small business – Page 31 – Cooper Mann Consulting

June 11, 2013November 3, 2017

A Holistic Approach to Cloud IT

holistic: a. Emphasizing the importance of the whole and the interdependence of its parts.

The Internet and cloud computing solutions can help businesses create an environment which allows team members and clients to work together more efficiently; where information can be generated once and used in a variety of ways by different users. With this new capability to share documents and files in real-time, many businesses are finding that they are generating more electronic information today than ever before – and they’re having a hard time keeping these information assets organized. With paper documents being digitized to allow for electronic distribution, OCR, and intelligent connecting to transaction data – lots of stored data is being produced and stored in a variety of places.

There are many technology models available, so there are a lot of options for businesses today – options which address the fundamental requirements to convert, store, secure, and distribute the various data types within the enterprise. When a business elects to use a variety of cloud solutions or providers to address a number of business problems, how does that enterprise wrap its arms around the content which represents, in all actuality, the sum of business intelligence in the enterprise? Keeping tabs on the business data is critical, but tracking all the data when it is stored with a variety of providers may be very difficult.

Example: If your business uses an online CRM such as Salesforce.com, runs QuickBooks on your local PC, and uses Gmail for email service… exactly where does your business data live? With Salesforce? On your local PC? At Google? In all 3 places?

Containment of distributed data isn’t the only issue facing businesses today. Longevity and long-term access to data is a concern, as well. Solutions and providers that exist today may not exist tomorrow. If you have data invested in a solution with a short life span (and you probably won’t know this is the case until it’s too late), you may orphan your data and not be able to access it later. And, if you can get your data from the provider, is it in a useful form or did you lose functionality when you lost the solution?

Example: Intuit once introduced a paperclip (attached documents service) in QuickBooks, and offered the attached document feature at no charge. The “free” service from Intuit encouraged a lot of users to migrate from other QuickBooks-connected document management solutions. Then… Intuit announced that the attached documents service would no longer be free. Users with the service could still get to their documents via a web portal, but not from within QuickBooks, and certainly not as attachments to transactions or other records. Then the attached documents feature was once-again changed, allowing only storage to local PCs rather than on Intuit’s servers. Then, it went away entirely.

Another issue facing businesses operating in the cloud is one of vendor lock-in (or lock-out), and being able to address the total business requirement. Point solutions and vendor-specific solutions may address certain business problems, but generally aren’t able to handle all of the needs of a given business. If your online solution doesn’t address the needs of the entire business, you risk increasing production costs and reducing productivity through duplication of data entry and other activities.

Example: An accounting firm with an insurance division uses Thomson Reuters Virtual Office service, which delivers certain accounting applications along with Microsoft Office on a remote desktop type of connection. Unfortunately for the firm, the users operating in the insurance division use applications that aren’t supported or available via the Virtual Office solution. So, certain users have completely disconnected services – a remote desktop serving up their Office apps, and a separate browser-based solution – neither of which integrate or work together. The complexity and confusion caused by this situation has done little more than increase the burden of duplicate data entry, recreation of documents, and constant download-save-upload activities.

In each of these cases, a “holistic” approach to cloud IT services might have produced better results than by looking at each application or functional “solution” individually.

As an example, consider that a business with in-office and mobile employees needs to use accounting, office productivity, contact management, documents storage, and several browser-based solutions in order to provide the functionality and operational support necessary. While many of these solutions are individually available online, the business opts to work with a single outsourced IT provider to create their own “private cloud” environment.

The solution includes remote/virtual desktops, hosted accounting applications, hosted Office applications, hosted browser (to allow browser and Internet-based apps to integrate with Office and other apps on the remote desktop), hosted CRM, and hosted document management… all applications that the business selects and might even have been using for years are included.

All applications are delivered on the remote desktop environment, providing users with the ability to open documents instantly, save and share files seamlessly, and participate in a central company-wide document store.

All applications are licensed to the business, so they have the flexibility of returning to local IT operations simply by implementing their own software in their own network and taking the data off the host.

Because all of the business data resides on this single hosting platform, the business is able to not only keep control of all information assets, but is also able to back up and protect (preserve) that data in its entirety.

Now doesn’t that make sense?

Learn more…

June 5, 2013April 28, 2017

Sustainability and the Humanization of Work

Few problems in business are truly solved simply by throwing more money and resources at them. Certainly, having the people, tools and supplies to get the work done well is a business requirement, and many organizations take a “building out” approach to addressing growing workloads and customer demand. On the other hand, there are business owners who recognize that things can always be accomplished better and more efficiently, and that improvements in these areas can make the difference between ending up with an overburdened organization with more mass than agility, or a lean organization with the ability to sustain itself while continuously adjusting to meet changing internal and external challenges.

It is said that the only constant is change, and businesses must find a way to effectively and cost-efficiently meet changing demands and conditions in order to survive. What frustrates many business owners is that change is generally disruptive to the business, representing a significant challenge when it comes to the re-development of internal processes and procedures. At issue is the understanding that proven, structured and repeatable processes help to improve efficiency, yet changing conditions often require changes to these processes. In many cases, businesses find that the requirement to structure and document activities is work that must be re-done in the event of broad changes. Too often, the work falls by the wayside because the minute it is completed, some change comes along and renders it obsolete. It is somewhat like the child who questions making their bed each day, as they’re just going to sleep in it again and make it messy.

There may be a solution, and a lesson to be learned, in the “kaizen” approach to change and improvement. Wikipedia’s entry on Kaizen identifies the meaning of the Japanese-Kanji word as simply “good change”. Similar to the English word “improvement”, kaizen does not refer specifically to any single or ongoing change. Rather, it has come to describe an approach to business which recognizes the potential for improvement – improvement in work product, work conditions, worker satisfaction, and worker performance – at all levels throughout the enterprise. Further, kaizen does not describe change as being broad-ranging or particularly intrusive. Beneficial (good) change may come at any level and may be identified by almost any source.

Kaizen is a daily process, the purpose of which goes beyond simple productivity improvement. It is also a process that, when done correctly, humanizes the workplace, eliminates overly hard work (“muri”), and teaches people how to perform experiments on their work using the scientific method and how to learn to spot and eliminate waste in business processes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen

The ultimate business goals are, of course, improved productivity, product quality and profitability. A “Kaizen” approach to business recognizes that these goals are often met through gaining the participation of the entire organization. Whether approached as individual effort, small or large group, or via suggestion system, the purpose is to nurture the company’s human resource and help focus it towards making improvements in work environment and activities which lead to improved productivity. After all, the most valuable asset a business has is its people. It is logical to apply this individual and collective intelligence and source of business knowledge towards making the company better – and a better place to work.

Make sense?

June 3, 2013

Client Solutions, not just Professional Services

Accounting Professionals serving a small business client base are struggling to find ways to demonstrate the value of the services they provide, yet many firms remain focused exclusively on their own processes and improving profitability therein rather than looking “outside the box” to see how they might involve the client in the discovery. The obvious element which these firms are not addressing is the client user, and how a direct participation by the client becomes the foundation for internal process improvement. After all, a lot of what accounting professionals are battling against is perceived value. If the client were to be a more direct participant, the value of the work and the tools which support getting it done could provide a more tangible or visible aspect and increase the overall value perception of the client.

It is easy to say “get the client more involved”, but actually doing it can be the real challenge. Professionals are recognizing this reality as they attempt to engage client users in online portals for document exchange and by providing application functionality which is supportive of the accountants’ processes. While some professional firms are experiencing success with this approach, many other firms are not. There are likely a variety of reasons why some firms have more success than others in getting clients to work with their online tools, but I believe there are two key elements which impact success: accountant-centric focus, and provider lock-in. Whether these elements work to the firms’ advantage or not depends solely upon the specifics of the service model and client market being served.

Accountant-centric focus

Most accounting professionals recognize that paperless approaches to working with client information and documents makes a lot more sense than working with the actual paper. Particularly with the innovations in image capture, OCR and zero-entry solutions, it is logical to try to get as much of the required information transformed into useful digital data as possible. Data entry time is reduced, accuracy is improved, and the resultant information is better and more useful and may be processed more efficiently… for the accounting professional. For the client, on the other hand, it’s just another way to get information to the accountant (who is always wanting more information). The value of the deliverable – the reconciled bank account, financial report, tax return or whatever – isn’t increased. The solution often offered to the client is a solution intended to solve not the client problems, but the accountant’s. For the client, it is difficult to see this as a “solution” to any evident problem they face.

Provider lock-in

Business software customers are often commenting about how the solutions they use don’t allow easy transition to alternative products, or add-ons are only available from developer-prescribed sources. Vendor lock-in is a consideration and may be a barrier to doing business, because business owners want to know that they have the ability to change as business requirements change… whether it means changing software and systems, or whether it means changing professional service providers. As more professional service providers attempt to engage their clients in technology-based approaches to doing business, clients are recognizing that these approaches may come with “strings attached”, limiting their future choices. While it is important for the professional services firm to protect its work product, it is also important to consider the client’s position. Part of every business relationship is trust, and that trust should not be one-sided. Just as the professional trusts that the client will work with them in a legitimate manner, so does the client trust that their professional will not hold their information hostage if they elect to make a change or engage with other providers in the future. Additionally, does the system provided by the accounting firm allow the client to collaborate with their own team members or other service providers, or does it address only the interactions between the accounting pro and the client? This also represents a barrier to participation, as any given client business likely interacts with a variety of providers – many of whom are also asking that owner to implement solutions which improve their ability to do a form of e-business together.

As accounting service providers look to technology to facilitate closer and more efficient working arrangements with clients, they would do well to also consider how that technology is positioned to benefit the client as well as the professional practice. Delivering a solution which provides clients with the capability to control information access, which allows collaboration with their various service providers, and which facilitates a lean process approach for all involved could be the right answer to the problem. Perhaps this becomes the most important factor – client enablement – and focusing on solutions which address the clients’ information management and processing requirements as well as those of the firm.

Make Sense?

May 23, 2013September 5, 2018

Moving Your Systems to the Cloud

The IT industry is promoting Software as a Service and online applications as the new normal for computing, and unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years you have heard how it is supposed to make our computing lives ever so much better. Hiding under that rock might also have spared you from reading about the various failures and outages which impact users, forcing them to make do without the online applications and data they have become so reliant upon. It’s surprising, but not unimaginable, that businesses rely so heavily on applications and services that didn’t even exist a few short years ago.

The potential benefits of a SaaS model are many, but the risks are equally significant and should not be minimized. This assessment should center on a review of the application software in use, considering whether or not it is meeting the needs of the business. Where and how the software runs is much less of an issue than the functionality and process support it provides – most “legacy” applications can be run in a cloud server environment, making remote access and managed service part of the service model.

There is risk in changing business applications – risk of data loss, changed or broken data relationships, lost productivity, and more. Many businesses would benefit by running their applications in a cloud model while continuing to utilize the software solutions their operation relies on.

Application hosting models where desktop applications are delivered on cloud servers is often overlooked when businesses go looking for cloud software because they are shopping for software and not the platform.

With Software as a Service (SaaS), the software and the platform are combined and together represent the solution. With application hosting on a cloud server, the software is the same software a business would traditionally run on PCs and servers, but the they are installed and managed on the cloud server rather than the local computers.

The big benefit is the agility of the platform and the user mobility it allows. The unspoken benefit is that you can still “take your ball and go home” if the service doesn’t work out.

Removing the barriers for adopting an online working model allows the business to experience the benefits attached to cloud computing without introducing unnecessary risk through unneeded changes in software and applications.

Make sense?

May 21, 2013May 21, 2013

Innovation and Disruption: Challenging the Professional Accountant’s Value

It’s tough, being a professional accountant or bookkeeper for small businesses and it’s not getting any easier. Yes, there have always been challenges to the relationship, particularly with the perceived value of performing the work being fairly low yet the value of the work product being quite high. But professionals are facing new competition – competition in more areas and delivered in more ways – than ever before. This competition and the advantage it often represents is founded in the disruption of traditional IT created through cloud computing services, and the innovative use of technology, people and process to craft entirely new service models. Accounting professionals must recognize and leverage these elements to improve client service levels and differentiate offerings, or they risk losing revenue, business value, and relevance to their clients and markets.

Accounting and finance technology has, for many years, been necessarily focused on managing the ever-increasing volume of paper-based information. This paperwork provided the basis for financial transactions and had to be collected, translated and normalized, keyed into the system as data, and finally summarized for various reporting purposes. It makes sense that the simple fact of “document and paper handling logistics” have resulted in a variety of approaches and computerized tools designed to deal with all that paper. The “reality of paper” is firmly entrenched in business, and has been for so long that accounting solutions and financial systems have been developed to make working with supporting documents easier, yet continue to approach the use of those documents simply as support for data entered after-the-fact.

But there are new participants in the world of small business accounting and bookkeeping, and this entirely new generation of solutions does not carry with them the weight of years of paperwork and paper-based processes. Rather, this generation of online application solutions is developed with innovation in mind, and is seeking to develop a new approach to what are generally referred to as “best practices” for accounting for small business. Bear in mind that the term “best practices” describes something well-known and

There are two very important aspects of these “new generation” solutions and the services they provide, and which represent the challenge to the old rules of doing business. Based on early adoption and usage of many of these solutions, they will be successful. How they fit into the profile of today’s accounting or bookkeeping practice remains to be fully exposed.

1. Real-time information

It was always broke, and now we can fix it. When most of the business and accounting information was paper based, it meant that accounting and bookkeeping would always be performed after-the-fact. It takes time to gather the information, and even more time to organize it and turn it into useful digital data. The new approach is not to provide a better way to manage paper or to turn it into data more quickly. The disruptive and innovative approach introduced is the belief that information should originate as data and not as a document.

2. Consumer-oriented service

DIY is fundamental to many of today’s small business solutions and services. While the term Software as a Service describes how software and systems are being sold in the form of subscription services, the reality of many of these solutions is Service through Software, where the work product is the service rather than the software and systems (and people) performing it. Customers subscribe to a supporting business service, and it’s delivered through a software-based interface. The innovation delivered is the simplicity and affordability of getting the work done for the business owner, and the disruption is the further-diminished perceived value of the accounting or bookkeeping professional and the fundamental services they provide.

Accounting and bookkeeping service providers have difficult decisions to make regarding how they will address these very immediate challenges to the value of the services they provide. Professionals who learn to understand and appropriately select and apply this new generation of technology-supported services are likely to find that the competencies they develop – which represent differentiation – serve to make them as valuable to their own enterprises as those of their clients.

Make Sense?

Read more about how, for Accounting Professionals, It’s Good to be Sticky
Read more about how There’s No Fear and Loathing in Accounting
Read more about Data Warriors: Accountants in the Cloud
Read more about using the cloud to extend “connectedness” beyond traditional boundaries

May 16, 2013August 7, 2017

Why Accountants and Bookkeepers Use the Cloud

When businesses do business, they generate a lot of information. In most cases, this information has a relationship to a financial transaction of some sort, like a bill from a vendor or an invoice or sales receipt for a customer. It can be difficult for a small business owner to find the best way to manage the information about customers and products and suppliers, and figuring out the best way to handle the bookkeeping and accounting is often a secondary issue. Sure, it’s important to know how much money is in the bank, but online banking helps with that. For a small business owner trying to keep their operation running, the biggest problems are the ones they face every day, like remembering which customer likes which products, or knowing which suppliers will deliver in a pinch. Bookkeeping just isn’t a huge focus other than during tax time because it doesn’t help them get business done.

It is this question of value in daily bookkeeping and accounting work that business owners and their accounting service providers alike struggle with. Certainly, most business owners recognize the necessity to get the books done, but it is generally for compliance purposes alone. Payroll taxes, sales and use taxes, personal property taxes, income taxes – these are the items that business owners think about when they think about accounting. If you see it through the eyes of the business owner, accounting = paying taxes. It’s a tough value proposition for the accountant, when you think about it. The business owner has to pay someone to figure out how much they have to pay someone else. Yeah, try to sell more of that, and good luck.

The cloud, on the other hand, is helping accounting and bookkeeping professionals change this perspective. It’s a relatively new working model for some even though the idea has been there for a long time. Better information helps business make better business decisions, and accounting professionals can help businesses implement the controls and processes which ensure that the information is complete and accurate; they can help make the information better and more meaningful.

Remotely accessed and hosted desktops and application models have been around for quite a while, too, but only recently has the market begun to realize the full potential of the hosted model. We have the investment in SaaS solutions to thank for this; they blazed the trail for online application adoption and created awareness of the possibilities around hosting and anytime/anywhere access. The SaaS and “true cloud” applications continue to gain in popularity and acceptance, yet the hosting model is providing businesses with the ability to retain use of their business applications and data yet benefit from the same managed service and remote access that other online solutions provide.

When you look at how public accountants and professional bookkeepers work with their clients, the concept of creating shared access to accounting applications and financial data makes a lot of sense. Time and distance are the real issues to be solved – the business owner and their accounting pros generally work from different locations, and likely need to access the information for different purposes at different times. If they aren’t in the same place and using the same tools, how efficient can the collaboration truly be? With the cloud, on the other hand, collaboration is fully enabled and allows each user to do what they need to regardless of the location and time.

As the accountant or bookkeeper is able to work more closely with their client (using the same tools and the same data in real time), information can be processed more regularly and with a higher degree of accuracy. Outsourced accounting and bookkeeping providers are then able to give their clients more timely and accurate financial information which supports making better business decisions all the time. Helping with the organization and processing of information as business happens, fewer gaps are found in the data and the improved controls protect against data loss or misclassification. The data becomes more useful in that it contains more details, is more accurate and complete.

For the accounting professional, the benefits are many. Not only is the professional in a better position to deliver tangible value to the client (much higher value than just a tax bill!), the value is delivered more frequently which increases the overall value perception of the service being provided. Note the word “value” is used a lot here; it is the basis for billing clients for the useful nature of services provided and not on the time it takes to provide them. Internally to the accounting or bookkeeping business, the increased efficiency introduced with real-time application and data access means that processing workflows and resources may be more streamlined and handled with a great level of efficiency, which drives improvement in profitability and the consistency of service delivery.

There are a lot of new and exciting products and services emerging: cloud application services, artificial intelligence and automation, and the Internet and Interfaces of Things.. and businesses are being encouraged to adopt these solutions for a variety of reasons. For accountants and bookkeepers working with small business clients, there is no doubt that the cloud, hosting and online collaboration are the keys to helping get more and better business done.

Joanie Mann Bunny Feet J