saas – Page 7 – Cooper Mann Consulting

June 30, 2015May 19, 2017

Two Ways to Get QuickBooks in the Cloud

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

cloud-computing Running 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 Feet Make Sense

June 2, 2015March 5, 2018

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-debate When 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 Feet Make Sense?

May 19, 2015November 15, 2019

Accounting for Custom Manufacturing

Accounting and bookkeeping is a part of every business large and small, yet there are myriad details to work with and a multitude of possible approaches to addressing the requirement. From a summary perspective, there are standards which are fairly easily met, providing the basics of sales and expense tracking and income reporting sufficient for basic tax and compliance work to be performed. Yet accounting may go much deeper into the operational processes of the business, delving into the details of productivity and profitability in order to find and expose areas where the business might improve both.

mfg Manufacturing, particularly custom manufacturing or ETO (engineering to order) is among those industry types that could benefit tremendously from a more intimate and detailed approach to accounting. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to find experienced professionals with not simply a competence in working with manufacturing industry sector clients, but specifically with ETO process. Building to order is one thing, but finding the way to improve efficiency and profitability when every job is a custom encounter takes additional skills and a lot of data. Accounting professionals with these skills are needed to help these custom manufacturers grow, transform their businesses and make the overall operations more efficient and sustainable.

It seems logical that manufacturing and ETO space businesses are ripe for the same bridging of technology and analysis that the accounting industry started broadly approaching some years back. With bookkeeping processes being more frequently outsourced to non-accountants, the accounting professionals saw increased pressure to find more efficient ways of doing things and had to find new value to deliver to clients. Technology, data collection and analysis became the foundations for delivering on that new requirement. With the established model and philosophy, bringing more operational aspects of client systems into the mix and extending the model end-to-end just makes sense.

It takes a combination of systems – from the core accounting solution to the manufacturing control or other operational systems, through to the analytical tools. Leveraging hosting technologies and cloud service, businesses are finally able to bring the multiple work locations – shops, warehouses and business offices – together in a single software and technology platform, and collect the level of detail necessary to provide a comprehensive and true picture of the business. The analytical tools then provide the means to explore the details and identify where improvements might be made or where previously unrecognized risk exists.

QuickBooks desktop editions remain among the most popular financial systems used by manufacturing and job shop applications, largely due to the effectiveness of connecting the operational applications to an accounting solution which proves highly workable and which has strong industry support. Even with the emergence of QuickBooks Online (and the push by Intuit to get customers to adopt this web-based alternative to desktop-based software) the QuickBooks desktop edition products continue to provide more functionality and application support for these working models, as the ability to fully manage the information in the solution exists more in the disk based products than it does in a multitenant web-based application. Accounting “mechanics” are able to see, access and work with all the data rather than simply view reports where only half of the transaction is visible – making detailed accounting and data analysis more readily available.

The key is to leverage the accounting professional, the right software tools, and the platform and delivery environment that allows it all to work in concert for the entire organization. Add the QuickBooks hosting service so the participants can work more closely together. Enabling the accounting professional and bringing them closer to their clients (and client systems) allows the deeper move into operational issues, creating the basis for both to receive new and more value from the relationship.

jmbunnyfeet Make Sense?

February 24, 2015

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_client On 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.

jmbunnyfeet Make Sense?

February 17, 2015

Confusing Value Propositions: Cloud Platforms and Hosted Applications

When a service provider is in the business of selling computing resources – like bandwidth, processors and memory, and disk storage – it makes a lot of sense to also leverage the value of software products and systems which drive consumption of computing resources. In short, they market and sell software that runs on the platform in order to get folks to buy the platform, no different from selling desktop and server software in order to sell the hardware to run it. It’s just that these days the hardware and networking components are often referred to as the “platform” or maybe “the cloud”.

Let’s face it… cloud computing platforms are just no fun if there’s nothing to run on them, and a hard drive has little value when there isn’t anything stored on it. Once there is something there – an application, data… something – then the part has actual value in terms of driving revenue. This is the difficulty and the basis for confusing value propositions when it comes to offering and delivering services in the form of a hosting platform. Once again: platforms are just no fun if there’s nothing to run on them. Is the value is really about the applications, not the platform? Or is the value in the platform, because it’s necessary for running the applications?

The truth is that both are essential parts of the entire “solution”, and the value of how the solution is packaged and offered is purely up to the purchaser to determine in terms of applicability to the business. When it comes to hosted application offerings for businesses, there isn’t a single one-size-fits-all approach that will work. Sometimes people want to purchase from different vendors and put their own solutions together, and sometimes folks want turnkey delivery of whatever they need. Even channel partners and value-added resellers are finding that, with diminishing margins and aggressive competition prevalent in the market, removing the time-consuming aspects of solution delivery becomes paramount to achieving some level of profitability on the work.

What this means is that providers are looking for ways to increase the overall value and usability of their solutions, and when it comes to platform services there are only two directions to look: automation to support self-service, and application software delivery to drive consumption and usage on the hosting platform.

So now we’re back to the applications again. There’s no way to avoid them, but there’s no great way for platform companies to engage with them, either. Working with business application software is sometimes complicated, often annoying, and can be exceptionally time-consuming and resource intensive. And there are few licensing models which make it really easy for hosts and ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) to work together. Then, of course, there is the desire for exclusivity on one side or the other.

Software companies don’t generally want to select a single platform provider for their software for a very simple reason: they don’t want to limit their potential user base. Now that Windows platform is available just about anywhere – on local computers, on mobile devices, from platform and infrastructure hosting providers – how does the ISV make a decision on a single delivery channel or model or provider?

Some lean towards working with hosting providers to create branded, point-deliveries of the application. Too often, however, this approach removes the ability for customers to benefit from other applications or integrations, eliminating some of the value of the solution and certainly curtailing benefits for integrating partners of the ISV.

Host it themselves? The last thing most software developers want is to be responsible for hosting and maintaining some other guys’ software products; they have enough to worry about with their own offerings. If the solution is standalone, maybe this approach works. But there are few solutions made for the desktop which don’t have some strange integration point with MS Office apps, Adobe reader, Internet browsers or other things prevalent on the user desktop.

There isn’t any proven or easy path for software developers, IT suppliers or small business customers looking to create mobility and managed subscription service around desktop and server applications, and there is likely never going to be a single story line that all will follow. This is among the reasons for the popularity of the “hybrid” cloud approach and growing importance of managed application hosting and ISV-authorized delivery models. Yet even key providers in those areas have a tough time really communicating what they do in a way that is meaningful to the buyer. Are they selling a platform, applications, or both? Folks in the industry know the jargon and how to use it, and are often skilled at adjusting their language in order to obfuscate or confuse certain sticky issues regarding software licensing in the cloud and other similar aspects of hosting. It’s no wonder that many customers remain confused as to what, exactly, they’re being asked to buy, and where the lines of flexibility and responsibility are drawn.

The applications justify the platform, and there are possibly multiple platform approaches to delivering the app. It is a confusing situation for business buyers of IT as well as for their resellers and suppliers, and the increasing number of options for how businesses approach purchasing and using information technology makes it unlikely that the process will become as simple as some suggest.

jmbunnyfeet Make Sense?

January 7, 2015October 9, 2017

Everything Old is New Again: Big Fat Phones and Desktop QuickBooks in the Cloud

Every year that passes leaves some reminder of the time – some person or occurrence which touches us and creates a lasting memory. 2014 delivered its share of memorable people and moments and proved again that social platforms such as Twitter and Instagram have become increasingly significant as people across the world organize, march or call for change. Yet even as change is demanded from us and often forced upon us, it is wise to remember that the pendulum eventually swings both ways. We want to have our cake and eat it, too, which is the ultimate no-win situation and causes us to constantly and consistently seek out the alternative. Like the puppy chasing his tail, we end up going round in circles. Harem pants and jeans torn from knee to thigh have come back in fashion, and even though they didn’t really work the first time, here they are again. It is inevitable.

Information technology trends follow similar patterns, and what was once in high fashion may now be considered as “legacy”. Perhaps the better word is “classic”, as these legacy solutions often represent the standards by which new solutions will be measured. Eventually, the properties of the classic or legacy solution wind up in the new breed, because this is what the market has come to expect and/or demand. Even when entirely new standards are believed to be adopted, the truth is that years of learning and experience will often find the path previously traveled by others to be the right path.

It seems like so long ago when some said “the desktop is dead” and that all applications would be used by every device via the web, but not run on the device. Well, there are quite a number of web-based applications and services delivered in just that manner, but there are also lots and lots of computers out there with software still installed on them, happily working away for their users (there’s an app for that, right?). The desktop isn’t dead at all, it seems, and what’s more – there are trends to extend the capability and reach of the desktop to the web rather than replacing the desktop with the web. Application integration, process integration, interoperability, functionality and modality – all these factors and more have become the underlying drivers for extension of and hosting for desktop applications, and are the areas where SaaS and web-based application service has not delivered as expected.

The idea of having no software on the computing device is kind of silly, when you think about it. Computers continue to get more powerful and have more capability than ever. Heck, even phones are getting fatter and bigger again. The best phones these days are the ones that rival tablets and laptops in size and have lots of apps to run.

Microsoft Office, too, hasn’t gone anywhere, really. It’s still firmly attached to most workstations whether they’re iPads or Macs or Windows systems. Web-based productivity tools are certainly gaining in use, but not nearly as widely as some would believe. Office productivity continues to live on the desktop, and ties many users to desktop computing for that very reason. Use CRM in the cloud? I’ll bet you still export data to Excel or Word on the PC. Use accounting in the cloud? A lot of reporting still goes through Excel, trial balance systems and the like. The universe of web-based and SaaS apps is getting larger, but it hasn’t yet become the center of the universe for most established businesses. Net-new customers and smaller businesses are adopting SaaS due largely to cost and to the success of the marketing message, but use and direct experience with the product applied in the business setting often demonstrates that adoption of a more flexible (malleable) or functionally rich solution is indicated. The business likes the mobility, remote access and managed service, but not the actual SaaS application. So, hosting becomes the better alternative and the business is able to use the software that works for the business, and use it in a manner that allows the business to take advantage of remote and mobile capability, subscription service, and more.

I really have no gripes with web-based and SaaS solutions. In fact, some of my best friends use SaaS 🙂 The message I’m trying to convey is simply that, regardless of what the media and marketing may tell you, things don’t always change as quickly as it seems. Yes, there is a movement towards cloud solutions and online working models. Yes, there is change in how information technology is obtained and used. And equally true is the reality that only a portion of the market has adopted these changes and new philosophies. By the time there is “complete” adoption, there will be a new standard or approach being marketed and we will be in this place once again. Is there wide recognition of the benefit for mobility and remote capability? Sure there is, but it is also accompanied by the understanding that tried and true solutions will continue to deliver the functionality and capability businesses rely upon, even as new models for delivering them come about.

Make Sense?

Here are some of the most popular articles from CooperMann.com in 2014. Surprisingly enough, the most popular were articles about QuickBooks and the Cloud, a subject I’ve been writing about for many years. In fact, some of the most popular of my QuickBooks/cloud articles are from 2013 and they remain among the most frequently viewed even today. Search and view metrics indicate that the topic’s popularity is not likely to diminish soon, so plan to hear more about how businesses are using QuickBooks (and other desktop and network applications) in the cloud, but aren’t using Online editions to make it work really well.

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. CooperMann.com blog was viewed about 19,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

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

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Accounting for Custom Manufacturing

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Trusted Advisor is About the Work, Not the Title

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Confusing Value Propositions: Cloud Platforms and Hosted Applications

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