Accounting request software: a dedicated tool or a shared employee portal?

Choose a shared portal for all departments if HR, facilities, and IT will eventually join it, and a dedicated system if they won't. Requests for letters, expense reports, and pay questions are handled by a self-service portal with a service catalog. Bookkeeping stays in the accounting system, and the portal is responsible for getting each request to the right accountant and tracking its due date.

What the options are

• Email, messengers, and a spreadsheet. Nothing to implement, but only the accountant knows the due date and the assignee, and request details have to be clarified over and over.
• Payroll self-service in the accounting system. Employees view their pay stubs there; the accountant generates letters in the accounting system, while the employee submits the request for one on the portal. A shared portal complements payroll self-service: employee requests, approvals, and due dates for all departments go through the portal.
• A request system for accounting only. A dedicated portal or service for one department. It works if other departments have no plans to move to a portal.
• A shared service portal for all departments: ESM platforms, for example SimpleOne ESM. This is how enterprise service management (ESM) works: accounting, HR, facilities, and IT take requests through one portal, and each department has its own service catalog, assignees, and due dates.

That is how it works at ITG Corporation: employees got a single self-service portal with a catalog of all available services. Instead of scattered requests by email, messengers, and phone calls, there is now a single point of entry.

How the options differ for accounting

• Business trips and expense reports. A business trip starts with the manager's approval and ends with an expense report in accounting. If accounting has its own system, the employee submits the two in different places, and the link between them depends on the employee's memory. On a shared portal, the employee orders any department's services in one place.
• Complete forms. A letter, an expense report, and a pay question each need a different set of details. When each service has its own form with required fields, the accountant receives the request with all the details, and it can go straight to the right accounting team.
• Questions about pay and deductions. A knowledge base article on the portal answers some of them, and no request to accounting is needed.
• Peaks at month-end and quarter-end. On those days accounting closes the period, while employee requests keep coming. You need to see how many requests arrive for each area and when, so you can plan the workload in advance.

If accounting is part of a shared services center (SSC) together with HR and procurement, a shared portal saves you from a separate system for each function.

How it works in SimpleOne ESM

SimpleOne ESM is a set of SimpleOne platform tools for managing internal services. Each department in it is a service provider with its own catalog on the shared employee portal. For accounting, you configure:

• a request form and, where needed, an approval for each service;
• automatic task assignment based on assignee workload;
• due dates in service level agreements (SLAs);
• reports where the head of the department sees team performance.

If the company already runs SimpleOne ITSM, accounting is connected to the same portal where employees submit IT requests. How this works is covered in the answer "Can accounting and facilities use the ITSM system we already have?".

Where to start moving requests to the portal and how to describe an accounting service is covered in the answer "How do you set up a self-service portal for accounting requests?". What it looks like in the system is on the SimpleOne for accounting page, and for a shared services center, on the SSC automation page.