Companies across the board are finding it harder and harder to handle their in-house finance needs while still maintaining the newly required transparency that has been increasingly demanded by the public. The public wants to know more and more of the financial information of the corporations that are publicly funded in one way or another.
While it makes sense that people would have a vetted interest in the financial details of a company before purchasing stock, this increased demand for information has been putting a major strain on most companies. Ashraf Elkotaney from Accounting Today states, “Financial reporting is increasingly complex, and many companies find it challenging to comply with the disclosure requirements of the standards while providing readers with information that is meaningful and understandable.”
New Global Accounting Standards
The International Financial Reporting Standards, or IFRS, are a set of principles, designed by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). The idea is to create a global standard for accounting in major corporations. When companies from all over the world utilize the same reports and financial standards, it will make it easier for better trade of products and services.
International Business Benefits
The push to make international trading easier and less complex is a goal that many can stand to gain from, including businesses and consumers all over the world. The new access to needed products can help some nations adopt a higher standard of health and living. Access to cheaper products for other countries can lower the national tax demands and can make the market a lot more reasonable in pricing.
The added bonus of being able to connect with new vendors that can make transportation and communication easier with new global markets creates some incredible opportunities for many big corporations who have been waiting for the right time to take their organizations international.
The IFRS will streamline the process of investigating potential partners in business and areas of investment. Bringing businesses up to these standards, however, is a whole different story. It is one thing to demand a certain level of transparency and organization, and another thing to actually put those demands into practice in a company that has never handled such document storage and retrieval of this nature.
DMS Technology to the Rescue
As companies are working to get to the new IFRS standards, it can be helpful to begin the transition with the right tools. Document management software can be very helpful in creating the right format for the document storage techniques that are demanded under the new IFRS ruling.
Publicly traded companies in most of the big business hub countries of the world have adopted the IFRS demands for public reporting. This can be very helpful when potential investors are looking at the possible options. Easy comparison is only possible when each company lists the same information in the same way.
A DMS program can help to organize information in a certain way that will make it easy to process, simple to read, and be compliant with all IASB demands on your corporate transparency. Trying to store so many documents in any other way could easily lead to mistakes. Using this program will take away much of the risk of human error.
Document Storage Standards
Another area of business that has been affected by these new standards has to do with the retention and destruction of certain information. There are new rules set out about which documents can be destroyed after a certain amount of time, and which ones must remain in place for public scrutiny at any time.
Having a good DMS program in place will make it much easier to comply with such sensitive standards that deal with sensitive data. Britney Pay with eFileCabinet states: “A DMS like eFileCabinet, for example, allows businesses to automate the deletion, movement, or archival of certain files at certain times. So, if the IFRS requires your business to keep a certain financial reporting document on hand for five years, you could configure eFileCabinet to delete that file automatically on a date five years in the future. You could also tell the system when to move the file from an accessible folder into an archive drawer if such a transfer were necessary.”
The basic controls can be put into the DMS of your choice, and it will handle the retention and deletion of the documents at the times that are fully compliant with these standards.
Easier Compliance with the Right Tools
In the end, the IFRS is something that probably affects your company without you even realizing it. It is now nearly impossible to do business overseas without dealing with this set of strict standards. Compliance with these rules can be hard to maintain without the right tools.
A good DMS program will make this task a lot easier. A few hours of programming to get things in place is all that will be needed. Once this programming happens, the rest will fall into place without your input on anything.