The AIS for my current company is not bad, in my opinion. There are things
that could be worked on, but for now it works for us. Currently we use
Sharepoint to store all of our accounting information (invoices, payments and
such). This allows for anyone who needs access to have access. Access to
specific information is restricted. For example, I am not in payroll (AP
Accountant) so I have no access to employees payrates, bank account
information, etc. We use Unanet for all of our accounting and timekeeping.
We recently transitioned to this, and I am still learning it so I cannot speak to
the ease of use/confidentiality of it. We have run into some issues. Anyone
working with taxes, knows that it is time for companies to send out W2s and
1099s for the prior year. In order to send these 1099s, we need the EIN or TIN
for the person/company. This is typically found on the W9 when the company
or person begins doing work for us. I recently began working through the W9s
in order to get the EINs needed for the 1099s to be sent out, and discovered
that we are missing quite a few W9s for companies that we have paid this
year. That shouldn’t happen. For most companies, a W9 should be requested
and stored somewhere for any company that is paid. I am not sure where the
ball was dropped, but it fell into my lap to fix.
There are a few things I would change with the AIS/accounting in my
workplace. Currently, as we are 3 companies that just merged into one, we are
working off 3 different accounting emails. As such, we have to check each of
these and hope that things are not missed. Additionally, in this transition
phase, a few of us are working on the same things at the same time. This can
lead to either duplicate invoices being entered, or invoices being missed
because one of us assumes someone else is handling it. Personally, I also do
not like sharepoint. Maybe it is because I am used to things like onedrive and
dropbox, but sharepoint seems difficult to manage and it can be easy to get
around access restrictions if given enough time and effort. We also rely
heavily on individuals to turn in receipts for expenses, and when those
receipts are lost/no turned in, that can cause issues. Specifically for audits. As
I said, we recently transitioned to a new accounting system, and to one entity
instead of three. There is a likelihood that some of these issues will be fixed,
until then we just do the best we can.
