Which tool you use is rarely the problem. The problem is which document goes where on which day of the month, and whether it arrives with complete information.
In most companies the route to accounting is undefined: an invoice sits in a mailbox, a receipt on a phone, a bank statement in a downloads folder, and at month end somebody collects them all. That method works at low volume and breaks as it grows. Moving the flow into the system turns month end from a collection exercise into a review.
The document arrives anyway; what is usually missing is context. Which legal entity it belongs to, which period it books into, which project or cost centre it attaches to. If that is not held in the system it gets reproduced every month through email traffic. What speeds accounting up is not faster software but a document that arrives complete the first time.
How long documents are kept and in what form is not solved by an archive added later; the history does not come back. Immutability, access logging and findability are decided while the flow is designed. In practice this is a decision made at the moment the document is created rather than at month end, and that is also when it costs least.
No. Ongoing accounting runs through our partner practice and regulated tax work is carried out by a licensed partner firm. Our part is the flow that gets the document there complete and with the right context. The separation comes from German regulation and works well in practice: the party building the flow does not have to be the party keeping the books.
Yes, and it is common. When we build the flow the target is the format your accountant expects, including the DATEV handover. Moving to our partner practice is an option when a single point of contact is wanted, not a requirement.
Describe how month end runs today. Two or three concrete changes usually take most of the load off.