Starting a Cooperative in Finland

Electronic financial management

Content

There are numerous software in the market for financial management. Some of them are sold only to accounting firms, other are sold directly to end users. More and more cooperatives rely totally or partly on electronic financial management.

The Act on online invoices entered into force in the beginning of April 2020; according to its provisions, business entities can refuse to receive invoices on paper. In this case the invoicing entity must send their client an online invoice. Most financial software include the invoicing functionality. Online invoices are also easy to send through different web services available.

Modern financial software is based on the supposition that a cooperative only accepts online invoices, which are integrated automatically into the system. Invoices on paper and sent via e-mail are to be scanned into the software. After this stage, most software have the possibility to send all invoices automatically to the bank for payment, so there is no need to pay them separately on your online bank. The account statements are also directly fetched from your bank by such electronic financial software.

Cooperatives can have debit or credit cards. All software provides different ways to accept receipts. They are either photographed or scanned and then stored into various applications, from which they are extracted to be attached to different accounting events and are saved in electronic archives in the software.

The treasurer of the cooperative has traditionally taken care of the payment of invoices and salaries. Today, as software robots do this automatically, it is essential to verify that every invoice has an inspector and an authorizer. This is how the cooperative avoids the emergence of “delicate tasks” which increase the likelihood of irregularities.

What are the duties left for the accountant? Firstly, he or she ensures that all purchase invoices and receipts entered into the software are according to the Accounting Act and are related to professional activities, in order to be deductible in taxation. The accountant verifies sales invoices, value added tax and movement to accounts. Every month, the accountant registers the wages and salaries and non-wage labor costs and sees that the reports to the Incomes Register are correct; verifies the accuracy of individual cost pool and project reporting, sends the periodical financial documents to the contact person in the cooperative (profit and loss account, balance, general ledger, cost pool report). The accountant submits the VAT declaration to the tax authorities.