End-to-end Integration of Accounting & EDI Messaging

EDI facilitates the secure exchange of documents between businesses, and these B2B transactions frequently need to be reflected in a comprehensive accounting ledger. Many common EDI documents, like purchase orders, invoices, and acknowledgments, reference and affect your accounting team's balance sheet.

The ability to integrate EDI with your accounting platform ensures that your ledgers accurately reflect the state of your business – without forcing accountants outside of their comfort zone and into external solutions.

Since EDI is a mature technology, it is likely that your organization's EDI solution has been around for a long time. EDI solutions have not traditionally had the capacity to integrate with accounting platforms directly, meaning that B2B exchanges often require ad-hoc or manual processes. But modern EDI automation platforms like CData Arc provide both secure EDI transactions and intelligent application integration, significantly reducing the amount of friction in your financial data flow.

Why Automate EDI-Accounting Processes?

There are three primary benefits of automating the relationship between your EDI solution and your accounting platform:

• Increased efficiency from automation
• Reduced risk of error
• Scalable, forward-looking infrastructure

Efficiency

Any time an accountant or data professional is manually keying data, there is a problem to solve. Businesses have learned that efficiency in the current data-driven era depends on sophisticated and automated data flow, but in most organizations, there are still a few manual processes that slip through the cracks.

Integrating EDI and accounting data is one of the more common inefficiencies remaining among modern businesses. Because EDI solutions and accounting are frequently seen as operating in separate spheres, manual intervention is often needed to bridge the gap. Whether this involves manually entering data into an order form, manually updating accounting ledgers from an order sheet, or any number of other ad-hoc approaches to data integration, organizations spend an exorbitant amount of time moving data by hand rather than by machine.

Automating the relationship between EDI and accounting ensures that your data team spends less time on menial tasks and more time bringing value to your company. In addition, the ability to quickly generate business documents from updated accounting ledgers, or to synthesize B2B exchanges in real-time to your accounting dashboard, helps prevent costly bottlenecks in the speed of your data and thus the speed of your business.

Reduced Risk

Automation platforms both increase efficiencies and decrease risk. Automating flow of data between platforms like a B2B solution and an accounting SaaS application eliminates the possibility of data replication failures. Removing manual data entry from your accounting processes eliminates the ability for simple human error is removed from the picture, leading to fewer problems when reconciling financial numbers.

Data automation also provides end-to-end data security using standard encryption and authentication technologies. Allowing your automation pipeline to bridge the gap between accounting and EDI means that these same security mechanisms safeguard the data throughout the process. Breaks in the automation processes, where manual data entry is required, function as cracks in the armor of digital security.

Scalability

In addition to the immediate benefits of efficiency and security, automation future-proofs your financial data flow to ensure that you can scale your business effectively. Automation platforms handle onboarding new business relationships, new accounting applications, and new types of business documents with little additional overhead. Automated data pipelines serve as templates for future automation needs, so that overhead is never wasted but instead can be re-used as your business needs expand.

While the relationship between EDI and accounting may be effectively handled by your IT team today, automating that process can save you time and money as your business grows and your needs change.

What Does an EDI-Accounting Integration Look Like?

Modern automation platforms are necessary to effectively bring together EDI solutions and accounting applications.

Automating the relationship between EDI and accounting platforms requires a different approach than with a traditional EDI solution. EDI processes frequently have a narrow focus on specific EDI document data formats and common EDI communication technology. An end-to-end data pipeline requires considerably more extensive connectivity, as well as more sophisticated data manipulation capabilities.

Accounting SaaS applications use a different approach to connectivity than B2B document exchange. Namely, these services expose APIs that must be consumed to read or write accounting data. As a result, an EDI processing solution must support both document-based and API-based communication in order to talk to your preferred accounting platform.

Additionally, traditional EDI solutions do not provide the tools for data transformation and routing required for a realistic EDI-accounting automation. EDI documents and accounting data (wrapped up in APIs) involve drastically different data models, so comprehensive data manipulation tools are required to bring them together.

Automate EDI and Accounting Processes with CData Arc

CData Arc provides an example of what an enterprise EDI-accounting automation platform can look like. Arc includes tools for each aspect of an end-to-end EDI and accounting data pipeline. With CData Arc, you get:

• Secure and reliable B2B communication: AS2, AS4, S/FTP, etc.
• Comprehensive EDI translation, mapping, and validation
• Simple, seamless data transformation and routing
• Connectivity to a wide range of popular accounting applications: Sage Intacct, QuickBooks, Xero, etc.

Bringing all this functionality under the CData Arc umbrella allows for frictionless integration between accounting data and EDI-based business relationships.

Are you interested in learning more? Book a demo with an EDI expert today.