2022. That will be a key step forward for AccountingSeed, but Magnolia is the foundation upon which that can be built.
This release is less like the flower Magnolia and more like the paint. It provides the base upon which Accounting Seed can add something far more colourful and interesting. However, it would have been much harder to create the sophistication that Accounting Seed and its customers increasingly desire without that base layer.
