Category: outsourcing

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Accounting Professionals Should Do This: Be Proactive and Regularly Communicate with Clients

Accounting Professionals Should Do This: Be Proactive and Regularly Communicate with Clients

I’m not sure where I heard it, I think it was a sky diver on TV, who said about the sport “you’re dead until you do something about it”.  At the same time that I realized that I never wanted to sky dive, I also realized that this fairly desperate philosophy at some level applied to a lot of business situations. Weirdly enough, one of them was how this relates to public accountants and bookkeepers working with small business clients.

One of the things I’ve heard a lot throughout the years is that bookkeeping and doing other work for small business clients is tough, because they never bring you the information you need when you need it.  With a philosophy of “help me help you”, accounting professionals are trying to find ways to make it easier for the client to deliver the work to them.  The missing element, however, is a closer working relationship with the client, coupled with PROACTIVE and REGULAR (please note the big letters) reminders that getting the work to the professional is the only way to get it processed in time .

How many firms really communicate with clients only during tax season?  Is the client organizer your main method of reminding them that you’ve got a relationship?  It’s not even funny how many business owners couldn’t name the accountant who did their tax return last year, and who don’t seem to care to know.  This is definitely not the way to build and retain client relationships, yet it is the approach many professionals take.  And then they wonder why the client base isn’t growing, and why they are having a hard time “communicating their value” and they want to know how to get more of that profitable “higher level” work.

You’re dead until you do something about it.

Put into the context of the reactive accountant, it starts to make sense.  Accounting professionals must be proactive – be doing something to build customer loyalty and retention, be actively and regularly communicating with clients so it’s not a mad rush during tax season, and be implementing tools and solutions to help them offer more meaningful services to their clients.  This is how to make the firm grow and thrive.  So, go do something about it.

Make Sense?

J

Being Proactive, Not Reactive – Accountants Need to Increase the Speed of Service Delivery from Intuit Accountants News Central

Read more about Building Smarter Businesses: Staying Relevant in a Cloud Accounting World

read more…

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Getting out of IT Jail

Getting out of IT Jail

I have a friend in the accounting/technology industry that spends way too much time on his business in-house IT.  He’s always futzing around with servers and workstations, fixing corrupted data files or PCs that won’t launch applications, and setting up remote access so he can work at home (which he never actually does because he’s at the office fixing IT issues).  More often than not, when I try to get time to chat with the guy, his response is “I’ll have to call you later; I’m in IT jail”.  As a side note, my friend is Doug Sleeter, a recognized leader in the world of small business accounting and among QuickBooks accountants, consultants and advisors.

My friend works a lot with different solutions and technologies designed to make it easier and more effective to get accounting and business information collected, processed, stored, and reported.  He reviews tons of different solutions each year, and looks for those he believes can truly make a positive impact in the life of a business owner.  My friend also, as he puts it, “eats his own dog food”, meaning that he actually puts into place many of the solutions which he finds to be beneficial so that he can experience their benefit in his own business.  His proven experiences then translate to support for the solution in the market.  People need to know that a solution will actually do what it is supposed to do, and many wait for someone else (someone they trust) to go first so they can use the customer feedback to help them make a decision.

My friend clearly recognized the growing value of cloud solutions and how implementing cloud-based services to solve specific business problems might be a more effective and affordable way to address growing business needs than with traditional ERP models or installed software approaches.  Using different tools that work together (his term for this is “chunkify” 🙂 ), even very small businesses could now affordably address the various operational and financial information management needs which exist at some level in all businesses.  Following along with his previous commitment to use and not just talk about these things, he began the process of selection and implementation of various cloud-based applications, tools and integrations for his desktop QuickBooks software.

No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.  thesis on Military Strategy, German Field Marshal Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke 

It was going great.  Application services subscribed to were working as expected, and all sorts of information was fairly seamlessly flowing to and from QuickBooks.  And then, it happened – his bookkeeper moved away and wasn’t able to work in the office where the accounting software and data were housed.  Take a deep breath. Okay, so back to the remote access thing, and more IT jail.

He worked diligently to create remote access for the now-remote bookkeeper, and remote desktop service worked OK, but it was “a pain to keep working, and it never could give the type of performance we were trying to give her”.  Go figure, the one piece of the puzzle left in the office was the one making everything else more difficult and costly.  He was in IT jail once again.

The final step was to get the QuickBooks software and company data out of the local network and in a safe and secure and fully-managed environment.  Particularly since QuickBooks is (in this case) the centerpiece of the business accounting system, it became essential to place it in an environment where it would be maintained, monitored, and protected by people who specialize in that sort of thing.  My friend, like most business owners, just didn’t have the time and resources to have the level of IT and management that an outsourced commercial service provider could offer.

See The Sleeter Group’s  QuickBooks and Beyond article Still Addicted to Desktop Software? Get it Hosted in the Cloud

Intuit even recognized that businesses needed a better way to run and manage their QuickBooks desktop software, so they created an accredited hosting program to allow service providers to offer application hosting and license management services to QuickBooks users.  My friend now uses one of these providers to host his QuickBooks and other desktop applications.  He still has all the integrations and features he had before, but isn’t required to spend time and productivity fixing hardware issues or software installation problems.  His software is installed, maintained, and actively supported by IT professionals who are focusing on nothing more than keeping his systems up and running.

In his own words, “the hosting move offloaded us from having to mess with providing access, and at the same time it improved performance and delegated the IT management”.

For a time my friend and his business went without a high level of IT management and support, but now he completely recognizes that he needs it and is finding it to be well worth the cost.   Now he’s got his own “get out of jail” card.

Make sense?

J

In case you didn’t know it, both Intuit and Sage have programs for service providers, providing authorization to host and deliver small business financial software products to direct customers.

Get information on Intuit’s Authorized Commercial Hosts for QuickBooks here, Get information on Sage hosting partners here.

If you need assistance deciding how to get your applications and business online, or selecting and implementing with a service provider, we can help.

Read more: Cloud Hold Out No More: QuickBooks Desktop Editions in the Cloud

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Turning to the IT Department When Times are Tough

When budgets get tight and the economic outlook is bleak, business owners and executives tend to turn to information technology departments and projects as a potential area for cost cutting. The reason for this is that many businesses view IT purely as a cost center, making it a prime target when driving to reduce operating costs. A survey by McKinsey & Company, however, reveals that the current trend is a bit different.  While the survey is a bit dated, the information it contains is as relevant today as it was then.

The research indicated that many non-IT executives “seemed to have a developed a healthier appreciation for their information technology functions” according to Joe McKendrick in an older ZD Net article on the subject. McKendrick mentions that business executives generally seem pleased with the way the information technology is helping organizations get through these difficult economic times, “navigating the rough seas” as he put it.

“The survey also suggests that organizations that took the most advantage of information technology going into the downturn may have come out the strongest” observes McKendrick.

The McKinsey & Co Study, authored by Roger Roberts and Johnson Sikes, reported that the economic downturn actually increased awareness of the role information technology can play in improving business processes and reducing costs. As for the quality of services delivered? The study revealed that non-IT executives largely believe their IT functions responded effectively to the economic crisis. A majority said current performance in providing basic IT services is very or extremely effective. In contrast, IT executives had a dimmer view of their performance, with only a minority being satisfied with service delivery levels.

There have always been questions about the alignment of information technology to the business need, and IT is often perceived as being out of touch with the business. In this research, McKinsey & Co indicate that IT executives are very aware of the issues of keeping up with the business and are finding innovative ways of addressing them.

Make sense?

J

If you need assistance deciding how to get your applications and business online, or selecting and implementing with a service provider, we can help.

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Knowing Enough to Run a Successful Business

Knowing Enough to Run a Successful Business

If you own and operate a business, you probably want to make it successful.  Granted, success comes in many flavors, and there are also “degrees” of success, where maybe you do okay but not as well as you’d like (or not as well as your local competitor).  Running a successful business, and crafting a business with sustainability and long-term value, takes information as well as know-how.   Remember that information = power and you want to be as powerful as possible when it comes to running your business.

While today’s information technologies, mobile devices, and “everything as a service” have the capability to deliver way too much information for the average business owner to make sense of, there are a few areas of the business where investing in a little insight and reporting can make a big difference in the level of understanding you have about the business.

Rather than making decisions based on guesses or gut, business owners should use actual historic data relating to these are key areas (and key performance indicators) to help predict sales and order volumes, estimate cash flows, and forecast profitability.

Getting Customers

The “customer lifecycle” does not start when someone buys from you, it starts when they become a potential customer (often referred to as a target).  Even before someone buys, your business may expend resources to expose your brand or product to them on websites, in advertisements, and through other marketing channels.  These marketing efforts will (hopefully) result in the generation of qualified leads for the business to sell to.  Unless the business understands the costs involved and the efficiency of the marketing and lead generation efforts, it cannot understand the actual cost of getting a new customer.

The next step in getting customers is turning a qualified lead into an actual paying customer.  The business will want to keep track of conversion of leads into customers, along with sales data including total sales, number of items sold, and how items were priced.  Powered by sales performance data, business owners can learn whether or not their lead qualification efforts are working, if their products are competitive, and if the pricing is in alignment with the industry.

Producing Work

When businesses operate, they essentially produce whatever work product their business model is designed to produce – whether it is a professional service, product, logistical support or whatever.  Every business produces some type of work product.  This is the operational aspect of the business, and business owners should want to know as much as possible about how well operations are running and how effective the operation is.   This isn’t just the cost of production, (the yield expected for a given investment in materials or equipment), it is also about the quality of the product (customer satisfaction) and the quality and value of the service behind it (customer retention).

Keeping Money

Money (more specifically, cash and the availability of it) is the metric that most small business owners tend to focus on.  It makes sense, too, given that most small businesses survive based on what they have in their bank accounts.   Then again, looking at the accounts receivable and payable won’t tell the entire story, either.  Business owners need to know how quickly their customers generally pay, and they need to know how much capacity or inventory they have before needing to buy or develop more.

The message underlying this entire discussion is that fact that you can’t analyze what you can’t quantify (no information = no power), so it is essential that systems be in place to capture information from the business and its activities.   Further, recognize that it takes some skill and experience – perhaps from your trusted accounting professional – to put the information together so that it makes sense and is useful.

Make Sense?

J
Measure, Manage and Succeed.  It’s all about knowing how to speak the language of finance

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Virtual CFO Services and Partnering with Bookkeepers

Virtual CFO Services and Partnering with Bookkeepers

Many accounting professionals seek to become more involved with their business clients, helping to institute the controls and establish the processes which support sustainability and higher levels of business performance and value.  Acting as the Virtual CFO to the business, these professionals use historical financial information and detailed operational data to guide their clients towards stated goals.

While this move to engage clients are deeper operational levels is a worthy effort, there is often a disconnection in the supply chain for these services.  In too many cases, there is discord or a lack of understanding and trust between the CPA and the bookkeeper supporting the daily processing of the business information.

The business bookkeeper is the person “in the trenches”, getting daily information organized and processed, reconciling accounts, and generally tasked with recording transactions resulting from business activities.  Because the bookkeeper operates very closely with the business, they are perhaps in the best position to provide insight into how operational tasks and various business functions are performed and “accounted” for.  While the bookkeeper may not have the skill or experience to design change in these systems, they are a particularly powerful source of current process information and, in some cases, represent the barrier to change.

Years ago, as CPAs removed themselves from daily bookkeeping services to focus on “higher level” work, the opportunity was created for outsourced bookkeeping services to fill the gap in providing daily book and record keeping tasks for small businesses.  Small business owners in particular need help with the management of their bookkeeping and accounting, and without the availability (or affordability) of getting this service from the accounting professional, businesses turned to the bookkeepers who stepped in to fill the gap.  Yet every year, businesses turn over their bookkeeping and documentation to CPAs who simply re-create the bookkeeping in the form of “write-up”, trusting only their own work when it comes to tax and financial statement preparation.

It would seem that there would be a naturally occurring desire of CPAs to partner with professional bookkeepers in order to provide a full service capability to business clients and eliminate the need to reinvent and write-up the information, but this is often not the case and may be partly due to the reality that CPAs are trained on accounting principles while many bookkeepers are really only trained on the use of a software product.  Too often, bookkeepers gain their education primarily based on using QuickBooks software, and “speak” the language of QuickBooks rather than “accounting” resulting with a minimized view of the bookkeeper value by the CPA.

The CPA is thinking in terms of AR and AP subledgers, while QuickBooks bookkeepers think in terms of customers, invoices, and bills to pay.  While the language of QuickBooks has been designed to be meaningful to the non-accountant user, it is this very language and presentation which has made QuickBooks both a popular small business accounting solution as well as a foundational solution for an outsourced bookkeeping offering.

Working more closely with the bookkeepers, CPAs could help their clients not only achieve a more accurate and timely accounting of activities, they could also influence areas where necessary controls should be implemented, or where inefficient processes might be improved.  Providing not just information but also direction and actionable ability, these accounting professionals are now positioned more directly to provide the CFO services businesses need.

CPAs must find a way to get past their prejudices in working with business bookkeepers, and recognize that these operators “in the trenches” could be their most useful resource – and their most powerful ally – in the supply of Virtual CFO services to the client.

Make Sense?

J

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Remote access to client bookkeeping comes in many forms because clients come in many forms

There are a lot of conversations in LinkedIn and other groups, where bookkeepers and accountants are discussing their various methods of accessing client QuickBooks data and applications remotely.  While these conversations are quite helpful for some folks, there are others out there that simply get confused due to all of the possibilities.  There are many ways to work remotely with QuickBooks clients, and there are a lot of different situations where one approach may work better than others.

The key to remember here is that REMOTE ACCESS MATTERS.  Time and distance is the enemy when it comes to outsourced bookkeeping, and whether you like visiting your clients or not, having remote access to their data can be the key element in providing the highest level of service and value possible.  Remember when PCanywhere became available, and we were all excited because now we could use a modem to dial directly in to the client PC?  OK, maybe I’m talking to a crowd that’s too new to remember that excitement, but believe me, remote access is something all outsourced accountants and bookkeepers have been looking for.  Now that really good options are available (a lot of options), it makes sense to get a better understanding of what you can and can’t do with various remote access approaches.

First, when you’re looking at any true SaaS solution (true being a relative term, but here we mean an app service that was built for the web and is offered as a subscription model), consider that the solution exists only on the web, and that when a business subscribes they are generally subscribing to a single company data set.  Unlike QuickBooks desktop, for example, where you can have numerous company data files, QuickBooks Online and other SaaS solutions generally build a single company data file associated with the subscription.  When you want to access different companies, you may have to log in as a user of the company you’re accessing.

If you’re an accounting professional, there may be an edition or approach that allows you to connect to multiple client accounts, but then again, there may not be.  So be prepared to have to log in as each individual client to access their data.  When this becomes the situation, what’s the difference between one client having QB Online and one using Xero, Wave, FreshBooks or Kashoo?  None, really, other than the fact that you need to get to know all of the solutions a bit.  As a bookkeeper or accounting professional, this shouldn’t be so much of an issue, as debits and credits and basic accounting theory doesn’t change with the accounting software (basic “accounting theory” isn’t really available for redefinition).

The other thing to recognize about these solutions is that the data belongs on the web with the app, so it’s not like you’ll be copying the data file to your PC to work on.  You might export the data to another solution, but you won’t be using the SaaS solution offline.

If the client isn’t using a SaaS solution, then it is likely a desktop solution, where the application is installed on their local PC.  This type of solution – QuickBooks desktop editions being the most popular and easiest example to work with – gets installed and runs from the PC.  Data may be stored on the PC or on a network hard drive, but the program is running locally on the user’s computer, and is using resources on the local computer (memory, processor, etc.).  There are only a few ways to make this type of application into something you can access remotely, and one of them is by using a remote control approach.

Remote control is where one computer connects to and controls certain aspects of another.  This is like the old dial-up approach, using PCanywhere-type applications to control one computer from another.  These days, the Internet rather than a dial-up phone connection is the preferred method, and there are web service providers which “broker” the connection and communication between computers, providing added features and layers of security.  Using a remote control solution (examples are LogMeIn or GoToMyPC) simply allows the user on one computer to control the keyboard and mouse, and view the display, of a remote computer.  It doesn’t matter what is running on the remote, so a bookkeeper could use this approach to access a client PC and QuickBooks desktop applications and data, or even to connect with the client so they can log in to QuickBooks Online or Xero together.

Some bookkeepers work with their clients, showing them how to do things and connecting to client resources in order to get work accomplished.  Others connect using their own resources or accounts, and work concurrently with the client.  Still others may export data from the client solution into their product of choice, not even working within the client application at all except to make adjustments and data exports.  It all depends on the collaboration model you and the client have going, and it is unlikely that any single model or approach will work for the entire client base.

QuickBooks hosting introduces a bit of a wrinkle in the concept, but not much of one.  Really, hosted QuickBooks desktop editions should be viewed to be not less and not significantly more than a QuickBooks Online or other SaaS approach.  If the client would benefit from working online (most client would), then having them host their QuickBooks desktop applications and data with a hosting provider makes sense.  However, just because the client is hosting their QuickBooks doesn’t mean that you should immediately assume that you’ll have access to their applications or data.  Like with a SaaS solution, you’ll likely have to have an account to log in with, and that account could be a separate login allowing you to work at the same time as the client, or the account could be one that is shared with the client and where only one of you can log in at the same time.

Since a hosted solution is accessed online just like a SaaS solution is, you don’t have to have the software installed on your own PC, and you only need an Internet connection to access the application and data at any time.  A major difference of working with a hosted solution is that you could possibly have the application installed on your PC, and could copy the data from the host and work on it offline.

With all of the options available, accountants and bookkeepers have realized that the selection of client collaboration approaches depends on a number of factors, and that professionals may end up applying an unlikely combination of solutions in order to address meeting various client preferences as well as their accounting needs.

Make sense?

J

Read more about hosted QuickBooks desktop editions

Read about the race to find the secret sauce of hosted application services for small businesses