Whether financial or non-financial statements, it’s important to ensure that everything you are publishing is accurate and evidence-backed. Financial accounting software supports reporting when it comes to numbers, but what about material statements? Verification software is often a crucial missing link in companies’ tech stack, and can work alongside your accounting software to increase the overall quality of your reporting.

What is financial accounting software?

Financial accounting software manages a company’s financial transactions and keeps track of assets, liabilities, revenue, and expenses. This software can be used for generating the data required for financial reporting, offering insight into a company’s performance and generating financial statements. It is often a key player in a company’s tech stack.

While financial accounting software is great with numbers, it’s less useful when it comes to narrative statements and document verification. To ensure accurate reporting across the board, companies need to invest in additional software that can track and verify non-financial statements.

What is verification software? 

Verification software is used by teams of all sizes to ensure there is truth behind each statement, fact, and figure. It does more than just collating information and generating reports. It allows you to highlight each statement in a document—financial and non-financial—and link it with supporting evidence. When it comes to reporting, verification software acts as your final line of defence to ensure that everything you are saying is accurate and not misleading. Adding verification software to your tech stack streamlines processes, is easy to implement, and increases the overall quality of your reporting. 

Streamlined processes

Manual document verification is time consuming and mundane. It has a higher likelihood of human error and can place huge strain on reporting teams. Verification software semi-automates the process and streamlines work between cross-functional teams. Individuals or groups can be assigned to particular statements for review and sign-off, and versioning becomes simple with real-time editing. Everyone can work from the same live document with highlighted changes, increasing both efficiency and collaboration. Statements can also be verified at various levels of detail—whether every sentence in a document, images, tables, or just the figures—via a simple point-and-click system. 

Easy implementation

Adding verification software to your stack is seamless—it doesn’t require integrations and is intuitive to use. For Orica’s Company Secretarial team, onboarding onto Atticus was simple, with “no steep learning curves and no lengthy project management required to introduce it to the organisation. Everybody who has been involved has been able to get up to speed very quickly.” The training was quick and painless, and the Atticus support team were responsive when any extra help was required. 

Improved reporting

Verification software improves the overall quality of your company reporting, generating rich documentation that really tells a story. Reports are fully hyperlinked, easily navigable, and include an index table that connects to supporting documentation. You can incorporate verification for visual resources such as diagrams and organisational charts, or use them as supporting evidence. Every statement—financial and material—is linked to appropriate data, ensuring that you are offering top-quality, decision-useful information to your investors and the public.

Verification software works alongside financial accounting software, enabling you to seamlessly produce reports that are transparent and reliable. Using general verification software ensures that your reporting is equally robust across financial and non-financial statements, placing you ahead of the curve in the regulatory landscape and increasing shareholder confidence. Atticus is used by 40% of ASX100 companies, and is the market leader for verification. Get in touch to book a demo with us.