October 2012 – Page 3 – Cooper Mann Consulting

Road Trip!

Guidance You Can Count On

Keeping up on where you’re going is vital to any business, small or large. Watching trends, tracking expenses and monitoring cash flow are all basics of good business. You wouldn’t keep driving straight if the road veers to the left, would you? You might, if you don’t notice the curve. That’s the type of problem any business can run into, if you just don’t watch where you’re going.

Metrics are the lifeblood of any industry; from Information technology to accounting, manufacturing, and retail. Acting like a guidance system, or GPS, your company’s metrics will tell you where and when you need to make a change to keep up with your industry and the needs of your clients. Look at your business the way you look at a road trip across the country. Would you leave home without a map or directions to your destination? Probably not. You could, but getting where you want to be would become an almost insurmountable task. Without directions you end up taking wrong turns, getting lost, and just have a difficult time making forward progress.

The possibility of breaking down in the middle of nowhere grows as well. Like on a road trip, it’s probable that anything that goes wrong will do so at the worst time imaginable. Unlike your car, however, your business doesn’t have AAA. No one to call to bring you gas or give you a tow, so knowing you have what you need to get where you’re going is the best bet. The only way to do that is with metrics; gathered, compiled, and triple checked. Your business needs maintenance just like your car does. Oil changes, alignments, tune-ups, new tires when the weather changes or the old ones have worn out. It’s all part of being prepared; which is a good thing to be, in business or on a road trip.

Watching how your business is performing in the market should be a simple thing, but it’s not. Not usually anyway. It requires poring over spreadsheets, running the numbers a dozen times, and re-evaluating the information you gather again and again. It takes hours of your time. It takes hours of your clients’ time. Just pulling up all of the information you need is time-consuming, and often daunting, but compiling it into a usable form is a hefty task in and of itself.

In any business, using your time efficiently is a priority and usually easier said than done. More often than not the process of seeing where you’re heading takes hours. Literally, hours. Of course your financial software has reports and statistical data monitors built into it, but the information is usually presented in a way that is less than helpful when it comes to seeing trends or where you’re heading in any given aspect. One would think that in today’s society, where easier is always better, someone somewhere would come up with a solution to this problem.

Well, someone did. The Corelytics Financial Dashboard, from Corelytics.com, integrates directly with your accounting software of choice and pulls all of the data you need into one place. What used to take hours only takes minutes. The dashboard even gives you the ability to compare your business with industry standards and set customizable goals. You’ve got the green light, so check your dashboard, get direction, and get your business moving forward.

Make Sense?

See the dynamics of your business come alive through the award-winning Corelytics dashboard at Cloud Summit 2012.

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Changing How We See Software:

QuickBooks 2013 interface frustrates power users

You’re an accounting, bookkeeping or business professional and have been working with QuickBooks desktop software for years. Your processes and methods for using QuickBooks to manage client accounting have been developed over time, and have been refined to the point where you are able to maximize your efforts and efficiently handle all your customer requirements. Sure, there have been changes in the software over the years, and many of them have proven to be helpful. But sometimes you have to wonder what they were thinking when they changed the interface for 2013.

Initially I thought it was the grumbling of a few people who simply resist change, some admittedly so. But then the grumbling got louder, and started to come from folks I would expect to hear only “happy rainbows and sunshine” from when it comes to QuickBooks. The new interface, they say, “sucks”.

So what’s the issue? What did Intuit do with QuickBooks 2013 desktop editions that has inflamed so many devoted users? One ProAdvisor puts it this way: “Basically no real enhancements at all, just the interface and relocation of options”. In short, QuickBooks desktop editions now look a bit more like QuickBooks Online Edition, and “there’s extra stuff in the navigation – Intuit stuff“.

I understand Intuit’s motivations for making the desktop and online editions appearance more similar. After all, the benefit of the QuickBooks product line is that you can start with an entry-level edition and move up the product line to more features and functionality without converting to and learning entirely new software. Since the online edition of QuickBooks is positioned as the entry-level product for some businesses, it makes sense to continue that same look for the user as they upgrade to richer desktop editions. Unfortunately for many accounting and bookkeeping professionals, this means giving up on some of the usability you’ve come to expect (like being able to fit all the necessary information on the screen, and having easy-to-read menus, or not seeing a lot of unusable space on the screen, or even being able to suppress Intuit in-product offers).

Many companies have successfully increased their revenue potential by adding offers for services via links in the software interface, which is much more acceptable now that people have adopted web technologies and are familiar with the “hyperlink” concept. Building additional value (and revenue streams) in the solution makes sense from a business perspective, which is why you see so many software companies moving in this direction. Software solutions and services can interconnect seamlessly and transparently via the web, so we should all expect to see software makers engage their customers in as many ways and with as many products and services as possible. For Intuit, this means being positioned to take advantage of, initially, their partner network of interconnected solutions and, later, their own direct offerings in each area.

Software developers like Intuit DO listen to their users and market influencers, as they value your continued patronage. They have come to learn, however, that devoted (or invested) users will accept change eventually – even more so when there is a chance to use the change to generate business opportunity. QuickBooks accountants and trainers rely on change in order to keep their clients coming back for more.

The real target is the new user – the business not already adopted into the product – and it is primarily for this new user that the interface changes were made and in-product advertisements targeted to.

In the case of Intuit’s interface selection for QuickBooks 2013 desktop editions, it might seem like there’s “no enhancement, just the interface change”. I would suggest, however, that the interface change IS the enhancement Intuit elected to deliver – enhancement of the acceptance of the online edition and connected services.

Make Sense?