Freight Investor Services uses AccountsIQ to meet its complex global accounting needs
Freight Investor Services (FIS) is a leading global brokerage specialising in freight and commodities. As an innovator in the commodity derivatives markets, FIS has built an international network of offices and has 10 entities across the US, UK, UAE, India, Singapore and China. As a rapidly growing, international financial services business, they have some complex accounting requirements.
In 2019 the Group was using different accounting software in different locations including Sun Systems in the UK and UAE. Freight Investor’s Head of Finance, Man Li explains “we needed to standardise our accounting software to make it easier to do group level reporting.”
Man Li compared many different software packages and concluded that AccountsIQ ticked all the boxes.
“Our accounting needs are quite complex and we particularly liked AccountsIQ’s multi-dimension and extensive BI coding structure”.
Detailed analysis across multi locations, departments, brokers and customers
As a broker, FIS is extremely customer focused and it’s essential they can monitor and track commission, costs and profits by each individual broker and customer. They currently use a five-dimension accounting structure to get detailed analysis by: employee, broker, office, department and customer (the AccountsIQ platform offers up to six dimensions).
“We can quickly and easily compare the cost of running our back office in each of our locations or how much we spend on each customer,” explains Man Li. “This gives us valuable insight across the business.”
AccountsIQ has been integrated with FIS’ in-house sales system.
“We have lots of trading data and inter-company transactions, so this took some time,” says Man Li, “but it’s working perfectly now, and our sales information is brought straight into AccountsIQ. We’re also in the process of integrating AccountsIQ with the Zoho expenses module, so we can capture and split our customer gifting and entertainment costs very precisely to comply with regulatory requirements.”
The flexibility to ‘slice and dice’ analysis and reporting
The complex nature of their business means FIS currently has over 4,000 BI codes in AccountsIQ.
“The great thing about AccountsIQ is that we have the flexibility to re-think the way we structure the dimension and BI coding over time,” says Man Li. “We can start one way and flex as we go. Right now, we’re working with AccountsIQ’s support team to consolidate and standardise some of the BI codes; it’s a work in progress as we get more familiar with the system.”
AccountsIQ is easy to use with useful features
The FIS finance team is spread across multiple locations around the world but they’re all enjoying using AccountsIQ and finding it easy to collaborate.
“I particularly like the prepayment and accrual functions; you can simply click repeat or auto reverse for recurring journal entries, it’s a great feature.”
A continuous learning and professional development process
FIS have yet to fully use some of the functions available in AccountsIQ such as the new AP Inbox Invoice Automation feature which Man Li is looking forward to using to save lots of processing time.
“We currently have 10 entities on the system and we’re always learning,” she says. “We’re using AIQ Academy with new starters and we get excellent support from our Account Manager, Victoria. I’ve already recommended AccountsIQ to several people.”
Learn More
Find out more about AccountsIQ’s multi company accounting software, and our Business Intelligence capability: accounting, consolidation and management reporting all in one platform.
Watch our 4-minute overview video of how AccountsIQ BI coding enables granular financial analysis.