Tag: forecasting

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Podcast Episode: Data, Cloud, and AI for SMBs

Pip: Cooper Mann Consulting has a recurring thesis: before you chase the shiny thing, make sure the foundation underneath it can hold the weight.

Mara: Joanie Mann covers a lot of ground in these posts — QuickBooks reporting infrastructure, cloud resilience for smaller businesses, Microsoft Fabric as a data platform, and what it actually takes to make AI useful.

Pip: Let's start with the reporting question, because it turns out QuickBooks alone may not be enough.

Reporting Beyond QuickBooks Enterprise

Mara: The core tension here is that QuickBooks Enterprise Desktop is genuinely capable software — cost-effective, flexible, widely used — but its built-in reporting has a ceiling.

Pip: The post puts it plainly: "Many businesses eventually outgrow the reporting capabilities available directly inside QuickBooks Enterprise Desktop." That's the inflection point the whole piece is built around.

Mara: And the consequence is concrete. When you hit that ceiling, you're not necessarily shopping for a new accounting system. You're looking at extending what you have — pulling QuickBooks data into Azure infrastructure and surfacing it through Power BI.

Pip: Which is a meaningfully different conversation than "time to rip and replace."

Mara: Right. The post walks through what that extension actually delivers: custom report design, consolidation of data from other operational systems, interactive dashboards, automatic data refreshes across devices, and handling for larger datasets using Azure's elastic infrastructure.

Pip: That last one matters for businesses that have been running long enough to accumulate serious data volume — the reporting slows down before anything else does.

Mara: The scalability argument carries through to a companion piece, Unlocking Insights in QuickBooks Enterprise Data, which frames this as an AI-readiness question too. Once QuickBooks data is centralized in a governed data warehouse or lakehouse, it can feed forecasting and anomaly detection — not just dashboards.

Pip: So the reporting upgrade and the AI foundation are the same project, just described at different stages.

Mara: And a third piece, Unlock KPIs and Improve Reporting with QuickBooks, backs up to the starting line: businesses that haven't yet captured the right operational data can't build meaningful KPIs from it. The post makes the point directly — "No data means no KPIs." You have to get the data right before the reporting layer has anything real to work with.

Pip: Which is a polite way of saying the ledger cards have to go first.

Mara: That thread connects directly to the cloud question — where the data lives shapes what you can do with it.

Cloud Flexibility as a Business Strategy

Mara: The cloud resilience post reframes what resilience actually means for a small or midsized business today.

Pip: The post puts it this way: "Cloud flexibility won't remove uncertainty, but it can change how the business faces it… from reacting under pressure to responding with confidence, agility, and control."

Mara: What that looks like in practice is scaling resources seasonally, enabling secure remote access, deploying tools faster, and strengthening backup and recovery — without rebuilding the technology foundation each time something shifts.

Pip: And the post is careful to say this doesn't have to happen all at once. You start where the value is most immediate.

Mara: That phased framing is what makes the cloud conversation feel like a business decision rather than an infrastructure project. Speaking of infrastructure — Microsoft Fabric is where that foundation gets built.

Microsoft Fabric for Growing Businesses

Pip: The Fabric post is aimed squarely at businesses drowning in spreadsheets — which is most of them.

Mara: The framing is direct: Azure data platforms and Microsoft Fabric can replace "spreadsheet chaos" with a centralized analytics environment, eliminating file version issues and the need for manual consolidation entirely.

Pip: So the upshot is a live business dashboard pulling from QuickBooks, Shopify, HubSpot, Square — whatever the business already uses — without custom integrations.

Mara: And the post emphasizes that getting started doesn't require a dedicated data team. That's the practical threshold for most small businesses. Which brings us to the question of what happens when AI enters that environment.

Fix the Data Before AI Touches It

Mara: The AI posts share a single argument: AI doesn't fix bad data, it scales it.

Pip: Fix the Data, Then Let AI Scale It puts the problem in terms any field-service business will recognize — jobs marked complete in one system but not invoiced in another, customers duplicated across platforms, manual spreadsheet patches holding the whole thing together.

Mara: The post is direct about the consequence: "Imagine training your AI on this data. It isn't going to resolve the data issues or repair them, it will repeat them at scale."

Pip: That's the part AI vendors tend to skip in the demo.

Mara: Data Is the Real Competitive Advantage extends the argument beyond any specific software stack. It asks four questions worth sitting with: Do you trust your core business data today? Can you explain where key numbers come from? Are your processes documented and consistently followed? Do you have a single, reliable version of the truth?

Pip: If the answer to any of those is no, the post's advice is clear — fix the data first, then consider the AI layer.

Mara: The thread across all of this is the same: the foundation has to come before the capability built on top of it.

Pip: Data before AI. Cloud before scale. Reporting infrastructure before the dashboard you actually want. Next time, we'll see what else is in the queue.

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Private Equity: Operational Systems Create the Value Financial Models Only Predict

Executives signing acquisition documents during a private equity deal meeting

Why connected workflows and reliable data are essential to scalable growth

Financial models can project revenue growth, margin expansion, cash generation, and even a successful exit. But a spreadsheet cannot produce those outcomes. Value is created inside the business, through operational systems that make work repeatable and data integration that gives leaders a reliable view of performance.

From Financial Plan to Operations Reality

An integration plan for operations should address a practical question: What will the company be able to do consistently better after the integration that it cannot do today? The benefits are typically found with consistent approaches to pricing, structure and pipeline reporting for sales, streamlined and preferential purchasing capability, guardrails for and improvements in service delivery, creation of working capital, and analytical reporting with an AI capacity.

Those capabilities depend on systems. Pricing needs govern discount rules and margin visibility; sales needs a defined process and trustworthy pipeline data; and cash conversion requires billing, inventory, purchasing, and collections to work as one coordinated workflow.

Integration Turns Activity into Insight

Many companies have the necessary applications but still lack visibility of the relevant data. Customer, transaction, inventory, project, and financial data often remain in silos, use inconsistent definitions, and arrive too late to guide meaningful decision-making. Teams will try to compensate – using spreadsheets, manual reconciliations, and competing versions of the truth.

Data integration creates a shared view of how activity becomes revenue, profit margin, and cash. Leadership can see whether price increases are making a difference, which opportunities convert profitably, where purchasing savings are gained or lost, and why earnings aren’t getting to the bank account. This is not about simple data movement; it’s about having timely, trusted information to support business decisions as they are made.

Standardize Before You Automate

New software cannot repair an undefined process or inconsistent data. To standardize something, first establish ownership of a process or area, make sure everyone is using the same definitions, understand where decision rights exist, and identify the most meaningful measures first. From there you can move to stabilize critical workflows, standardize the master data, connect the systems supporting high-value decisions, and automate.

The key is to connect investments to operating outcomes, such as faster quoting, better sales forecasting, reduced inventory, fewer billing errors, and more efficient administration.

Build for Acquisitions and Scale

Acquisitions introduce more and different applications, customer structures, products and product codes, reporting practices and more. A repeatable integration capability defines what must be standardized, what can remain local or localized, how the data maps across systems, and when reporting comes together. This approach reduces operational disruption and accelerates time to value, capturing the synergy more quickly.

The Real Source of Durable Value

Long-lasting value does not come from having more technology. Extended value return comes from operational systems which employees can execute, integrated data that business leaders can trust, and a management mentality that turns information into action. When pricing, sales, procurement, delivery, and cash management use connected processes and consistent data, growth becomes more predictable and margins more defensible.

Turn Fragmented Operations into Measurable Results

Ready to connect your systems, improve data visibility, and build more scalable operations? Noobeh is ready to help!

Let’s start by identifying your highest-impact workflow and defining the business outcome, and then together we’ll create a practical integration roadmap. The sooner your applications, data and processes work together, the sooner your strategy can produce measurable results.

bunny feetMake Sense?

J

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Analysis, forecasts and modeling: What’s the point?

Analysis, forecasts and modeling: What’s the point?

financeIn today’s business world, risk, uncertainty and volatility are just par for the course – everyday realities of simply being in business.  Nothing is certain, they say, except death and taxes.  Yet there is a fine art to driving profitable growth in a business, and adapting to existing and emerging risk takes a great deal of experience, information and agility.  While planning and process development may occur at many levels within the organization, it is the FP&A (financial planning and analysis) capability which helps top performing businesses be top performers.

Financial planning and analysis are activities central to enterprise performance management (EPM) and must necessarily extend beyond finance.  Integrating various functional domains in the business (financial, operational and strategic), FP&A should bring data together from the various facets of the business and use the information to help structure and guide the organization toward meeting short-term and long-term goals.  Among the most critical of the duties of FP&A is calculating the financial impact, the monetary effects, of potential business decisions.  Everything in business means money, so there is always an impact to a decision.  With the right information supporting the decision, it is far more likely to have a positive impact and a level of sustainability.

While many CFOs may recognize the importance of performance measurement, planning and forecasting, a great many also believe the process isn’t very effective. The cause is frequently the divide between the various domains in the business and the information systems supporting them.  Operational data are distilled into summary financial information and fed to finance systems, losing much of the underlying intelligence that might be gained from analysis of the details.  Strategic development and planning may overlook certain volatile elements in the market, or may base successful outcomes on an expectation that conditions within the business will not change.  Finding ways to integrate the data from the respective domains into a comprehensive model is essential to developing a better and more robust forecasting and scenario-playing capability.  With the right information, analytics may be applied to all facets of management decision-making, anticipating and shaping business outcomes far more effectively than could be done without the insight.

Small business owners may believe that things like “predictive modeling” and “enterprise performance management” aren’t things they need to worry about, but the small business could use this information just as beneficially as a larger enterprise – perhaps even more as the insight could be the key to small business survival and growth.

Using analytics, the owner is able to adjust and re-align strategy in real-time to keep on the right path and goals clearly in sight.  Analytics can also help a business better understand what really drives revenue, working capital and profits.  Analytics can even help managers align compensation and strategy with business objectives, preventing compensation issues from outpacing business benefit.

There is a cost to growing a business, and some strategies might be more sustainable than others.  Time will tell, but it is great if the business owner has some business intelligence that might indicate what’s going to happen before it actually does.

Make Sense?

J

 

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Why Accounting in the Cloud?

Why Accounting in the Cloud?

Business owners and managers need to keep close control of their financial data.  They need to know where they stand at all times, and having information available to make business decisions is essential.  When the financial information is in the office but the owner isn’t, how can wise decisions be made without access to supporting data?  They can’t, and that’s a problem.  The solution is simple: work in the cloud.

A cloud computing model properly applied to accounting and bookkeeping systems helps businesses of any size keep their financial data and accounting applications in a safe a secure environment, yet accessible to those who need it.  By locating the business applications and data in a protected central location, access to programs and data sets can be provided to authorized users regardless of location or computing platform.  For a small business owner, this means that working from home or on vacation can be as productive as working in the office.  In larger businesses, cloud-based accounting means the accounting department, CFO and financial advisers might all access the same financial records and applications no matter where they work from.

Cloud computing and hosted application models applied to accounting and bookkeeping represent a viable option for managing, securing and providing access to critical financial information.  Businesses outsourcing their accounting or bookkeeping work find that cloud based approaches offer workflow and process efficiencies to help get the necessary information in the hands of those who need it, quickly and efficiently.

Keeping accounting and bookkeeping systems safe yet available, providing business decision makers with the flexibility of accessing their financial data from anywhere and at any time is a highly valuable service. Accounting and finance professionals can act as the trusted adviser to their clients, providing important business insight and information, with guidance in developing cloud computing and online accounting approaches being among the benefits the firm offers.   Working closer with clients allows professionals to produce better, more accurate and insightful results.   Cloud computing models remove distance barriers and allow professionals and their clients to work more collaboratively with applications and data than ever before.

Many firms are just recently discovering the relationship between technology adoption and business competitiveness.  Those that embrace new computing paradigms gain the ability to meet client requirements in innovative, efficient and timely ways while those that do not adopt these new models continue to struggle, unable to communicate value and differentiation in their service offerings.

There are some recognized truths in business, and one is that is isn’t what you know but who you know.  Another truth, an understanding that is just now being fully recognized, is that it’s not what you do, but how you do it that matters.  Accounting and bookkeeping for business is absolutely an area where cloud computing and the wise application of technology and service can improve cost efficiency, accuracy and turnaround times, allowing the firm to provide a higher level of service to clients.  Accounting in the cloud is a technology-enabled approach which propels the firm into an entirely new range of capabilities and potential service offerings, reaching higher levels of performance and profitability.

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J

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Efficiency and Value with Cloud Accounting

For some accounting professionals, the problem is finding a way to provide services that are valuable to the client, and doing it in a way that makes it profitable for the provider.  Outsourced and online accounting models are the answer, employing innovative tools in the practice and with clients: tools and resources necessary to get more informed and run the business better.

accountingCloud

With online accounting solutions the firm is able to increase profitability with the range of services offered, often adding clients and work without hiring more personnel.  Online solutions allow professionals and their clients to work from anywhere at any time, providing both with the freedom to focus on core business capabilities (and lifestyle).

Reducing the requirement for sophisticated on-premises technology may mean providing everyone with the ease of use and security of server-based computing models, which is among the benefits of a cloud IT approach.  Centralizing and managing applications, protecting valuable data resources, and streamlining business processes are among the benefits to be achieved with an outsourced, managed application hosting solution.  Businesses who outsource their IT management often realize an increased capacity to do business simply by leveraging the cloud to make the current working models more efficient and effective.

Leveraging mobility and real time access is also about increasing the overall range of opportunity to deliver value.  Contractors, employees and clients all find improvements in getting the information they need when it matters, and the firm finds a greater agility in meeting client demands and expanding service offerings.

Cloud computing and online accounting solutions have proven the viability of anytime, anywhere working models, and professional accounting practices of all sizes and orientations are realizing the benefits of working closer with their clients by applying them to the engagement.

Cloud accounting is really about improving the profitability of the accounting practice while delivering higher levels of service to the client.  The movement of information from one place to another; translating data from one form to another – these are the processes representing the cost and inefficiency in the practice, and are specific areas where a collaborative, online approach may introduce new service efficiency and value.

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J

It is worth noting that “cloud accounting” and online accounting models do not necessarily require the use of a SaaS solution.  QuickBooks Online, Xero, Freshbooks – these are new small business offerings that exist purely on the web.  QuickBooks desktop editions can be “cloudy”, too, when they’re hosted by an authorized QuickBooks hosting provider.  The point is not necessarily to use web software, but to approach IT management and systems from an outsourced perspective, allowing for centralized management and administration and delivering secure remote and mobile access.  The systems should facilitate the working model, not force it.

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The Productivity Paradox: Accounting for Returns on IT Investments

The Productivity Paradox: Accounting for Returns on IT Investments

There has always been somewhat of a struggle between the IT department and “management”, much of the difficulty existing with the need to demonstrate clear returns on investments for IT purchases.  Unfortunately, expenditures in information technology are often the result of short-term views of long-standing problems, applying “solutions” that do not fully address the requirement or which do not deliver the productivity or performance gains expected, particularly in a dynamic and rapidly changing business environment. The assumption is that a wise investment in information technology will result with improved profitability and performance.  Demonstrating this on paper is not always easily accomplished.

There is a great deal of research on the subject of accounting for returns on IT investments.  Some of this research describes “The Productivity Paradox”, referring to early studies on the “relationship between information technology and productivity, and finding an absence of a positive relationship between spending on IT and productivity or profitability”. [1]  Previous to the emergence of cloud computing and widely available remote and mobile technologies (and now possibly even more with the prevalence of available options), businesses invest heavily in IT infrastructure and applications which deliver nominal benefit to the business when measured against the cost of acquisition and implementation.  Heavy IT investments are made with little or no measurable benefit to profitability, even if operational performance improvements are created.  In many cases, the difficulty in “proving” benefit from information technology investments rests with the lack of information relating to impacts in non-operational areas, such as with investors, auditors or analysts.

The early research has become a foundation for making the argument that accounting professionals should be more directly involved in determining the value and impacts of IT investments – due largely to the fact that accounting professionals are generally familiar with the variety of formulas and approaches which become relevant in measuring the effects of IT purchases.  Information technology spending will result in short-term impacts, but will impress on the business over the longer view as well. With a foundation in accounting principles, valuation and analysis, and accompanied by IT knowledge and experience, management accounting benefits from an improved ability to recognize the relevance and value in IT implementations even where no direct profit improvement is visible.

Can difference in firm performance be explained by differences in IT investments?
Can differences in firm performance be explained by differences in IT investments?

Emerging technology models are having huge impacts in business capability as well as risk, and this new paradigm requires that accounting professionals apply their skills to understanding more fully the influences from and results of IT spending in the enterprise.

Having a basis for studying valuation and recognizing the good and bad of focusing on various key measurements (return on assets vs equity vs sales vs investment…) is essential in developing a “formula” for predicting impacts of and potential returns from IT spending, and solving the puzzle that is the productivity paradox.

jmbunnyfeetMake Sense?

J

[1] Journal of Information Systems Vol. 16; “Returns on Investments in Information Technology: a Research Synthesis”