Books That Close On Time Because They Were Never Apart
Accounting built into operations rather than beside them: entries created by the transaction that caused them, Vietnamese statutory reporting, e-invoicing, and a close measured in days.
There are two ways to run accounting. In the first, the business does its work and accounting reconstructs what happened afterwards from delivery notes, invoices and conversations. In the second, the act of doing the work creates the accounting entry. Almost every complaint about month end closing traces back to which of these two a company is doing.
Standalone accounting software, however good, enforces the first model. It receives data after the fact, which means somebody types it, which means it can be typed wrongly, late, or not at all. The warehouse issues goods on the 28th, the entry appears on the 5th, and the inventory figure in the accounts is a historical statement rather than a current one.
iGlobal implements accounting as part of the same database as sales, purchasing and inventory. A goods receipt posts the stock entry. A customer invoice posts revenue and tax. A payment reconciles against the bank statement. The accountant's job shifts from entering transactions to reviewing them, which is a far better use of a qualified person.
Why the close takes as long as it does
Ask a finance manager what the longest part of the close is and the answer is rarely the accounting. It is waiting: for the warehouse to confirm what shipped, for a supplier invoice that has not arrived, for someone to explain a payment on the bank statement. Each wait is short. In series they consume two weeks.
The second structural problem is that cost is known too late to be useful. If the margin on an order is calculated weeks after delivery, it informs nothing. Sales has already quoted the next one at the same price, and the only thing the figure can do is confirm a loss that has already been repeated.
The third is reconciliation between systems that should never have been separate. Inventory value in the accounting software and inventory value in the warehouse system disagree, so somebody spends a day each month deciding which one to believe. That day is not accounting work; it is the tax paid for having two databases.
- Month end taking two weeks or more, every month
- Inventory value in accounting differing from the warehouse system
- Margin per order known too late to affect the next quotation
- Receivables chased from a list someone updates by hand
What the finance system covers
Chart of accounts per Vietnamese standards
Configured to the applicable circular, with the statutory report set, and extended with the management dimensions you actually steer by: cost centre, project, product line, branch.
Electronic invoicing to the tax authority
Invoices issued through your registered provider at the moment of sale, with the reference stored back on the order, so the invoice and the transaction are never two separate records.
Bank reconciliation that learns
Statements imported and matched against invoices and payments automatically, with the matching rules improving as you confirm them. Only genuine exceptions reach a person.
Costing that is current, not retrospective
Standard or average costing applied as goods move, so margin on an order is visible the day it ships rather than after the period closes.
Receivables with a follow-up process
Ageing by customer, credit limits that actually block, and reminder levels sent on schedule instead of when somebody remembers. Collection becomes a process rather than a personality trait.
Multi-entity and consolidation
Several companies in one database with separate statutory books, intercompany transactions handled properly, and consolidated management reporting across all of them.
How we deliver it
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1
Chart of accounts and policy mapping 2 to 3 weeks
We map your existing accounts, costing method, tax treatment and the management dimensions you report on, and agree the structure with your chief accountant before anything is configured.
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2
Configuration and integration 3 to 5 weeks
Journals, tax rules, the e-invoice connection, bank statement formats and the automatic entries generated by sales, purchasing and inventory movements.
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3
Opening balances and reconciliation 2 to 4 weeks
Trial balance, open receivables and payables, inventory valuation and fixed assets loaded and reconciled line by line against your current books. Nothing is approximate here.
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4
First close with us present 1 period
We sit with your finance team through the entire first close, resolve what surfaces, and only then hand over. A first close completed without us is the actual acceptance test.
Who this is for
- Companies whose close takes longer than a week every month
- Businesses where accounting and warehouse figures regularly disagree
- Groups with several entities needing consolidated management reports
- Finance teams spending more time assembling data than analysing it
Why iGlobal
Accounting is not a separate project here
Because the entries come from operations, the accuracy of the books is a by-product of running the business correctly rather than a monthly effort to catch up with it.
Your chief accountant signs off the structure
We do not impose a chart of accounts. The person who will answer to the auditor agrees the mapping before configuration starts, which is why year end is not a surprise.
We can coexist with MISA during transition
If your finance team is not ready to move, operations can go live first and we exchange journal entries on a schedule. Forcing both at once is a choice some vendors make for their own convenience.
The best balance of cost, quality, and service
No per-transaction licence fees, statutory compliance included rather than sold as a module, and a support team that has closed a Vietnamese fiscal year before.
Three ways to do this, compared
| What you are comparing | By hand, on spreadsheets | Off-the-shelf software | With iGlobal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where the figures come from | Typed again from sales and purchase paperwork | Imported, when the file format cooperates | Posted automatically the moment a document is confirmed |
| Bank reconciliation | Line by line against a printed statement | A manual import followed by manual matching | Statement in, matched against open invoices automatically |
| Closing the month | A week, and the number still moves afterwards | Faster, but the operational data still sits elsewhere | A few days, from data that nobody retyped |
| Cost across three years | Hidden inside salaries, so it never appears in a budget | A predictable licence per user, plus the work it cannot do | Quoted per phase and reviewed with you before each one starts |
| Who holds your data | Scattered across files, inboxes and personal phones | On the vendor platform, exported on the vendor's terms | Your own database, exportable in full whenever you ask |
| When something breaks | The person who built the file, if they still work here | A ticket queue, often in another language and time zone | A named engineer in Hanoi you can reach the same working day |
The two middle columns describe approaches that genuinely work for some companies. Where they win, they win, and we have tried to say so.
What changes after go live
The headline change is the length of the close. Clients who took two weeks routinely reach three to five days, not because the accountants work faster but because they are no longer waiting for other departments to tell them what happened. The information arrived when the event did.
The change with the most commercial weight is timing of margin. When the gross margin on an order is visible the week it ships, a pricing mistake is corrected on the next quotation instead of being discovered at the quarterly review, by which time it has been repeated forty times.
Quieter but just as valuable: the finance team changes what it is for. Hours that went into assembling figures move into cash flow planning, credit control and asking why a cost moved. That is the work a qualified accountant was hired to do in the first place.
- Month end close measured in days instead of weeks
- Inventory value identical in accounting and in the warehouse
- Gross margin per order available the week it ships
- Receivables chased on schedule by the system, not by memory
Frequently asked questions
Can we keep using MISA for statutory accounting?
Yes, and for some companies that is the sensible first phase. Operations, inventory and invoicing run in the new system while MISA remains the statutory book, and we transfer the journal entries on an agreed schedule. Most clients eventually consolidate, but doing it in the second year rather than the first removes a lot of risk from go live.
Does it handle electronic invoices and tax declarations?
Invoices are issued through your registered e-invoice provider directly from the sales document, and the reference number is stored on the order so the two never drift apart. Value added tax declarations and the statutory report set are produced from the posted entries; your accountant reviews rather than re-enters.
How accurate is inventory valuation?
Because the stock movement and the accounting entry are the same event, valuation is accurate by construction rather than by reconciliation. You choose standard, average or FIFO costing during discovery, and the choice is driven by how you price and what your auditor expects, not by what is easier to configure.
What about our opening balances and history?
Opening balances are loaded and reconciled line by line against your existing trial balance before go live, and nothing proceeds until they agree exactly. Transaction history is usually kept in the old system for reference rather than migrated, because migrating five years of detail costs real money and is almost never consulted.
When in the year should we switch?
The start of a fiscal year is cleanest, and the start of a quarter is perfectly workable. Mid-period switching is possible but means a split year for reporting, so we would rather spend the extra six weeks waiting than hand your accountant two sets of books for one year.
Related solutions
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Tell us what you are trying to fix and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right team for it.