Countsy Debuts Platform to Streamline Back-Office Management

Accounting and human resources and finance firm Countsy has debuted an online platform.

Announced Tuesday (April 23), countsy.ai is designed to simplify back-office management by providing a centralized place for essential business tools and team collaboration.

“We designed our new portal to streamline the often complex back office operations for our clients,” Mairtini Ni Dhomhnaill, founder of Countsy, said in a news release. “It’s part of our ongoing effort to enhance our service offerings and support the startup community along with our growing portfolio of later-stage companies.”

The portal, free for all Countsy customers, includes integrations with the client’s enterprise resource planning, payroll, accounts receivable and payable, financial reporting, expense management, HR tools, among other things.

In addition, countsy.ai offers customers a communication channel with the company’s team of experts, “including fractional CFOs, chief people officers, controllers, and other back-office specialists,” the release said.

Elsewhere from the world of back-office innovations — or the need for such things — PYMNTS spoke last week with Kevin Baker, head of merchant services for EMEA at Bank of America, about the divide between traditional payment workflows and innovative solutions.

“Paper invoicing certainly remains a major method,” Baker said.

“Legacy systems and processes still remain, and some companies might not be ready to go digital. Demographics [of decision-makers] also play an important role, with some cohorts more digitally savvy while others are more comfortable with using paper.”

He added that regulatory factors can play a role as well, as some countries have legal requirements dealing with paper invoicing.

All the same, the tide is turning toward digital invoicing, which offers a range of payment methods including cards, pay-by-bank account-to-account (A2A) transfers, embedded QR codes and other solutions. This shift is being fueled by efficiency, cost reduction and even environmental concerns.

“Digital invoicing is a great development in the B2B [business-to-business] and even B2C [business-to-consumer] space,” Baker said.

And as PYMNTS added, agility and efficiency reign supreme in the digitized business environment. That’s why companies, irrespective of their size, are embracing digital solutions to streamline their invoicing and payment processes.

In a separate report last week, we noted that the rise of sophisticated tools and digital technologies such as automation, data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) have revolutionized finance operations.

“Turning to automation transformed our finance department,” LiquidX CFO Abhishek Khandelwal told PYMNTS. “Things that used to take hours, for example analysts spending around 80% of their time pulling data and not analyzing it, are much more streamlined. It has totally transformed jobs, freeing up valuable time for more strategic exercises.”