Tag: cloud document management

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Innovation and Disruption: Challenging the Professional Accountant’s Value

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?

J

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

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?

Joanie Mann Bunny FeetJ

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

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.

CloudStorage_120x600The 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?

Joanie Mann Bunny FeetJ