Introducing Continuous Accounting

Introduction

We are excited to introduce Continuous Accounting to the Modern Treasury platform. When we founded Modern Treasury, we initially focused on helping our customers move money, manage approval workflows, and reconcile their bank accounts. Our customers have built incredible products with high-volume or complex payment flows using our software.

Yet all of our customers would reach the end of the month and still have to close their books by hand. For some, this meant manually entering every transfer, expense, or deposit in QuickBooks. They would have to retroactively apply the correct accounting categories and decipher their bank statements to figure out what happened.

Some customers tried to streamline this process. They’d download CSVs from Modern Treasury and use third party platforms to import data into their accounting system. Although less manual, using a patchwork of systems like this still requires time and is error prone. For example, if the name of a payee is different in Modern Treasury than in QuickBooks, the payment would not be attributed properly.

As a result, our customers had to do large amounts of tedious work to close their books. And because closing the books took a long time, our customers could not get real-time insights about their businesses. Although this might be the status quo for accounting, we want to change that.

Starting today, Modern Treasury can connect to accounting systems, starting with QuickBooks. We plan on adding Xero as well as larger systems like NetSuite and Workday. This will help finance teams manage their day-to-day payment operations seamlessly while simultaneously providing real-time access to financial data.

What are General Ledgers?

Every payment in a company ultimately maps to a company’s general ledger, which is a record of all its financial transactions. A general ledger has categories for keeping track of a company’s assets, liabilities, equity, revenue, and expenses. For example, spending money on advertising would be considered an expense, while charging a customer for a product is revenue.

These general ledgers are stored in a company’s accounting system. Modern Treasury links to the accounting system to keep information about payments in sync with a company’s general ledger.

Our Product

Modern Treasury now keeps our customer’s accounting system in sync with their business. We enable our customers to tag every payment with the correct accounting categories when they initiate the payment. This requires a two-way exchange of data, where Modern Treasury stores the structure of the general ledger in order to send journal entries to it later.

This tagging is accessible in our dashboard as well as the API. Tech teams and finance teams can work together to make sure that platform payments are accounted for correctly from the beginning. API calls to move money, even if they happen millions of times a month, will be automatically accounted for correctly.

We have also built systems to enable instant reconciliation and categorization for payments that our customers did not initiate. For example, one of our customers that administers payroll often receives funds via wire transfer. They use an alert to monitor for the inbound wire and automatically book it to the general ledger when it arrives.

All told, this keeps financial transaction data flowing to our customer’s accounting systems. No more manual data entry. No third party connector tools.

Welcome to Continuous Accounting.

Early Feedback

Our early customers who are using the integration have given us good feedback thus far. Paul Dreyer, Head of Business Operations at Sana Benefits, said:

Since we began using Modern Treasury's QuickBooks integration, the time to close our books has dropped by hours. Our systems are always in sync and I no longer have to manually categorize payments, and better yet, our executive team can log into QuickBooks and see where we are financially in real-time.

Continuous Accounting has enabled our customers to focus more on their business’s progress rather than the minutiae of recording their transactions.

If you’re interested in learning how your company can use Modern Treasury, please reach out.