Is your accrual management process efficient and accurate, or is holding your organization back from growing and scaling?
Accrual accounting is a key financial accounting method where revenue or expenses are recorded when a transaction occurs rather than when a payment is received or made. This method is usually compared to another popular and less complex accounting method, cash accounting, which records when goods and services are actually paid for.
Accrual accounting gives business leaders a more holistic view of the company’s financial status, effectively matching revenue with expense. However, this process demands more rigorous management and scrutiny, as it is often more complex than cash accounting.
That’s why we’re sharing 4 ways to evaluate your accrual management process. Whether you’re a seasoned expert or relatively new to this, these insights will get you started on your journey to a more efficient and accurate accounting process.
1. Data Accuracy
Ensuring data accuracy within your fleet expenses is paramount to identifying saving opportunities, preventing fraud, and making more informed business decisions. Does your current process automatically collect vital transaction data in real-time?
Car IQ automatically captures crucial data in real-time through a mobile frictionless driver experience. From VIN, vehicle ID, location, odometer, and unit number information to fuel tank capacity, fuel spend, available funds, and driver details, our technology extends your vehicle system of intelligences, increasing the value and ROI of your telematics deployment to improve data accuracy and integrity while securing fleet transactions.
2. Timing and Frequency
Are your fleet managers wasting precious time by waiting for reports to generate by external third parties? Struggling without a single source of truth? Spending countless hours correlating data across spend, vehicle, telematics, and scheduling data that all live in different databases with multiple credit lines?
The timing and frequency of financial reports can make or break decision-making processes. Consider creating a single view to create visibility into all vehicle transactions across all drivers and categories. This will enable your fleet managers to easily calculate the total cost of ownership across all fleet spend categories.
3. Internal Controls
Internal controls are vital for protecting against theft and skimming but can be a challenge to enforce and monitor. By implementing a solution such as Car IQ that allows you to set smart controls, you can eliminate skimming and card theft. Set rules based on merchants, spending caps, or day / time controls to mitigate risk and prevent fraud. And with detailed insights into fuel take capacity, fuel levels, and the amount of fuel leaving from the merchant’s pump, you have increased visibility into actionable data that will help you make more informed business decisions.
4. Technology Solutions
Manual reconciliation processes are prone to human error, fraud, and inefficiency, making it difficult to effectively scale your business. Traditional methods involve painstakingly matching transactions, cross-referencing various paper documents or spreadsheets, and manually verifying every entry. Remember that not all technology solutions are created equal, though.
By automating data collection and providing a single ledger for all transactions, Car IQ is setting the standard for modern fleet management. With insights into real-time spending habits, Car IQ helps you streamline the accrual management process, reducing the risk of fraud and human error while improving overall data accuracy.
These are just a few of the common fleet card policies that companies often have to create, communicate, and enforce. As you can see, fleet card management can quickly become complex, potentially disrupting operations and burdening the management team.
Fuel Your Fleet with Car IQ
Managing your fleet doesn’t have to be a headache. At Car IQ, we use real-time vehicle data to enable payment transactions, eliminate fraud, and streamline the reconciliation process with one single ledger across your entire fleet—all without the hassles of credit cards.
Interested? Let’s start a conversion today.
