Kenya, 30 August 2022: Caseware Africa, a division of Adapt IT, has introduced a new cloud-based app in Kenya: SME Financial Statements. The new solution, which will be rolled out to various African regions, has been completely redesigned to leverage the benefits of the cloud, as well as everything Caseware has learned from its clients over the past decades, says Nienke Krüger, Product Manager: Financial Reporting at Caseware Africa.
“This new cloud-based application has been designed from the ground up to revolutionise the way that preparers create financial statements. We have leveraged our extensive experience over many years with our clients to design a process that is user-friendly and streamlined,” she says. “The new approach takes into account regulators’ growing insistence that only material information is presented in the financials – something that can prove quite tricky for inexperienced or infrequent users.”
SME Financial Statements uses checklists, questionnaires and integrated queries that expand and collapse, only displaying content relevant to the current engagement. This will enable users to work much more efficiently by empowering them to focus their time only on relevant items and will greatly assist them in streamlining the process to produce the financial statements as the final output document.
Another big advantage of SME Financial Statements is that it enables users to integrate the trial balance information directly from the company’s accounting package. This eliminates the tiresome, error-prone, and manual process of exporting and importing data via spreadsheets. Currently, direct integrations from Xero, QuickBooks and Sage Business Cloud Accounting are supported, with more packages to be added in line with market demands.
These features provide users with significant timesaving and greatly reduces room for error, Ms Krüger says. A built-in workflow ensures that information is entered only once, reducing the risk of inconsistencies, duplication, and errors. The solution also allows users to insert logos and graphs into the financial statements and save external documents in the same file.
“SME Financial Statements is powered by Caseware Cloud and can be accessed from any device at any location, completely secure, at any time. It enables multiple users to work on the same document at the same time, thus supporting greater collaboration between team members across both the client and accounting firms. That makes for huge productivity gains,” Ms Krüger says. “It’s also much easier to update the application as new functionality is added.
“This app has been carefully designed based on Caseware Africa’s vast experience and intellectual property to assist preparers to create accurate SME compliant statements as quickly and painlessly as possible” says Ms Krüger.
Ms. Krüger confirms that this is a significant development for Africa’s SMEs. “In due course, post the introduction of SME Financial Statements in the Kenyan market, the app will be rolled out to other regions across the continent, which presents an exciting opportunity for practices and SMEs to enhance their business efficiencies as they continue to strive for growth.”
