Infrastructure as a service or IaaS is a cloud computing service that offers various services on a pay-as-you-go basis. These services may often include needed services like computing resources, storage, and networking resources on demand. It is one of the four types of cloud services: software as a service(SaaS), platform as a service(PaaS), and serverless.
Now that we know what IaaS is, we move on to choosing one of the various platforms available. This can be tricky for some people or organizations due to many factors. Hence, you’ll want to select a service that provides anything and everything at a reasonable price. You can do your research and still won’t reach a decision because everything will sound too good to be true, or some services are missing something while others miss something else. Today, we’ll be reviewing Amazon Web Services and why many people choose it over other big names like Microsoft Azure and Google platform.
Why Amazon Web Services?
Many experts have called Amazon web services the bang for the buck deal. Amazon web services can run various services and support different ranges of OS. As widely used OS is supported and non-standard ones, their usage becomes quite universal. This universal appeal is again strengthened by its easy and intuitive setup. Management and monitoring features are also some things that are just cherry on top. Let’s move on to the pros and cons of AWS.
● Pros
1. Being close to the community is what AWS does the best. Along with having a wide range of products and features, it has an expanding list of add-ons and integrations from third parties, which makes your life a lot easier.
2. As mentioned, you have a ton of choices of the operating system from Windows to Linux OS server and other options. This makes AWS a massive attraction as OS restrictions make IaaS services less flexible.
3. One of the most important things other than the quality of the services and its pricing is the security of your data. It automatically identifies threats by continuously monitoring the network activity and account behavior within your cloud environment.
4. AWS also provides extensive server support.
● Cons
It isn’t a con if you look at it differently. AWS has a vast selection of choices when it comes to services. This makes it very difficult to determine prices.
What do Amazon Web Services offer?
There is a lot to cover if we get into every service and feature it offers. Hence, we’ll only mention the most attractive features and the ones that are industry standards. To showcase how vast AWS is, let us give you an example: In 2016, AWS launched 1012 new features, and in 2017, it launched additional 1430 new features. That amounts to almost 1500 new features in just two years.
You will be getting the essential IaaS platform services, which are cloud services, including compute, storage and content delivery, databases, and networking. But, as you can tell, this is just the beginning. In addition to these essential services, it also offers mobile developer tools, management tools, Internet of Things(IoT), security, and enterprise apps.
Accessing all these tools is made as easy as it can be. You will be able to control all these tools with extensive admin controls. The admin controls will be accessible via a secure web client. You will be able to control and manage everything with tools like identity management, auditing, monitoring and logging, encryption key creation/control/storage, etc.
Setting up with AWS
If you haven’t done your research or are not intuitive enough, you will run into many problems. Just the number of features alone is enough to overwhelm you. Also, setting up was significantly tricky at the starting time of the services. However, they have improved upon the system, and you can see that it is well thought out and clear.
If your requirements aren’t very complicated, you will be able to handle the setup yourself. However, complex needs require a good consultant who could advise you of the exact services and features that you should be going for. This will also allow you to have the accurate pricing of the services you want. Once you have everything set up in the correct order, you click okay and wait while your infrastructure is built. The time will again depend on the complexity of the infrastructure.
Conclusion
If you manage setting up the infrastructure you want, you’ll likely have excellent performance benchmarks with reasonably reasonable pricing. In addition, you will have great flexibility due to the plethora of available options. AWS is the best choice, no matter which field your organization is in.
Accounts payable and accounts receivable departments are the most essential parts of any company. They make sure that any transactions that need to be made in your company are done safely and successfully. These transactions are done to pay vendors and customers (or other businesses if you have a B2B business). However, when there is money involved anywhere, you need to ensure the safety of the transaction method; otherwise, you might experience fraud.
This is why netting is necessary. Netting is the process of ensuring the safety of your transactions, and this article will walk you through how to net your AP and AR.
What is netting?
Netting is nothing but reducing the financial risk between two parties by aggregating a lot of financial obligations into a net obligation amount. This reduces risk from various factors like foreign exchange risk and bank exchanges. This also helps you to reduce operational costs and increase your efficiency. There are mainly two forms of netting, AP netting for your Accounts Payable department and AR netting, which works for your Accounts Receivable department. Although both are done through the same process, both of them are done for different reasons.
Netting is a fundamental process that needs to be done to ensure the safety of your company’s money. However, various setups need to be done to ensure the suitable netting of your company’s accounts. Once you do so, it is pretty easy to automate the process and check the result at the endpoints.
Why is netting important?
Netting enables your company to do away with many risks involved with foreign exchanges and bank transfers. For example, suppose you are outsourcing raw materials from a company that is located in a foreign country. Whenever you get your order and need to pay them, you need to be sure that the money you are sending is appropriately converted and not stolen by intermediaries. This is where netting comes to play. It ensures the safety of the funds being transferred and ensures that the vendors get adequately paid. Of course, this also works for accounts receivable for customers and for other businesses you need to receive money from.
These are essential things to keep in mind, especially when managing a large business. It also helps audit all your accounts which enables the company to do more than its capacity.
What is the netting process like?
Before implementing netting in your accounts department, you need to understand how it works. The netting process is very technical, so hold your breath while it is being explained. First, it creates transfer documents in a transfer batch from the source documents to close them. It then does what the average accounts payable/receivable system does and marks the amount paid as paid. Once this is done, it creates verified result documents and gives a netting number. This netting number makes sure that the transaction is safe; it acts as a unique ID for the transaction to be successful. This billing is often done after the shipment arrives.
An example of netting in AP & AR
Another example of account netting would be a simple vendor transaction (in the AP department) and a customer transaction (in the AR department). Suppose you have bought raw materials worth $4000 from a vendor. You need to pay him, but there is no security in the transaction. What you can do is very simple. While you are billing the invoices and getting your AP department to work on it, make sure that the transaction is netted when they make the payment. This way, even if the vendor is not from the same country as you, they will safely be able to receive your payment.
Similarly, for customers, you need to set up your accounts receivable department so that your transactions are netted. This means that any transaction the customer makes is safe, secure, and easy to access.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there is a simple moral in this article. Make sure that your accounts department is properly netted. While it makes sure that all your transactions occur safely and securely, it also makes sure that all the processes in your business are highly efficient. This sort of efficiency can also be reached by automation, but why dip your toes in just one great thing when you can benefit from both? Netting is a cost-effective process that significantly impacts your business, so you should go for it. It avoids the risks of being a foreign company and helps you convert any money you receive into your native currency. All companies should go for it as it is a practice with great benefits.
The accounts payable department of a company is one of its most important building blocks. However, it has been one of the slowest to adapt to change. However, this shift is now being accelerated due to the trends of automation taking flight amongst accountants across the world. Due to increasing automation, making invoices becomes more accessible and easier to manage. It helps optimize payments and makes sure that minimal human errors occur.
accounts payable workflows
This article will explore what accounts payable teams are, how they are made, and how they make accounts payable more efficient. Read on ahead to find out.
You can reduce the size of your teams
AP automation can help you reduce the size of the accounts payable teams. When you automate the tasks, less human intervention exists, and a lesser chance of human error exists. This is an excellent advantage for the company you are working for because you might see duplicate entries if purely manual work is being done. Due to duplicate entries, a company can experience losses of up to $15 million, which is not an amount to be scoffed at. Digitising your accounts payable means increasing the number of vendors but not the number of people working in the AP department. This is the meaning of making your AP department more efficient.
All these processes also help you bill more invoices than you usually do. Getting more invoices means that more payments are made. This, in turn, makes sure that your company is earning profit in droves.
Less time on data entry and reconciliation
Data entry is one of the most tedious tasks you can ever face as an accountant. Just as it sounds, it involves manually inputting the data into a system. This task can get monotonous and boring to the extreme. However, automating this process, the AP workflow has excellent advantages. Automating the workflow means that all the values can be put in automatically, and all you need to verify the data.
Another part of an accountant’s job that is made more accessible by automation is data reconciliation. What does that mean? It means the reporting of the payments or any form of transaction that has taken place. When this process is automated, the verification of invoices becomes more straightforward, and so does your life as an accountant. This is why making sure that your AP workflow is automated is one of the most important aspects of any business.
Make more payments more efficiently
Payments are much more efficient when the process is automated. You don’t need to worry about the invoices that have to be reported as paid. Why is it so? That is because the computer handles those. Making payments efficiently is very important. It builds a sense of trust between you and your vendor and ensures there is no chance of fraud. To do so, automating your AP workflow is the best way.
What does AP automation do to make the system so efficient? First of all, it makes sure that all transactions are end-to-end encrypted. This means that other than the sender and the receiver, nobody else will have any idea about the details of the transaction. Another advantage is that due to the highly intuitive nature of the workflow, there will be absolutely no margin of error. As a result, no mistakes or redundancy of the invoices benefit the company significantly.
Help you use corporate credit cards
Corporate credit cards are risky. They are very prone to fraud and can cause your company a lot of losses if misused. However, you might be asking, why use it? One significant advantage of using a corporate credit card is getting discounts using them. These discounts may not seem much at first, but when you get discounts of up to 20% on bulk purchases, these transactions become valuable for every company. Automation helps and makes this process of availing of discounts much easier.
When you are using an automated system, it knows how secure a transaction is by running it through some software. It can ensure the safety of the transaction ID of a vendor by verifying it. Hence, going through this process becomes extremely easy and makes automation a must-have for companies.
Conclusion
In conclusion, ensuring that you have automated your AP workflow is very important. Automation doesn’t just make your systems more efficient; it helps you earn more too. It is a way to ensure the safety of your transactions while also ensuring that everything is done on time. This makes automation one of the most important, if not the most important, tasks to be done with your AP workflow. Hopefully, you could convince yourself of the same after reading this article.
Cryptocurrencies took over the market around five years ago, and since then, popularity has never declined. On the contrary, more and more people are looking into ways to invest in cryptocurrencies. Many companies and individuals on top of the business industries started showing support for these new currencies with no third parties by accepting payment in the form of cryptocurrencies and investing in them.
There are many options to choose from, but Bitcoin and Ethereum are the leading cryptocurrencies that everyone has their eyes on. Although cryptocurrencies are significant as a form of payment for everyday products and services, can they be used to pay employees? Well, that is what we are here to discuss today. However, before answering the question if it is viable, we first need to clear the legal grounds for it to be an option. So, let’s see if paying in cryptocurrencies is a viable option.
The legal grounds
Many government officials have shown interest in paying crypto to employees in a legal deal. However, as of now, most states do not allow employees to be paid in crypto. Instead, they are only allowed to pay employees in U.S. currency or its equivalent.
FLSA, i.e., The Fair Labor Standards Act, governs most public and private employment in the United States. The main requirement of the FLSA is “Payment of the prescribed wages, including overtime compensation, in cash or negotiable instrument payable at par.” Apart from some exceptions, employers are left with two options that are cash or negotiable instruments, “payable at par.”
The Department of Labor, i.e., DOL provides a clear definition of what can be considered a negotiable instrument payable at par. The DOL allows employers to pay employees in foreign currency and U.S. dollars, as long as it satisfies the minimum salary requirement of the FLSA’s executive, administrative and professional exemption.
The foreign currency is initially converted into U.S. dollars, and if it matches the FLSA threshold, only then can you pay someone with foreign currency. A similar concept can be used for paying employees in crypto. However, the DOL and courts have yet to give their opinion on whether cryptocurrencies can be considered a form of foreign currency. Hence, the situation is a little ambiguous. Therefore, employers need to be cautious of the case if they are trying to adopt cryptocurrency as a payment to their employees.
How does crypto’s volatility affect the situation?
While some people will be in favor of receiving crypto as a currency, as they see potential in that currency, most experts believe that bitcoin will rise to $100,000 in the near future. If you are being paid in bitcoin, then there is no harm, as you could see that payment as a potential investment for the future.
On the other hand, you could see the payment in crypto as a complete facade. As most crypto currencies’ prices can’t be predicted, you can see a considerable dip in prices the next day you are paid. This might result in employees lashing out at the company. In addition, other risks could be taken into account, and employees could feel cheated in receiving payment in crypto.
If you see it from an employer’s perspective, employers could use cryptocurrency’s volatile nature to violate the minimum wage and overtime laws. Minimum wages can be termed as the specific standards of exactly how much employees must be paid for their work. If employers fail to pay the requisite salary, they can face misclassification claims. These claims could include anything from unpaid overtime to potential fines.
The volatility of the cryptocurrency could lead to the violation of these rights unintentionally. For example, if there is a drastic change in the currency’s price, the amount could be less than the required amount suggested by the wage-and-hour law.
Will it ever be viable?
Although most governments are not into cryptocurrencies right now, the market has already adopted these digital currencies into the system. As most aspects of life are being converted into virtual space, cryptocurrency will only increase its influence in the future. If it is not viable now, it surely will be in the near future.
If you want to adopt the system right now, you may want to give the actual payments in U.S. currency and then provide the option for your employees if they’re going to convert them into cryptocurrency or not.
Conclusion
Cryptocurrency is still new territory, and if you are stepping into it as an employer, you need to keep yourself updated. Keep in check all the changes in the law regarding payroll practices and the acceptance of cryptocurrency as a foreign currency. There may also be other legal problems while using cryptocurrency to pay employees not mentioned here. Hence you should also consult an expert before adopting the system to save yourself from future issues.
