7 Retail Accounting Functions You Should Integrate Today

If your retail operations are going to be profitable and efficient, you need to integrate your accounting procedures into your operations management solution. At a minimum, you should incorporate the following seven accounting functions in order to keep your retail chain profitable and growing.

1. Inventory management– At the heart of any retail operation is its inventory. You cannot have a retail operation if you have no inventory. How you manage your inventory is paramount of the success of your operation. Simple procedures such as spot checking bar codes and serial numbers make accounting for your inventory easy over time. Plus, being able to manage your inventory across your chain from a centralized location means your entire accounting operation can be held accountable.
2. Expense allocation – In order to know which stores are turning a profit, you need a simple way to allocate all expenses to each store–from overhead, to payroll expenses, to merchandise purchases.
3. Commissions – Capturing your sales associates’ commissions at the point of sale will go a long way to streamlining all of your accounting procedures, but especially your payroll operations. And if you connect this data with your payroll provider, it will be even more streamlined.
4. Invoice matching – Being able to match invoices with purchase orders is a necessary function so you can make sure your vendors are paid on time and you account for every bit of merchandise your order.
5. Bank reconciliation – When you can automatically reconcile your bank accounts with all of your ongoing accounting procedures, that will save your accounting department a lot of time and ensure that your bookkeeping is kept up to date and accurate.
6. Lease management – Some of your most important expenses are those related to property leases. Each store location likely has its own lease agreement, and being able to manage those from one centralized location means that your entire retail operation is streamlined. You’ll also be able to keep an accurate accounting of expenses for each store location.
7. Multi-company management – In this day of massive consolidation, you need to be able to manage multiple retail operations efficiently. ChainDrive is capable of helping you manage all of your retail operations from one solution while keeping them separate and your accounting procedures streamlined.

This is just a start. When you integrate your entire accounting department into your operations, you’ll be more efficient, more effective, and more profitable.