Category: business finance

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Two Ways to Get QuickBooks in the Cloud

Get QuickBooks in the Cloud: Hosted QuickBooks Desktop or QuickBooks Online

cloud-computingRunning applications online, or “in the cloud” using today’s parlance, is top priority for a lot of businesses.  It’s not that these organizations have a burning desire to post their financials to the web, which is what a lot of folks thought was going to happen when we first suggested they use their financial applications online.  Rather, business owners and managers have begun to recognize and experience the benefits of connecting their various locations, remote and mobile workers with real time access to business applications and data.  Further, centralization of IT coupled with outsourced IT management and subscription service pricing has introduced financial and operational benefits which make businesses more cost-efficient as well as more agile.  From being the basis for foundational process and workflow improvements to allowing the repositioning of IT costs from capex to opex, online application services are proving their value in various ways every day.

The evident popularity of cloud solutions is clearly visible in one small corner of the global software marketplace: the small business accounting solution market. Intuit’s QuickBooks product, almost a default go-to with entrepreneurs and small business owners, is still the most prevalent accounting solution in use by US small businesses.  While there may be growing usage of other applications on the web, such as Xero or FreshBooks (both are awesome SaaS apps that do what they do quite well), there is equally strong growth in Intuit’s own SaaS version of QuickBooks.  The SaaS applications are easier to localize for different places in the world – different languages and currencies – so international use of these products is likely to continue to grow.  Even more to the point, these solutions address functionality and pricing levels which are acceptable to entirely different classes of users that previously wouldn’t even consider buying accounting software to do the books (like freelancers and solo/soho operators), so the overall size of the market of “businesses who use accounting or bookkeeping software” is actually growing.

Intuit’s QuickBooks Online edition is a true SaaS solution that is quite different from the desktop-based QuickBooks.  While QBO has gained tremendous popularity, it has yet to reach the user numbers the desktop products have.  The desktop solutions boast not just a particular range of functionality, but integrated applications and add-ons, and – perhaps most importantly – being a foundation for a wide variety of financial and business record keeping, bookkeeping, accounting, operationally oriented and reporting processes.  To sum it up: it’s embedded.  People know the software, the data is in a known format, and the product is simply part of how the business operates.

Once a solution is as entrenched as QuickBooks is – kind of like the entrenchment Microsoft Word and Excel have in the productivity area – it doesn’t go away very quickly and only when the value proposition is much greater… and maybe not even then.  Rather, folks find ways to make the solution they want work for them.  This is where hosting comes in and meets with the market’s demand for running applications (yes! even desktop applications!) online, as managed subscription service.

Running your QuickBooks desktop online via a hosting provider is how businesses take advantage of the best benefits of SaaS without actually converting to a SaaS application. They retain investments in training, process and integration yet introduce mobility, remote access and office connectivity, centralized information and predictable costs. QuickBooks-using businesses need to know about hosting their QuickBooks and the providers who can offer anything from standardized to extremely customized service.

As technology continues to evolve at ever-increasing rates, businesses will continue to be faced with new paradigms for doing business.  Some will adopt early and some will adopt later, and some simply won’t adopt.  Certainly the market as a whole doesn’t adopt as quickly as software companies would like, but then that’s always the way it is.  Customers will do what works for customers, and right now hosting is working for QuickBooks customers.

Joanie Mann Bunny FeetMake Sense

J

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To the EU and Beyond! Avalara acquires VAT Applications

To the EU and Beyond! Avalara acquires VAT Applications

Avalara, perhaps the best known and respected purveyor of sales tax compliance solutions in the US, has made another acquisition to expand their service line.  Just announced is Avalara’s acquisition of VAT Applications, provider of the iVAT suite of VAT compliance software and services. The iVAT solutions work for customers doing business in Europe and around the world, providing (among other things) cloud-based VAT compliance services for filing returns on all EU countries… in the required formats and languages.  By incorporating the iVAT solutions into the Avalara product line, the company extends its reach and capability to serve the global market.

To Infinity and Beyond! Buzz Lightyear from Pixar film Toy Story; image from wikipedia

To Infinity and Beyond!

While Avalara solutions are quite popular with US-based small businesses, the solutions are geared to work for businesses of virtually any size. iVAT solutions now take Avalara into EU and beyond, where VAT compliance is a necessity for enterprise as well as small biz (just as sales and use tax compliance is in the US).

Avalara has successfully acquired and incorporated several companies and solutions into its fold over the years, including EZtax, HotSpotTax, SuitePlus and Zytax.  This latest acquisition fills the cloud-based tax compliance solution line very well, and positions Avalara’s portfolio among the most comprehensive available anywhere.

Sales tax and VAT compliance is a big issue for business large or small.  Finding a solution that can not only address the business need, but that can serve businesses across borders and boundaries is essential in serving today’s global economy.  Even the smallest of businesses may find itself doing business internationally, selling to customers via the web often means crossing those lines and introducing new tax and compliance wrinkles and requirements.  Avalara addresses those business needs, and delivers solutions for the market whether it is local or global. It’s light years ahead of the rest.

jmbunnyfeetMake Sense?

J

 

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QuickBooks Online vs QuickBooks Desktop: The Great Debate

QuickBooks users around the country are facing a dilemma like never before – they’re being forced to consider exchanging their beloved QuickBooks desktop editions with a subscription-based online application that seems like an entirely different product.  It not only seems like a different product, it is.  And this is where the debate begins.

For years businesses both large and small found Intuit’s QuickBooks software to be their solution for business bookkeeping and accounting.  Over the years the product line grew to support larger businesses, with the Enterprise edition scaling to 30 users and boasting a load of operational process support features.  Accounting professionals, too, grew to favor the QuickBooks products because there were features just for these “mechanics” who learned to make the software do what was necessary to support the business, even if the software wasn’t intentionally designed to be used in that manner.  After all, it is this “unintentional” activity which often results in really cool new features being introduced in the product – features that the designers didn’t think up but that users did and the news eventually got back to the developers.

dt-v-online-great-debateWhen Intuit introduced QuickBooks Online, however, the tried-and-true solution known as “QuickBooks” became something very different at first glance, creating the need to educate the market about the continuing existence of desktop QuickBooks products as well as the newer online QuickBooks product.  Differentiation of the two is not really the “desktop” versus “online” moniker – Commercial Hosts for QuickBooks, who essentially turn the desktop products into online application service, pretty much eliminate the whole “any time, anywhere” debate, as hosted QuickBooks desktop editions are just as anytime/anywhere as the online edition is.  The benefit of Internet access and running on any device is now removed from the equation, so what’s left to compare other than functionality, benefits and features… and a proven track record?

We could, in the past, have a conversation about the features, benefits and functionality in QuickBooks and know that the flow-through of product use knowledge, stored data and integration with other business solutions would be fairly seamless and consistent.  QuickBooks Online has demonstrated none of this, fracturing the seamlessness and consistency users could previously expect as they move through the product line – as businesses will do as they grow larger and have more demands from their software solutions.

So now there’s a debate – which solution is best?  The answer really isn’t necessarily about which is best, but which addresses the business need now and, if the business intends to be around for a while, in the future.  Sometimes the argument is more about getting you where you need to be rather than simply supporting where you are now.  I know I’m not yet ready to place any hard bets on whether or not the QBO  model will truly deliver the goods for growing businesses long-term.

Joanie Mann Bunny FeetMake Sense?

J

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EMV and Retail – Your Trusted Advisor Should Be Advising You about This

EMV and Retail – Your Trusted Advisor Should Be Advising You about This

EMVChipCardThere is ‘big change a comin’ for retailers, merchants and any business that accepts credit cards for payments, and there are a great many businesses that are completely unprepared for it.  The change, what is being referred to as the “Payment Networks’ Liability Shift”, goes in to effect in October 2015 and places the burden of liability for fraud squarely on the shoulders of the merchants and card issuers who are not compliant with certain payment system security standards.  Accounting professionals and Trusted Advisors – here’s one of those things you should be helping your clients with.  Help them get informed, trained, and prepared.  Help them to understand the risk and decide on a course of action.  This is part of what makes a trusted advisor: they got your back.

The way things generally work in the US today, a fraudulent charge on a credit card is likely to end up being covered by the credit card company (the issuer). Starting in October, retailers are supposed to be able to accept payment cards with EMV chips (named for the founders of the standard: Europay, MasterCard and Visa), and must process those cards using the compliant technology that takes advantage of what the chip processing and security offers.  If these conditions aren’t met – like having a POS or payment terminal not capable of reading the EMV chip – the merchant is on the hook for the fraudulent transaction.  Given the volume of credit card and payments fraud in the country you’d think that most merchants would already be ready for this, but replacing all the POS and terminal equipment could be pretty costly.  It may take a bit of analysis to understand the real risk and compare that to the cost of compliance.  Certainly it makes sense to always be in compliance, but there are always factors which influence how quickly (or how completely) compliance may be met.

The liability shift is part of the influence being leveraged to get businesses to adopt newer and more secure models of electronic payment acceptance and processing.  It is simply the case that the magnetic strip on a credit card isn’t good enough any longer.  The new EMV Chip reading payment terminals require that the card be inserted and processed by the terminal rather than simply swiping the magstrip across a reader.  Over 40 years of using the magstrip approach has helped to earn the United States a top spot on the leaderboard for credit card and financial fraud, and we seem to be lagging behind in adoption and implementation of the EMV technology even though it has been shown to seriously curtail fraud even as payment card usage increases.  The EMV chip process, which encrypts information about the card so that even the local POS system doesn’t get access to it, is far more secure and is being widely adopted and used in Europe, Canada, Latin America and the Asia/Pacific regions.  Now the clock is ticking for US businesses to get ready to either update their systems or accept the liability for not doing so.

The shift in how payment cards are made and processed is simply one of many changes which will continue to occur as technology and human ingenuity continue to be applied in both good and not-so-good ways.  Recognizing that the pace of change is increasing, businesses must find ways to remain informed and prepare for those changes which will impact the business operation and sustainability.  This is among the essential roles the trusted advisor plays, and the current imperative simply underscores the growing need for such advisors by business large and small.

jmbunnyfeetMake Sense?

J

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Trusted Advisor is About the Work, Not the Title

Trusted Advisor is About the Work, Not the Title

Many accounting professionals believe they are THE trusted advisor the client comes to for advice and guidance on business financial matters.  Having fully bought into the messaging about the value of the accounting and tax work, these professionals are feeling pretty relaxed about their client engagements.  They believe the client will come to them with questions and provide the opportunity to deliver advice or work.  And each year  many clients return to get their taxes prepared or financial statements produced, and even new clients may appear.  But the work remains largely the same – financial statements and tax returns, and addressing additional needs only when the client brings it up, which isn’t all that frequently.

happy_clientOn the other hand, there are professionals who recognize that a proactive approach to helping clients results in better and richer client engagements and better-performing client businesses.  These professionals are truly the business advisors to the client – the trusted partners who understand the variety of conditions which impact business performance and care to make sure they are properly addressed.  This advisor not only reports but makes recommendations and provides guidance on certain situations or processes which are essential in the business model.  These professionals recognize that the bookkeeping and operational information collection is not simply a means to an end; these professionals understand that these foundational processes and the information they encompass are the important details which reflect the true performance of the business… details which no summary report can fully describe.

Having more direct participation in clients’ financial systems is a highly successful component of practice building, helping the firm to mine opportunities that may be hidden in current or new client engagements.  This does not mean that the accounting professional becomes part of client operations or workflows.  Rather, it suggests that the accounting professional understand these aspects of client operations and assist in the development of necessary controls and processes involving data collection or validation.  It may include the implementation of KPI and benchmarking solutions to help identify problems and map improvements, or it may involve the installation of a solution to improve the importing of orders and other transactions into the system, improving the efficiency in processing the information while at the same time reducing the potential for manual data input errors.

Regardless of the depth of direct involvement in client systems, professionals can more fully benefit from every client engagement by providing some level of training, consulting or supporting service in addition to compliance and reporting work.  Services may be aligned toward helping clients set up or support their own in-house bookkeeping and controllership responsibilities, or they may be more suited to providing real-time guidance and review of client business performance data. Either way, the quality of the financial information derived is generally far better and requires less work to adjust and report on.

The key is recognizing that the work involved – whether it is through training, regular process and data reviews, or more direct participation – is not intended to simply streamline reporting on outcomes.  The work the trusted advisor performs is intended to help the client save money and improve business and financial performance, and the practice is rewarded with higher value billable services and a much increased opportunity to engage the clientele in other efforts.

jmbunnyfeetMake Sense?

J

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State of the Union: The Irrelevance of Good Accounting?

State of the Union: The Irrelevance of Good Accounting?

financeI’m a little concerned, and any professional in accounting and finance who works with small businesses should be just a little concerned, too.  Why?  Because there is a belief out there that some nifty software and Internet Of Things (IoT) approach to finance will ultimately eliminate the need for a small business to work with skilled, trained accounting professionals.  Remember the marketing slogan introduced by Intuit with QuickBooks – the one that suggested that, “if you can write a check, you can do your own books”?  Most accountants will tell you that it is not true, and the ability to operate a product like QuickBooks does not magically turn poor accounting and bookkeeping information into good business data.  In fact, it most frequently enables bad information to turn into bad business decisions – quickly.

DIY bookkeeping solutions have been around for a while, so why the distress about it now? Up until this point, it hadn’t been so overtly stated to small business owners that having less-than-great accounting data is very much OK, and that the role accounting professionals play in small business finances is more of a burden than benefit.  Consider the statement made by President Obama in his recent State of the Union address:

“Let’s simplify the system and let a small business owner file based on her actual bank statement, instead of the number of accountants she can afford”

If I’m an accounting professional, I am pretty steamed up about that statement because I know how screwy business accounting data gets when the work is done by folks without the proper training.  Incorrect or improper accounting treatment can make a big difference when it comes to filing those taxes mentioned…. and not in a good way.  That transaction on the bank statement… Is it a cost of goods sold or a regular business expense? Is it an asset or supply item? Is it a reimbursement or revenue?  Is the payroll deduction before or after taxes?  Is that even a viable payroll deduction item?  These questions and more arise frequently in a small business, and the treatment for these items is improper as often as not.

There is a big value in what a trained accounting professional can offer a small business owner, and the value often translates to eliminating unnecessary tax burdens and the delivery of accurate reporting – both of which are really important when it comes to actually trying to grow a healthy and sustainable business.

Small businesses are often considered to be the fuel powering our economy.  Doesn’t it make sense for us all to recognize that smarter businesses are likely to be more successful, and that more successful small businesses means growth in the economy?  The importance of good fiscal and financial management and reporting – in business and in government – is not something to minimize, and suggesting that it takes no intervention or skill to do the job properly reflects poorly not only on the person saying it, but on the entire establishment.

jmbunnyfeetMake Sense?

J