saas – Page 22 – Cooper Mann Consulting

January 10, 2013

Using Structured Workflow to Manage Offline Clients | Intuit Accountants News Central

The demand today requires that accounting professionals be more attentive and, yes, aggressive, in terms of “attacking” a regular flow of processing client information rather than batching it at period end. This drives a great need to structure and organize the work, and workflow, so that the repetitive and regularly performed processes may be streamlined and made easier to manage on an ongoing regular basis. It is no longer good enough to wait for clients to deliver the information and request the resultant reports. We must proactively request and gather the required information for processing, especially with offline clients, in order to get the work done more frequently.

Read the entire article at Intuit Accountants News Central

Read more about Online Accountants and Their Clients: Working Smarter, or just Closer?
Read more about Data Warriors: Accountants in the Cloud
Read more about using the cloud to extend “connectedness” beyond traditional boundaries

January 8, 2013October 28, 2014

SmartVault Scan to QuickBooks – When you need to know, go to the source

One of the biggest challenges in business bookkeeping is keeping track of the paper documents and items which back up the data in the accounting system. If you’ve ever had to produce an expense report, or provide a receipt for a business purchase, you know what I’m talking about. That piece of paper is the supporting information for a financial transaction, proof that the entry in the books matches what was actually done. This is what is referred to as the “source” document, and it’s pretty important to keep around, especially in the event of an audit.

Keeping track of paper receipts, bills and other documents which support bookkeeping or accounting transactions can be quite a challenge for any business. In many cases, notes are made in journal entries or in transaction descriptions identifying source documents, but finding the document then becomes an adventure in the paper filing system where you hope the paper you’re looking for is actually in the file referenced. Just the time it takes to organize, store and then later find those documents makes the whole process inefficient, time-consuming, and costly.

What makes sense for many businesses is to attach those source documents right to the transaction in the accounting system. When the accounting was manual, it was easy to do this – simply paperclip the invoice or receipt to the page with the journal entry. In the world of electronic information and computerized accounting software, the process is a bit different, but not much if you use SmartVault and QuickBooks together.

One of the best features of SmartVault, an online document storage and secure file sharing solution, is the integration it offers with QuickBooks financial software. Using SmartVault and QuickBooks together, business owners and the bookkeepers and accountants who support them are able to easily and efficiently manage source accounting documents, connect them to transactions in the accounting system, and retrieve them at any later date required. The process of connecting the source document to the transaction in QuickBooks is the easiest thing to do, too, because you simply use the familiar paperclip to hook the two items together which ultimately deliver an integrated QuickBooks document management solution.

When working in QuickBooks, the SmartVault toolbar is visible on the screen. Operators who need to make entries in the financial system are able to attach source documents right to the transaction using the SmartVault,toolbar – the user simply clicks on the paperclip icon on the toolbar to scan, browse or drag and drop files onto the toolbar and into SmartVault. The source document is now attached to that specific QuickBooks transaction – later, when a user views the QuickBooks entry, clicking on the folder icon on the toolbar will display the attached document, providing instant access to the supporting documentation for the entry and a built-in audit trail. Users can even scan documents as they make the QuickBooks entries, because SmartVault can grab the image from vault folders or directly from the SmartVault Inbox. This gives users scan to cloud functionality and makes scanning, naming and saving documents much easier, and eliminates the need for the user to have computer skills required for storing, organizing, and finding documents on their PC before they can be put into SmartVault.

Considering the volume and variety of paper documents that most businesses deal with, having a simple and fool-proof means to keep important financial documents available is critical. Even more, having those source accounting documents readily available and viewable right from the accounting software becomes an essential element to making sure you have the right information, and the back up to support it, in your accounting and bookkeeping systems.

Make Sense?

December 20, 2012June 27, 2013

Business Owners to Accountants – Tell Me in Real Time

Business accounting is defined as the system of recording and summarizing business and financial transactions and analyzing, verifying, and reporting the results. It sounds pretty dull, and to most small business owners it is the last thing they want to think about. “Accounting” is what happens at the end of the month, quarter or year – or when any type of taxes are due. What matters to the small business owner is their cash flow and cash availability to meet immediate operational demands, and how they will get past today’s problems to reach their future goal of comfortable retirement, leaving a legacy for the kids, or selling the business at a high value. It may even be that, during periodic visits to deliver the monthly paperwork to the accountant, business owners express interest in discussing their ability to meet future business goals, yet these conversations often take a back-burner to simply getting the work processed and reports and returns completed.

Accounting has traditionally been approached as an after-the-fact activity, recording transactions for things that were already done in the business. While this may be a handy approach to getting an annual tax return completed, it really does nothing for the small business owner in terms of providing them with information to run the business. Further, it does nothing toward helping the business owner get to where they want to go with the business, reaching whatever goals they had in mind when they first got started.

Cloud solutions and Internet-based applications have emerged which provide a high level of capability and information to small business owners, much like the E*Trade tools which enabled any user to “take control of their financial futures by providing the products, tools and services they need to meet their near- and long-term investing goals”. Where E*Trade delivered simplicity, insight, and guidance for investors in real-time, so do many of the new business analysis and financial dashboard solutions, but in a business financial context.

Individuals who are focused on meeting their financial or investment goals are very interested in monitoring their progress toward reaching those goals, and guidance often suggests that making adjustments in strategy or approach at certain points along the way may be required. Similarly, business owners have a great interest in monitoring the progress and status of their businesses, and many are taking steps to gain that insight and obtain guidance through the use of online banking solutions and other real-time reporting tools.

By simply connecting financial systems to some of these online reporting tools, business owners are able to gain a significant level of insight into their business operations, including bank balances, cash coming in and going out, and other information which supports making daily business decisions. Unlike a static financial statement or annual report, these dynamic tools can provide business owners with real-time information about their businesses, which is what the business owner is looking for. But guess what? It’s not happening like it ought to.

Business owners are becoming increasingly impatient with their accounting professionals, and are demanding higher levels of service at more competitive rates than ever. Further, many business clients of accounting professionals are gaining a belief that the value their accountant delivers is diminishing as do-it-yourself tools are gaining in popularity due to ease of use and well-stated value propositions. If accounting professionals would only take a proactive, rather than a reactive, approach to working with their clients, this question of value would be much less of a question.

The biggest problem facing these accounting professionals is that they rely upon the client to deliver the work. Waiting around for clients to bring in information for processing, or traveling around to client offices to pick up materials when they say it’s ready, is creating a divide between the client and the accountant which is difficult to overcome. This divide – the lag in time between when business things happen and when they are accounted for – eliminates any possibility for the business owner to operate with all the information they need.

Accounting professionals must become proactive in their relationships with business clients, establishing the initial groundwork for how each will perform in order to achieve the desired result – real-time information for real time decision support. The accountant has a responsibility to not only ensure that the information is processed appropriately and accurately, but also to ensure that it is obtained and processed in a regular, timely manner. Increasing the frequency of capturing and processing data is necessary in order to provide information when it is most useful. This means that accountants must not only organize their workflows to adjust to the new frequency and timeframe for processing, but that they must also be far more proactive in obtaining the source information from clients on a regular and recurring basis.

It has always been a problem to get information from client businesses so that it can be processed and reported on. Now, with the demand for more timely data and “instant insight”, business owners are expecting faster returns on the processing of accounting information even as they continue to be the bottleneck in providing the source data. Accounting professionals and the tools they use will have to adjust to this reality, creating a stronger focus on the organization of work and turning notification and exception handling processes around so that they drive the workflow rather than simply result from it.

Make Sense?

December 19, 2012September 17, 2013

Accounting Professionals: Is Your Value Tied Up in The Accounting Software?

Subtitle: when all you have is a hammer…

There was a time, not so many years ago, when it made sense for an accounting firm to take the position that all clients must use the firm’s preferred accounting software product or they would not be clients. For these firms, the concept of standardizing transaction entry and data processing across the client base made sense, and provided a means to create maximum efficiency in handling the bookkeeping and accounting processes. Typically, firms handling small business clients would select Intuit QuickBooks for client use, and offered QuickBooks training, QuickBooks transaction processing, and use of QuickBooks add-ons to support the model. With Intuit QuickBooks “owning” the small business market for accounting software, it made sense for accounting professionals to leverage the popularity of the solution to the benefit of the practice.

As cloud-based solutions and online application services have emerged (including QuickBooks Online Edition and Intuit Partner Platform – IPP – integrations), many accounting professionals have simply continued with the philosophy of applying QuickBooks (the hammer) to every client engagement. These firms focus on the software as a basis for delivering what they believe is value in the engagement. In short, these professionals focus their value in the use of the product (licensing, installation, training and support), and in their data entry skills (efficiency in entering and reviewing transactions in the product), rather than in the greater value of business intelligence, insight and actionable advice.

The new challenge facing many professionals – the reality of the current market – is that there are myriad solutions and approaches available to address client bookkeeping and process needs which work really well, and it is not always a good idea to try to turn a client using one of them into a “nail” just so you can hit it with your favorite hammer – QuickBooks. With Freshbooks, Wave Accounting, Xero and other solutions which handle various business accounting or bookkeeping requirements quite well and for an attractive price, small business owners are more frequently electing to implement applications outside of the QuickBooks product line even as their accounting professionals are continuing to promote QuickBooks for everyone. The reason business owners are electing to use these other tools is simple: they work for them.

In reality, this issue has existed in some form for a very long time, and was perceived to be primarily in markets where technology adoption and use is low for various reasons. The truth is that a lot of small business owners find ways to accommodate their information management and record keeping needs, and they use whatever approach works for them and what they want to accomplish. Sometimes the approach involves Internet solutions and online applications, and sometimes it does not (Excel spreadsheets with stapled piles of receipts are still quite popular and in widespread use by SMBs and Entrepreneurs). When that small business elects to engage the help of an accounting professional, the last thing they want to be told is that they have to make a big change to how they get things done. It’s fine for the accountant to provide guidelines for when information will be made available to support getting the accounting work processed, but it is not necessarily okay to dictate immediate changes in software and systems supporting the business daily operations. In a lot of cases, the accounting professional simply has no real basis for the requirement to change, other than to support their own efficiency (which is the wrong basis for making a client change their systems). It’s that silly cost-benefit thing. If it costs the client a lot (change always = cost), and the client does not perceive or experience an expected benefit, then it makes no sense for them to make the change.

Consider a professional accounting firm in Los Angeles, California. This firm serves small businesses, and has a pretty significant market available to sell to. LA is a market where technology adoption is high and broadband Internet is cheap and reliable, so this firm has elected to use a product-based focus (e.g., the QuickBooks approach) in qualifying clients and crafting engagements. Clients must conform to the solution set and the workflow in order to participate with the firm.

Now, consider a professional accounting firm in Elkton, Oregon. This firm serves just about every business in town (population 195) as well as businesses from a few nearby towns. Broadband Internet service is sketchy at times, and provider options are few. This rural area of Oregon is not known for being particularly “high tech”, and computers and software and online application services are not among the things many of these business owners focus on or even care about. The accounting firm serving this market is not focused on what accounting solution the client uses (or not), and they aren’t pushing to have all their clients purchase and install the same accounting software so that the firm’s processes can be more efficient. Interestingly enough, this firm is likely doing better work and probably developed a closer and more intimate relationship with their client than those who have fully “standardized” the client base. The reason is that the firm, whether out of necessity or out of desire, recognizes that each of their clients may have unique needs, and it is up to the firm alone to create maximum efficiency in meeting them. Further, delivering personal service and useful insight instead of simply providing the work product has allowed the professional to more fully reveal their value to the client.

The truth of the small business accounting market is that there are more businesses like those in Elkton than in LA. Accounting professionals should consider whether they are in a position to “filter” their client opportunities based on use of certain software products and online solutions, or if they will accept that business clients come in all sizes and shapes – with various needs and wants and self-developed methods of getting things done – and that the firm is willing to embrace them as they are and work with them.

Make Sense?

December 17, 2012August 9, 2013

Scan to the Cloud – Point A to Point B with no stops

There is a lot of talk today about the benefits of running a “paperless office”, and the number and variety of solutions currently available prove that the concept is a popular one. Paperless offices consume fewer resources in terms of consumables like paper and ink, and require less floor space for handling and storing paper files, saving on office costs and storage space. Paperless offices also make it easier for people to share information, and to control that information so that multiple versions or editions of documents don’t get distributed in error. Paperless office solutions make storing and sharing documents easier and, in many cases, more secure.

Online document management and electronic file storage approaches come in a wide variety of forms, but the consistent requirement for all of them is that the document – the paper file to be stored – first be turned into electronic data. Users familiar with this process understand that it means taking the paper document and scanning it to an electronic image file. You simply place the paper document in the scanner, direct the scanner to scan the document, and then save the file to your hard drive. Then, once the file is saved as an image file on the hard drive, you upload it to your “paperless” storage solution. It sounds like a simple process, but for people with limited PC resources or who are “technically challenged”, it is not at all a simple or straightforward requirement.

What isn’t straightforward is the need for the user to name, save, and then try to find the file on their PC before it can be uploaded to the cloud storage vault. Paperless solutions are supposed to be intuitive, yet it isn’t very intuitive to require a user to store files on their PC before they can use their cloud solution. PC hard drives get filled up, files get old and need to be deleted when no longer needed, and finding one particular file on a stuffed full hard drive can be time-consuming and frustrating. Further, the entire concept of the paperless office and a central filing area is that documents don’t get reproduced and distributed, yet the requirement to save image files to the PC first essentially guarantees that extra copies of files will be left sitting around on PC hard drives even after they are copied to the storage vault.

The better answer is the SmartVault answer, which gives you the ability to scan directly to the cloud from your local scanner. SmartVault is an online document storage and secure file sharing solution that gives users a way to go directly from point A to point B – from paper to stored image – with no stops in between. SmartVault does this with the SmartVault Inbox, which you can think of as an electronic inbox with the same functionality as the old inboxes that used to sit on desks. The Inbox is part of the little SmartVault desktop client which installs on the user PC and delivers the ability to scan directly to the cloud. The SmartVault Inbox makes it easier to get files into the document vault because users can simply drop the document in the scanner, and in one click, the file is scanned directly into SmartVault. The file is auto-named with information from the document for easy searchability – you can even rename the file if you need to, but not having to come up with file names just makes using the solution that much easier to use.

The file is not stored on the local PC, eliminating the requirement to perform regular file cleanups, and now that the file is in SmartVault, you have a secure offsite backup of that document.

So whether a document needs to be uploaded and attached to a QuickBooks financial transaction or just needs to be archived for future use, SmartVault handles the process with just one click. When multiple files or documents need to be processed, that “one click” method saves a lot of time and user frustration.

Paperless office solutions should save steps in the process, not add more of them. SmartVault’s unique approach of allowing users to scan directly to the cloud saves time and frustration, and helps even novice technology users function like seasoned IT savvy professionals.

Make Sense?

December 12, 2012

The True Cost of the Cloud

Excerpt from article on Intuit Accountants News Central: The True Cost of the Cloud

“Accounting professionals are strongly encouraged to adopt cloud computing models in their practices, and there can be little argument that mobility and access are driving the need. In concert with the messages supporting mobile access to business information – and the value of anytime, anywhere access – cloud service providers are strongly suggesting that the overall cost of purchasing and maintaining information technology (IT) in the business is much lower when a cloud computing approach is used.

Arguments over the total cost of IT and related services become somewhat subjective. Many business owners and managers fail to consider the value of their own time spent dealing with business technology issues, much less the time spent by in-house employees and remote workers. To further complicate the issue, dramatic changes in process support and delivery, connected service and cloud computing approaches are impacting business productivity and profitability in new and dramatic ways. As a result, every business should consider the costs and the benefits of this new connected and collaborative working model.

At the core, cloud computing is really just an outsourced IT service that addresses the various levels of application and computing infrastructure. From IaaS (infrastructure as a service) to SaaS (software as a service) and all things in between, a viable cloud computing approach for a business may encompass little more than co-location of physical server and network resources with a third-infrastructure provider to something much larger scale, such as offloading virtually every aspect of application management and delivery to a SaaS solution.

Because there is no single, correct definition of what makes up a “cloud” service model, attempting to compare costs directly to a more traditional IT approach is quite complicated.”