Accounting can become pretty complicated and hard for business owners. Especially when you start looking into complex elements of accounting like lease accounting, or where the business kicks up into another gear and you find your time is too stretched to do it effectively. At this time, a lot of business owners might hire an accountant, while some will look at accounting software to help streamline the process. NetSuite, by Oracle, is an example of this helpful software and here, we’re going to look at how it can help your business.
What Is NetSuite
It’s probably one of, or the most well known accounting software solution on the market, at least in the USA. You can do a lot in NetSuite, so no matter how complex your accounting is, it can probably handle it. One of the only deviances here is with complex elements of accountancy like lease accounting.
Netsuite is also pretty popular because the customer support is epic and they can usually sort out any problems you may have pretty quickly. This is quite the plus point because there can be some really annoying aspects to accounting that can be hard to translate to accounting software.
How Can It Help Your Business
NetSuite, along with other types of accounting software, can help you and your business hugely. It’s all about time. If you’ve got the time to dedicate to properly accounting for your income and expenditure, then great. However, if you’d rather spend time on actually running the business and securing new clients, you might need accounting software to help you along the way.
Being able to automate and plug numbers into software and watch it work everything out for you is pretty impressive. There are some elements of accounting, like lease accounting, that NetSuite might struggle with due to the new lease accounting guidelines but in general, if you want to save some time, aside from hiring an accountant, NetSuite can be great for you and your business. There is a slight learning curve with the software but once you’ve actually gotten your head around it, you won’t know how you coped before installing it. Again, if you run into snags they do have good customers service…and there is also a tonne of third party help online if needed.
NetSuite and Lease Accounting
NetSuite can be great for multiple elements of accounting and save you time, however there can be certain elements of accounting that it isn’t so good at. Unfortunately lease accounting can be one of them. Lease accounting has undergone a change recently where the old lease accounting standard, ASC 840, has made room for the new accounting standard, ASC 842. Unfortunately, when accounting for leases in NetSuite it becomes obvious that it doesn’t natively offer the right functionality. There is, of course, different accounting software you can use to supplement NetSuite and ensure it’s all working properly.
If leases aren’t a huge part of your business, you might be able to just account for them manually and add the data in later. However, if your business is lease oriented, either as lessor or lessee, you’ll probably want to make sure that NetSuite properly ties in with your lease accounting efforts too.
