Ah, the end-of-year holidays. A time to enjoy big meals, gifts, egg nog, mistletoe – and the joy of sticking around the office to close out an accounting period.

Wait. What? Ok, closing out an accounting period isn’t really among the first things we think of this time of year. But unfortunately there’s a good chance that your company has at least one poor soul – maybe it’s you, in which case, sorry -- who will be doing just that while everyone else celebrates the season.

That’s because far too many accounting engines force an accounting period to be closed on the last day of the month. Which isn’t really always the most convenient time.

This means the Thanksgiving weekend is often cut a day short for whoever has to go into the office and close the period. Even worse for New Year’s Day, which lands on an accounting period close every year! Talk about the New Year’s ball drop: Your accounting software drops the ball, so you have to skip the party and go pick it up.

Come to think of it, every time the end of the month falls on anything but a normal working day, someone gets stuck going to the office to close out the month.

You can enjoy your time off

Thankfully, the Essent Accounting Engine utilized by Compass performs As-Of Date processing and reporting. It lets you choose when to close out an accounting period -- whether it’s physically the last day of the month or not -- without sacrificing the accuracy and control you need.

Do you think you should be able to accurately close out the month days after Thanksgiving, for instance, so that everyone can go enjoy their long weekend? We think so too. That’s why Essent accounting software lets you do that.

You’re welcome.

In light of Thanksgiving, here are more issues you’ll be thankful to have solved this holiday season.

Essent works even when you’re not working.

Are you the type who likes to treat yourself to a week off at the end of the year? Just because you have the week off doesn’t mean your commerce engine needs to be off too. Since Essent ecommerce websites are fully integrated with the Compass business management system, orders continue to flow in as your customers place them. Whether you’re on the clock or not.

It’s a great gift giver.

Essent makes it easy to give gifts to your customers. You can offer a discount or bonus through a promotion code. Since Essent ecommerce websites are integrated with the Essent business management system, the systems keep track of the code from the moment the recipient punches it in all the way through fulfillment and shipping and beyond.

There’s plenty to chew on.

Maybe you’re not a big fan of Aunt Betty’s fruit cake. That’s OK. The Essent Status Dashboard gives you a healthy slice of business information to chew on instead. The status manager updates real-time so that the moment an item is ordered, received, fulfilled, shipped, or invoiced, you can see it in the status manager and digest it.

It knows who’s been naughty and nice.

Integrated customer credit management with credit card processing has the entire process covered with Elf-like accuracy and efficiency.

The Essent Commerce Engine — used by all Essent business systems like Compass and ecommerce systems like SiteBuilder — manages credit, authorizations, prepayments, payments, and real-time balances so both the system and you know the customer is in good standing before you accept the order. The processing engine automatically handles the entire process, starting at the time of order submission.

So no inventory is allocated and no work is started until the credit card is confirmed to be on the nice list. The customer may be naughty, but the process to handle it is nice … really nice.