3 Benefits of an Integrated Financial Management System

With these three core benefits in mind, it should be a whole lot easier to convince your executive team or board of directors to seek out an AMS that integrates with your primary financial management system.
With these three core benefits in mind, it should be a whole lot easier to convince your executive team or board of directors to seek out an AMS that integrates with your primary financial management system.

By The Protech Team

Great association management software enhances the member experience and streamlines event management, but it also offers major benefits for your accounting team… if your financial management system is integrated with your AMS.

So, why is an AMS so important to the accounting department? Improved data accuracy and healthier financials.

By connecting your preferred financial management system with an AMS, you’re also connecting the accounting team with a significant amount of data relevant to member transactions with the association. Instead of working in data silos, your membership and accounting teams should be able to work together to promote strong data integrity.

Need to convince someone at your professional or trade association that it’s time to harness the power of an AMS to easily integrate with your financial management system? Here are three of the biggest benefits:

Automation for Increased Efficiency

In recent years, the number of automated procedures across a business has grown exponentially. The same can be said for accounting.

According to the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, 55 percent of C-level executives expect intelligent, automated accounting systems to have a major impact on business over the next 3 to 10 years. Why is that the case? Probably due to the increased data accuracy that automation can bring.

In the case of trade and professional associations that are using an AMS, you can certainly export or import data manually with decent results. But then you’d lose the efficiency and accuracy of automated procedures that more than half of C-level executives expect to provide significant benefits in the coming years.

Clean Data and Visible Audit Trails

No one likes errors or duplication of effort.

Unfortunately, approximately half of companies believe those issues are caused by human error, according to Experian. One solution to cutting down on errors? Integrate your financial management system with your AMS and take advantage of automated procedures.

The seamless integration will not only reduce errors, but also provide a complete audit trail of transactions, which is particularly important come audit season.

Reconciliation and Data Integrity

As the financial management experts already know, trade and professional associations recognize some revenue streams on a modified cash basis, while others are noted as accruals. This modified cash basis accounting can lead to a difficult reconciliation process.

Whether your association recognizes membership revenue annually or spreads it throughout the year, the flexible configuration of an AMS can simplify the reconciliation process and increase accuracy. Also, elasticity within the AMS can be used to recognize event registration revenue in the month an event takes place, rather than the month it was received.

With these three core benefits in mind, it should be a whole lot easier to convince your executive team or board of directors to seek out association management software that integrates with your primary financial management system. After all, your association leaders wouldn’t want to be among the 65 percent of executives without a high level of trust in the way their organization uses its data.