An A/P Accountant Perspective
Updated March 05, 2019

An A/P Accountant Perspective

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Score 8 out of 10
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Overall Satisfaction with Abila MIP Fund Accounting

MIP is being used across the finance department. It is being used for financial reporting purposes. It is intended to track payment information for orders placed by the purchasing department. The budget department creates entries that set aside funds for particular purchases, in which the budget officer enters the estimated funds needed along with the fund coding information. It is also used as a user-friendly option for accountants to enter payment/funding information so that the data can be turned into a static file and transmitted to the uniform standard accounting system used by the State of Texas Comptroller's office among all state agencies. The MIP interface is more user friendly to the accountant and the data fields required for particular categories of purchases/payments are easier to view because of the one-line, white space table. Also MIP allows shortcuts to address the problem of multiple or even hundreds of coding lines that need to be copied for a particular category of payments, allowing for saving time and resources in order to record a payment.

Pros

  • MIP is user-friendly and enables efficient data entry. For example, as an accountant, I often see purchases that need to be paid with multiple lines of code. Often the amount of coding lines reaches over 100 lines of code. For these purchases, the budget department does not code the purchase and as an accountant with many bills to pay, I appreciate that MIP provides shortcuts like F6 to copy a whole line under the one above or F5 which allows me to copy down only one field if needed. It saves me a lot of time to copy data versus having to re-key information.
  • MIP provides options to run quick reports on orders and purchases. With few clicks of a button, I can run a report on the encumbrance status (i.e. the funds set aside for purchases) and see if an encumbrance has been previously used up whenever I am unsure that an invoice has been paid. I can also run reports on past years funding information to see how a particular contract or purchase has been paid years prior when old staff used old processes.
  • MIP offers an "Excel export" and "PDF export" option for payment reports. This option often saves a lot of time, particularly when I have to make an entry for a transaction that has 100 lines of funding code and I am looking for where I made an error in my entry of debits. I am often off by only a few pennies in my entries and the ability to export my file into excel allows me to run a pivot table and find my error easily. This way, I save time and work smarter.

Cons

  • The MIP software often freezes in the middle of my line entries or it will freeze up when I run a report. That said, I often deal with documents that have over a hundred lines of code and this may be the reason why the software takes a minute or two to load properly.
  • Due to my role and limited access rights, I would not be able to answer this question as I do not and would not know the ROI.
As an accounts payable accountant, I think that MIP Fund Accounting does allow the ability to manage multiple funds from multiple sources in a time-saving, efficient manner. For A/P purposes, the ability to see what the budget staff recommends in terms of fund coding, which often includes a combination of fund types, by the time the invoice is ready to be paid allows the accounting staff to compare funding sources for the payment.
I have not used any alternatives.
MIP would be well suited for a small company with small average data entry lines for one transaction. It would be a terrible idea for a company that has more documents which require 100 lines of code or more. The reason being because as an accounts payable accountant, the MIP software freezes often whenever I need to enter transactions of 100 lines of code or more.

MIP Fund Accounting Feature Ratings

Using Abila MIP Fund Accounting

Basic data entry, State Comptroller rules for accounts payable and revenue, State governmental accounting
  • Our organization primarily uses MIP to enter payment transactions and generate end of the year reports to create the Annual Financial Report.
  • Our organization uses MIP as a user friendly alternative to the state program called USAS.
  • Our organization uses MIP primarily to record accounts payable and accounts receivable.
  • None that I can think of.
  • None that I can think of.
The MIP reporting function needs improvement. For example, when you create reports, it takes way too long to load and then when you do create a report, there is not an easy way to delete. Even our administrators have difficulty deleting reports.
Accounting - Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable

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