Brittany Paris
August 13th, 2020
2 Min Read
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“The trades are a daily business, so accounting needs to match the cadence of the business.”
—Svamal De Fonseka, Michael and Son Services
As a business, you must maintain accurate financials—but do so as efficiently as possible. Fortunately, ServiceTitan software integrates with QuickBooks and Intacct to provide comprehensive reporting you can easily compare and use to validate accounting accuracy.
Svamal De Fonseka, Revenue Accounting Manager at Michael and Son Services in Alexandria, Va., provided tips and tricks for more effectively validating a service company’s financials in a virtual session during Pantheon 2020, ServiceTitan’s annual conference for the trades. Here are some key takeaways:
1. Treat month-end close as an ongoing activity.
Stay on top of accounting to make reconciling the books quicker at the end of each month. By setting up regular auto batches in ServiceTitan, you can greatly improve reporting efficiency. “It’s so much easier to deal with something the day after, then try and deal with it the week after or a month later, especially given the volume,” De Fonseka said. “The trades are a daily business, so accounting needs to match the cadence of the business.”
2. ServiceTitan should be a source of truth for revenue and payment info.
De Fonseka recommends building scheduled reports in ServiceTitan, delivered right to your inbox on a daily or weekly basis, so you can catch mistakes immediately. Export those reports to your accounting software to make sure the totals match for all revenue and payment totals. Outstanding Accounts Receivable (AR) and Revenue are two accounting reports De Fonseka runs daily. “That’s how you know if a tech accidentally marked a job as billing now, instead of later. Maybe a credit card payment failed, or the customer refused to pay,” De Fonseka said. “Review revenue daily to give you a good idea how well you’re performing and see if something doesn’t look right.”
3. Process refunds immediately.
When initiating a refund in ServiceTitan, you must go in and manually enter a negative payment. “Enter them as soon as you process it,” De Fonseka said. “Those things take a couple of seconds when you do it right away, but saves you minutes—even hours—when closing books. You need to know what your AR total is and if you’ve accidentally given someone free money.”
