document sharing – Cooper Mann Consulting

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

Smarter Online Document Vaults

Document Management for QuickBooks, Microsoft Office and more

Document management used to be just about storing and retrieving files. Being able to easily store document images and other files, and then quickly finding them when you need them, is an important aspect of business record keeping. If you are an accounting or bookkeeping professional offering outsourced services to clients, having a secure way to store and manage client document files from a variety of sources is key to developing workflows and standardizing service delivery. Invoices, bills, bank statements, and all the other paperwork which is generated by various business processes must be captured, accounted for, and retained for future reference and documentation support. With all of this going on, having a secure and easy way to handle all that paper and computer-generated reporting is really important.

Using an electronic document management system isn’t really that much different from dealing with paper filing systems, at least in terms of the process. You obtain the document, you translate it into a journal entry or transaction, and then you file the document away for later use. The difference is simply that the document becomes digital image data and is stored electronically, instead of keeping the paper file around. And, the earlier in the process where you can turn paper documents into digital images, the better, because it reduces the need for “paper-based” processes which take more time and resources, and which may introduce risk of information loss or damage.

In an outsourced bookkeeping arrangement, for example, allowing the client to convert paper to image files is highly desirable as it prevents the outsourcer from having to travel to client offices to obtain paperwork, and reduces the time involved either with traveling to and from client locations or time spent waiting for mailed information to arrive. For the client to handle this process willingly, or with any frequency, tools which are simple to understand and use must be supplied. Scanning a document, saving it to the hard drive, and then trying to find the file to upload later to an accountant “portal” is not a simple process and it is not efficient. If the user is somewhat nontechnical (most business owners?), or if there is a lot of paperwork to scan and upload, that multi-step process just won’t work for the client.

SmartVault, a solution for QuickBooks-connected and general purpose document management, has an elegant solution to the problem, and it’s called the “InBox”. Just like the inbox on your desk, the SmartVault InBox is where new documents arrive to be processed. The ingenious part is that the InBox is a little applet that gets installed on the client workstation, and provides them with a very simple way to scan files directly to SmartVault. The accountant or bookkeeper then accesses the client files from the inbox and processes and/or attaches them to QuickBooks transactions as required. The client has only to perform the simple task of telling the SmartVault InBox app to obtain documents fed into the scanner. No local file saving and retrieval required. For the accountant or bookkeeper, the inbox is the first stop in the workflow, and is the place they go to obtain whatever information the client has provided. The SmartVault InBox can also be used to return files easily and securely to clients, bypassing the need to have the client access and log in to a website in order to get the files (but a website portal is also part of the system, just in case the client prefers this method). If providing seamless service and easy to follow procedures describes how you work with your clients, then SmartVault could become a key element in your service delivery.

Affordability and ease of use are important factors to consider when looking for document management solutions for small businesses. In addition, having the ability to store documents from popular small business applications allows users to centrally store and manage all their business documents and files, not just those related to accounting. When users wear many “hats” in the business, and need access to a variety of document types, a centralized filing system is an absolute necessity. SmartVault addresses this by providing direct integration with Microsoft Outlook, Results CRM, and a variety of other popular small business solutions.

Oriented for use by small businesses and the accountants and bookkeepers who serve them, SmartVault delivers a surprisingly powerful solution which addresses the variety of document storage, attachment and retrieval requirements of most businesses, coupled with the workflow tools and a unique QuickBooks integration capability to specifically address the needs of accounting and finance department users. You know you need to work smarter and not harder, so your document vault should be smarter, too.

Make Sense?