Tag: enterprise IT

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Accounting Online and Outsourced Accounting – Focus on Enabling Your Client

Accounting professionals and those involved in business bookkeeping and accounting service delivery have been literally bombarded with messages about “taking your practice to the cloud” and “working closer with clients using the cloud”, but what does all this really mean for the average professional practitioner?  Does it mean that the software and processes already established in the practice need to be replaced?  Does it mean that accounting professionals need to get all of their clients into online applications?  Are the tools used by the professional practice obsolete?  These are all valid questions, and are issues not always addressed in the marketing messages of the various “solution” providers.  The complexity exists with the variety of tools and solutions most professionals use in servicing their business clients, and no single-solution cloud service is able to adequately address this variety.  As a result, many professionals are either trying to assemble their own toolkits through an expensive and frustrating process of trial-and-error, or are avoiding adoption of new technologies altogether.

There are a lot of ways to “enable” a professional practice, focusing on the technologies and applications supporting efficient and profitable service delivery.  The key in selecting the right tools to support the practice is to fairly evaluate the nature of services to be delivered, and understanding how and where in those processes the firm and the client “touch”.  It is in the interaction – of people, data and systems – where better technology-supported collaboration with the client should be established.  In many cases, this means focusing on improving the client system and the accounting process will benefit as a result.

Processes which are entirely internal to the practice must certainly be evaluated and improved, but the initial problem – the new area of focus – is in how the firm and the client work together.  The needs in this area will necessarily drive adjustments to internal processes, which is to be expected.  Most practitioners have already established their methods of dealing with clients, workloads, paper and software that have been around for a while.  It is the new client demand – to get more benefit from existing providers and solutions – which must be addressed.

For example, there was once a need to obtain bank statements and cancelled checks in order to balance a bank account.  This caused many accounting firms to develop a standard process of sending someone to the bank each month to pick up the paper statements and documents for client accounts, so that the bookkeeping could be done and accounts reconciled. With the advent and acceptance of online banking tools, the process for most accountants has been adjusted to where the bank activity data is simply downloaded and integrated into the company accounting information, rather than transported in the form of paper documents which are then keyed in as data.  This simple example of “enabling” the client accounting system to interact with the bank resulted in benefits to the accountant processes, and caused beneficial changes to be made in the internal process of the firm (no more driving to the bank, timely access to bank data, more accurate data due to single-entry of information).  While the client likely doesn’t care how the books get done, they do care about the information being timely, complete and accurate.  Thusly is the accountant value increased through the simple use of a readily available technology.

As accounting and finance professionals look to find ways to deliver greater value to their business clients, they would be wise to explore how and why they interact with those clients and understand what is missing – what more can be done – to support and advise those client business owners.  By focusing on helping the client “tool up” their enterprises to support more efficient and profitable operation, professionals will find that the resultant benefit is more consistent and streamlined access to client data.  Enabling the client, in many ways, is enabling the firm.

Make Sense?

J

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

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Online Accountants and Their Clients: Working Smarter, or just Closer?

Online Accountants and Their Clients: Working Smarter, or just Closer?

There are a wide variety of ways to work closer with your clients, and the thing that you will always want to remember is that “one size does not fit all”.  In other words, not every client will like using your favorite technology or software, and not every business owner will recognize your suggestions as solutions, because perhaps they did not recognize the problem in the first place.  But that’s OK, and perhaps how it should be.  You see, using the right tool for any given situation is the proper approach, rather than trying to shoehorn everyone into the same solution or method.  With a client-centric approach, you can still develop consistent internal processes to keep your service delivery as efficient as possible, because many of the core services you provide are consistent across the client base regardless of the solution in use.  The trend is to help your client work smarter, and it will bring you closer to the client than ever before.

Determining what is right for each job or task should be part of your value, whether it’s deciding how to connect remotely with your client, or helping your client find the right software system to support their tasks, with you ensuring that the integration to the accounting system is there and working properly.  Where the focus was once placed on accurate data entry, now it’s on placing the proper solution in front of the user, and through the use of the solution to perform their various tasks, the necessary data is collected. Accounting professionals should recognize that the collection of information in real time facilitates better business decision making, and that they can be instrumental in delivering this decision support resource to their client.

As an example, I know the owner of a small construction business.  This guy runs around with estimates, invoices, receipts, and other paperwork in his truck, and getting him to stop long enough for his bookkeeper to collect all that paper from the truck cab is one of the hardest and most annoying jobs she has.  Her focus is on collecting the paper and then entering the data and getting invoices and reports out.  The accountant is frequently requesting more information or clarification of data, as well as the information necessary to meet various reporting deadlines.  Even after implementing QuickBooks accounting in the office for this business, the ultimate problem wasn’t solved.  Certainly, the information is better-organized and accounted for once collected and entered, but the business owner still lacks timely information about the performance of his business, and sees little additional value in his accountants participation beyond the annual tax return.

On the other hand, I know another guy (landscaping this time) who has an accountant that has him use his phone to record just about everything he does as he does it.  He bids a job, and sends it via email.  He gets paid for a job, then snapshots a copy of the check and deposits it.  Buying equipment or supplies?  Sure, but electronic payment and approval tools let him track that as it happens, too (again, snapshot a copy of that receipt, etc.).  For this business owner, there is more business going on because less time is being spent doing the paperwork of business.  The bookkeeper in the office has the information necessary to keep things up to date, and can focus on how to streamline things even better.  The accountant has a much higher quality of information – faster – upon which to advise the client (which he has time to do, because he’s not cleaning up bookkeeping data or collecting information for reports and returns).  This business owner sees much more value in the participation by his accountant, because real issues are able to be identified and addressed in time to make a difference.

So, for today’s accounting professional, bookkeeper or consultant: is the idea of “working closer” with your client simply the concept of working remotely on the same systems at any given time, or is it to know more about their business and to help them do business better?

Make Sense?

J

Read more about Data Warriors: Accountants in the Cloud

Read more about using the cloud to extend “connectedness” beyond traditional boundaries

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Cloud FAQs for CFOs: CFO.com

There’s an amazing article on CFO.com called Cloud FAQs for CFOs and every business owner, manager, accountant, CFO and CIO should read it.

Here is one of my favorite Q/As from the article:

“Q: But I’m a finance officer, not a technologist. Can you guarantee that the total cost of ownership for the cloud is lower than what I’m already spending for my on-premises IT?
That depends upon what you’re already spending. Do you know?

According to Forrester senior analyst Dave Bartoletti, most companies are not all that good at knowing how much it really costs to run an application because IT departments “are still seen as cost centers.” The company buys the servers, the storage, and the applications, and flips the switch. “What does it cost to run?” Bartoletti asks rhetorically. “Who knows? You just depreciate the assets over a certain amount of time and after they’re fully depreciated, you buy more.” Even organizations that account for staff costs, maintenance, energy — all the indirect spend that goes into producing a service the business needs to run — will probably not be able to cost out individual applications with any degree of accuracy. How much, for example, does your e-mail cost? “If your CIO can’t tell you it’s x, y, z, per box,” Hotels and Resorts CIO Mike Blake tells CFO, “that’s a problem.”

“Enterprises are making significant investments in cloud technology in pursuit of lower costs,” says Dave Zabrowski, founder and CEO of Cloud Cruiser, a provider of cost analytics for cloud consumers, but “if you can’t see what you’re spending, there’s a good chance you’re spending too much.”

And that problem, that financial black box, has been the bane of the finance officer’s life in the IT age. The cloud, if nothing else, presents an opportunity to open that black box”

 Read more on CFO.com (http://s.tt/1jGJU)

Make sense?

J

read more about the confusion over hosted licensing on The Progressive Accountant http://www.theprogressiveaccountant.com/tech-tips/confusion-over-hosted-licensing.html

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The Cloud Makes Time Travel Possible: Hosted applications can deliver immediate business benefits

The Cloud Makes Time Travel Possible: Hosted applications can deliver immediate business benefits

In an article published on CIO.com, author Kevin Fogarty describes how moving to a cloud IT approach proved to be a highly beneficial and strategic decision for an on-site diesel fuel distributor.  The focus of the article was on how existing software and processes were enabled by centralizing them in a cloud hosting environment, and not by replacing them with new subscription-based applications.

For many businesses, this is the secret that nobody’s talking about: you can have the benefits of “the cloud” without having to radically change everything you have and everything you do.  Retention of knowledge assets is critical to business continuity, and moving existing systems and process to platforms where they can be leveraged to greater business advantage is a way to do that.  With centralization of systems and services, information can be processed far more efficiently than before, eliminating delays and improving cash flows dramatically.  Time is money, and the cloud helps businesses spend less of both.

“A lot of the invoices have to go out every day by certain times, so third-party accounting companies can do their thing for the fleet owners.” The setup sounds like a classic for any overhyped business-process-automation system, but Daniel Abrams and other Diesel Direct managers weren’t interested in managing their business using sophisticated business systems that require more motivation, money and technical staff than Abrams was willing to use or pay for.”

The initial benefit is being able to use the products already in place, just from a more secure and redundant location, but when you begin to consider the positive ramifications of reducing the time between delivery and invoicing, billing and payment receipt, or customer demand and product supply, you rapidly realize that the cloud means much more to the business than just another way to run software.

“Those changes save Diesel Direct both money and time. Rather than running reports and invoices all night Tuesdays, for example, the additional capacity lets the company run those resource-intensive processes during the day rather than overnight. That gets critical work done faster and more accurately than a process left to complete itself unattended.”

In short, the cloud makes time travel possible, because the result is available almost immediately upon completion of the task.  It’s kind of like getting your expense check as you walk off the plane in your home town, because you reported all your expenses in real time as they were incurred (snap a picture of the receipt at the bar, and like that).

Yet most business owners and IT managers for small and mid-sized businesses are being told that the cloud is best applied when innovation is required, and should be reserved for NEW things, and not thought of as a way to improve the status quo with existing or legacy architecture.

“It’s not unusual for mid-sized companies to come to depend on cloud services, according to James Staten, vice president and principal analyst for Forrester’s Infrastructure and Operations practice.

It is unusual for them to be more concerned with infrastructure than with applications, he says.”

With affordable and secure application hosting services being widely available for small and medium businesses, owners and managers no longer have to look to new solutions just to enable mobility, remote access, and a fundamentally stronger and better-managed system.  Legacy applications can be hosted and delivered, extending their useful life as well as the value of the development and intellectual property, and giving customers capabilities not readily available with local implementations.

“Diesel Direct can’t accomplish anything if its minimal IT infrastructure is offline for any length of time.

Abrams, worried about storms taking out his business as well as the power, didn’t know what technical solution he wanted until Callow “described for him what an enterprise infrastructure looked like,” Callow says.

“They didn’t need one, didn’t want one, but they did want the security, the reliability of a redundant IT infrastructure,” he says. “The most effective way to get that at the lowest possible cost is the cloud.”

Among the greatest benefits of outsourcing application delivery to a cloud hosting provider are the increased monitoring and security, application of best practices, and high levels of system fault tolerance and recovery capabilities offered.  While business subscribers focus on features and functionality of the application, the real focus for hosting providers is the platform – and the management and security of it.  This behind the scenes work offers tremendous business benefit to subscribing customers, but is often not the focus when discussing overall benefits of a cloud computing approach in the context of Software-as-a-Service, which is where many smbs focus their investigations.  As an alternative, businesses who may seek to adopt hosted solutions for their existing applications and software frequently do so for reasons of security and redundancy, not recognizing that their business processes may likely experience significant improvement, as well.

“Enterprises might have the luxury of making strategic decisions about cloud or other technology,” Golden says. “In mid-sized companies things are very tactical. No cloud evangelist is going around the refueling industry saying ‘there are ways to solve this problem.’ “Companies make tactical decisions to solve their own problems and, five or 10 years later, we’ll all wake up and realize we’ve changed the way we do everything,” Golden says.”

Make Sense?

J

The company in the article could be just like yours.  You don’t have to adopt new software and systems to benefit from the cloud.  How could your business change, if you could remove the problems of time and distance?

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Lessons Learned (or Not): Development and the Cloud

Lessons Learned (or Not): Development and the Cloud

Talk about agile technology and how great things are because we can experience rapid software solution development and deployment via the cloud is shining a brighter light on certain IT management issues which have existed for quite some time, but perhaps went largely unrecognized.  One of these issues is product development direction and influence, and where it really comes from.  If you think most IT companies determine their product lines and offerings from the top down, with detailed specifications supported by a strong business case, you may want to think again.  Based on my experience and that of a lot of other folks, there are many companies out there offering products and services  that were crafted in more of an ad hoc manner than through a focused “product development” effort with long term sustainability in mind.  In some cases, this demonstrates ingenuity and a desire to look at things in new ways.  Sometimes it’s just uncontrolled and unstructured chaos with dollar signs attached.

“there’s a school of thought, put forward by the small but influential analyst firm RedMonk, that developers now occupy the role of IT kingmakers. This theory holds that the traditional model of IT adoption, which assumes that major decisions emanate from the top, is wrong. Instead, the decisions that appear to come from a CIO are, in fact, dictated by the choices made by people way down in the IT organization-the traditionally denigrated developers. CIOs merely ratify the decisions made by “lowly” developers.”

It goes like this:  a high level concept comes from upper management… some “great idea”.  This high level idea is communicated (at a high level) to the production teams who will make it real.  The production teams decide what it really is, how it will really work, what it will look like, and how it will be offered – and all of this generally based on the preferences, skill sets, moral guidelines, belief systems, and work ethic of those involved in the development process.  The product details are run back up the food chain, where they then become the defining elements of the new solution.  In many cases, refinements and changes are argued against by the developers, citing various reasons or roadblocks to making changes to their prized construction.  But hey – they got it ready to go out the door, didn’t they?  So what if it’s not quite what you envisioned, and doesn’t necessarily represent a sustainable strategy?

Experience in business does count, particularly if you learn from it.  There is a saying I heard once, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it other than it proves to be so very true each and every day.  The saying is that “there is no morality without context”.  In business, context is often experience, understanding the cause and effect of an action or activity.  Without this learning, without the experience earned within the organization or by others, there is no context guiding the development.

“It’s irresistible to poke fun at some of the most egregious aspects of today’s IT practices-change control committees that only meet once every two weeks;ITIL implementations that place more emphasis on paper trails than actually, you know, getting things done; operations groups that resist application updates in the name of stability, and so on and so forth.

However, the fact is that these functions, if not their manifestation, exist for important reasons. Overlooking them-or outright ignoring them-is not the right solution. Ensuring that updates to production systems are made, and being able to track who makes changes to infrastructure, are enterprise functions are that won’t go away just because cloud computing is in the picture.”

Lessons previously learned will need to be learned again, and addressing problems after-the-fact is generally far more costly than being proactive and trying to avoid them in the first place.  It can be a very painful process, watching the company go through puberty all over again (particularly if it had once reached some level of maturity), yet this is what can occur when the bright and shiny new idea causes management to forget fundamental lessons previously learned.

In a recent article on Computerworld.com, author Bernard Golden makes a number of really good and interesting points about the opposing viewpoints of this “agile” development enabled by the cloud (the article focuses on AWS – Amazon Web Services, but it is completely relevant in the broader context).  Link here to access the entire post, it’s worth the read.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9230040/How_the_Cloud_Brings_Developers_into_Business_Process

Make Sense?

J

Read more about legacy application modernization, and why IT and back-office outsourcing makes sense for a lot of reasons 

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Data Warriors – Accounting in the Cloud

Data Warriors – Accounting in the Cloud

The cornerstones of building and supporting a professional accounting, bookkeeping or financial services firm are the tools and resources that assist the professional in building their practice clientele.  In today’s market, that means understanding the value and application of cloud computing models and services.

Information management paradigms are changing, and professionals who can help their clients to achieve maximum performance and profitability through increased efficiency and innovation will find that the practice evolves into a more effective and agile organization, and the quality of their client engagements is taken to an entirely new level

Not participating in a cloud technology model is making a decision to not participate in today’s technology-enabled flow of business opportunity.  Ensure your continued relevance and value, and communicate to your clients and peers that your firm is prepared to meet the demands of an intelligent and informed clientele and market.

What does the “cloud” really mean to accounting and business?  Well, it means a lot of things.

  • Centralized access to information resources
  • Distributed storage and management of information resources
  • Collaboration and co-working
  • MORE data collection than ever before
    • MORE data being produced by various operational systems
      • MORE need for controls on data flows and exchanges
        • MORE need for analysis
          • MORE need for critical thinking

It’s been proven that any time things become more complicated or complex, it creates a need (read = opportunity) for specialists.

There is a current a growing need for accounting and business professionals who understand how all of this “connectedness” will work.  And the question isn’t really a technology question, as there are people way smarter than me handling all that.  What I’m talking about is the flow of information and data throughout the system.

This used to be more in the domain of the CIO; information systems guys and data analysts.  Accounting and finance, for all its business value, was the final dumping ground for after-the-fact financial data.  Operationally, things could be humming along in the business and looking just fine, but the business was losing money and nobody knew it before it was too late.

But we’re finally coming to understand that virtually EVERYTHING in business has a financial impact leaving an imprint on the business: every action and activity, every relationship and interaction.

With the applications and service now being made available to businesses of all sizes, even small businesses are  now able to leverage the tools and gain the insight that only the largest of enterprises were able to do in times past.

The key is in enabling the business – facilitating their processing and getting their work done – using connected applications and mobile data access tools, or even simply helping with the collection of job or invoice or expense information electronically and in real time.

The earlier in the process, where you convert information into electronic data, the better.  You can then use connected systems or integrations to move and share data with others – other systems or other processes – within the business.

Accountants are already familiar with many of these concepts and tasks, where detailed customer activity and information is distilled into an AR entry, or where vendor and payments and various enterprise expenditures and resource utilizations are summarized into AP transactions and inventory valuations.  Operational systems are simply ‘exploded’ views of these subledgers and subsystems, where operational data and process-specific functionality resides.

With a traditional ERP/MRP approach, software systems were designed to meet the integrated business model by hanging all of the functionality and capability off a single framework or foundation.  Everything in the business was an extension from the core accounting and finance system.  Less intuitive for the user than a function or process-specific tool, at least the comprehensive integration of data was there.

What businesses may benefit from with a cloud-supported model is a similar result in terms of information being shared and enterprise collaboration being supported.  The difference, and the real and amazing benefit, is that specific and unique tools can be applied to support each operational segment or functional requirement in the business, and it can be done affordably and dynamically because it comes with the integration and real time information (data) exchange that single-framework enterprise systems provide.

The accounting professional becomes of greater importance in this connected system of data and functionality.  Their experience with and understanding of back-office and bookkeeping process, and the collection and preparation of subledger data for proper accounting treatment, is an integral role to play in establishing the proper integrations, syncs and data flows to and from “accounting”. Accounting becomes not an after-the-fact silo of historical data, but the centerpiece – the key – to unlocking business intelligence which leads to deeper understanding of business performance. When information is power, data analysis becomes the weapon, and the accountant the warrior who wields it.

Make Sense?

J