By Kristin Karnes, VP of Customer Support

If you use Qvinci or have spent any time working with Qvinci staffers, you’ve almost certainly encountered our special and unique acronym: SCoA.

SCoA stands for Standard Chart of Accounts and it’s our patented secret sauce, the must-have Qvinci feature for anyone who’s part of a franchise or multi-unit ecosystem. SCoA allows for instant consolidation and side-by-side reporting, not just at year-end but at any interval in-between.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with many different types of organizations over the years and one of the statements I’ve repeatedly heard is how much time Qvinci saves them – regardless of their size or industry – solely because of the SCoA feature.

Standardization Made Easy

Without Qvinci, standardizing a chart of accounts and ensuring that standardization remains in place is an extremely difficult process, even for organizations where a central person or team has access to the accounting files.

Accounting platforms do not allow for chart of accounts templates to be rolled out and locked down from changes. So, the evolution of each chart of accounts is always at stake when standardization is attempted from inside each accounting file.

The mere insertion of a parent account – or the slightest naming convention change of any account – causes instant anomalies. And that is just one accounting file. This is a common issue for any franchise or multi-unit system.

So, for those of you who aren’t very familiar with Qvinci’s SCoA, here’s a quick functionality lineup:

  • Perform setup and account mapping in very little time
  • Make changes at any time
  • Map all accounts into their respective SCoA counterparts
  • Stay abreast of changes to accounting files
  • Mappings you perform in Qvinci will not change the accounting file
  • Instantly consolidate, compare and report on many or all units in a meaningful manner

So how does the SCoA work exactly?

Let’s say, for example, you’re the financial officer at the corporate office of a franchise. And, you have different units using different names for the same expense in their accounting files. For example:

  • Unit #1 calls their expense account Lease
  • Unit file #2 calls their expense account Mortgage
  • Unit file #3 calls their expense account Rent

This, of course, creates quite a mess in terms of reporting and consolidation and can lead to a chart of accounts with an unmanageable number of line items.

What Qvinci allows that financial officer to do is create a standard naming convention – in this case Rent – and then map all the disparate accounts to that name. After the initial setup, this is something that can be done automatically or manually. Oftentimes, people will use a combination of both.

A Huge Time Saver

It’s not uncommon to hear clients say that prior to Qvinci, it took three months to complete their year-end financial consolidations simply because they had no real way to harness standardization. In one case, the organization saw its chart of accounts reduced from over 800 line items to less than 50.

With Qvinci, they’re now able to standardize for best practices and uniformity’s sake but also easily maintain standards throughout the year and also gain quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily access to consolidated reports. And, this is possible whether they have two or 2,000 units in their ecosystem.

If you’d like to know more about SCoA and how it can make it easy for you to produce insightful and uncomplicated financial reports, call Qvinci’s Customer Support at (512) 637-7337 Ext. 1 and we’ll be happy to answer all your questions and offer any needed guidance.