Automating finance, so you can focus on your business

Real estate and construction leaders and owners have a lot of demands placed on them. You have the potential to gain from major activities and projects, but you also have a lot of back-office tasks, and have to be purposeful with your time and resources.

The accounting and finance function especially can prove to be cumbersome and time consuming.

Challenges in managing the finance function

From receipts piling up, payments and invoicing, to managing cash flows, the real estate and construction industry has significant financial management requirements. The COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated challenges such as:

• Ensuring payments are coming in on time
• Paying suppliers on time
• Invoicing efficiently
• Seeing cash flow in real time, especially with costs going up
• Filing receipts on the go
• Tax and GST or HST planning

Not only do you have to deal with fluctuating prices, shortage of labour, and demand for services, but you’re also making critical business decisions based on information that requires a lot of work to obtain accurately. Often, decisions are delayed or not to your satisfaction based on the information you have, because you don’t have the time or staff to do it.

That’s where cloud and digital solutions come in. The applications that make up your back office, and how they play into your decision making, are a critical factor in your organization's success. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated change in the industry, and increased the need for cloud solutions with efficient and remote on-the-go access becoming essential.

Cloud-based solutions can be of help

For real estate and construction companies, specific departmental solutions are significantly more valuable than large and often unnecessary enterprise-wide solutions. And nowhere does the need for back office solutions become as necessary as it does in the area of finance, accounting, and bookkeeping.

Having well-organized and planned finances are essential to success in the industry today. A smoothly operating finance function ensures that time is not spent on manual and retroactive tasks, and helps you stay focused on projects and growth.

Some of the benefits of having a robust finance solution are:

• Identifying and capitalizing on opportunities
• Streamlining accounts receivables and payables
• Organizing business expenses and income
• Improving customer experience through timely and efficient invoicing
• Saving time by automating manual processes, so you can allocate time and resources towards other critical aspects of your business

The right solution can help you from end to end — all the way from daily cash flows through to strategic business planning.

A cloud solution with human expertise: ease

The right finance, accounting, and bookkeeping solutions can help you build the business bottom line, and make critical decisions a lot more timely. They are a value-added investment—when done well.

It’s important to keep in mind that the information you get from a software solution is only as good as your ability to act on it. You need human expertise and knowledge to interpret the data. This allows you to make key decisions with confidence and understand how those choices impact your business moving forward.

Yet, resource constraints often mean you cannot get a senior level of dedicated finance expertise in-house. That’s where an experienced advisor comes in. Along with the right cloud software, our ease solution comes with a large and seasoned team, with a deep understanding of your industry and your business. You get personalized one-on-one service from the right advisor, who can react very quickly, and can proactively help you identify and resolve issues.

You get a modern accounting and bookkeeping solution on the Xero or QBO platform, along with the help of a business advisor from MNP. We help you make sense of the data and develop action plans based on the information in the system. This allows you to make decisions with confidence and understand how those choices impact your business moving forward.

Our business advisor is your point person on a fractional basis, and makes getting expertise more economical than having the full-time resource in-house. While a digital solution can help you streamline operations, an advisor can steer your organization in the right direction, and the incremental cost of an advisor adds significantly greater value.

When you look for back office solutions, it’s easy to fall into the feature trap — features you pay for but aren’t what you needed most. Our team can guide you on the solution that is right for you, and help deliver on the most important factors for your organization to enable your success.

View a video on how our ease solution on the Xero platform helped Brad Dodds of Dodds Building and Contracting here.

For a deeper conversation on how our ease solution may be right for you, please contact:

Shayne Dueck, CPA, CA
National Leader, Client Accounting and Bookkeeping Services
[email protected]
306.664.8315