Tag: reporting

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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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Advance Your Analytics and Reporting for QuickBooks Enterprise Desktop

Office workers analyzing business data and graphs on multiple computer monitors

QuickBooks Enterprise Desktop remains a strong fit for businesses that need more functionality and flexibility than Intuit’s online editions provide. Its cost is far lower than most ERP systems, and with the right add-ons, extensions, and reporting infrastructure, it can support sophisticated accounting, inventory, manufacturing, and operational needs. For many QB Enterprise customers, the next opportunity is not replacing QuickBooks—it is strengthening the analytics and reporting environment around it.

Many businesses eventually outgrow the reporting capabilities available directly inside QuickBooks Enterprise Desktop. They may need more flexible dashboards, consolidated operational data, cleaner KPI definitions, or faster access to information across departments. An external reporting approach can address those needs by extending QuickBooks data into a broader analytics environment.

Mendelson Consulting and Noobeh recommend using Microsoft Azure data infrastructure and Power BI to create a single source of truth for analytics and reporting. In this model, QuickBooks Enterprise Desktop and other operational systems feed a governed reporting foundation, so leaders can work from consistent data, trusted metrics, and timely insight when decisions need to be made.

QuickBooks provides useful built-in reports, but an external reporting approach can deliver deeper customization, broader data integration, and more advanced analytics. With Mendelson Consulting’s support, businesses can build a reporting foundation that combines QuickBooks data with information from other operational systems, giving leaders a more complete view of performance.

For organizations that rely on QuickBooks Enterprise Desktop every day, an external reporting strategy can turn accounting and operational data into a more flexible, scalable decision-support system. The following benefits explain why many growing businesses choose to extend QuickBooks reporting with Azure data infrastructure and Power BI.

Why should a business with QuickBooks Enterprise Desktop consider using an external reporting approach alongside QuickBooks?

Advanced Customization

Power BI allows you to design reports that provide exactly the insights you’re looking for, tailoring reports to align with your specific needs and metrics.

Data Consolidation

If your business uses other software systems or databases in addition to QuickBooks Enterprise Desktop, we can help connect to and consolidate data from those sources into a single reporting environment, giving you a holistic view of your business’s performance.

Data Visualization

Power BI has sophisticated data visualization capabilities, allowing you to create interactive charts, graphs, and dashboards. These visual elements can help you interpret data more easily and make informed decisions.

Cross-Platform Reporting

Noobeh creates Azure data infrastructure that enables automatic refreshes for Power BI data, giving teams access to current reports and analytics across devices and platforms. Power BI’s web and mobile access helps leaders monitor performance from anywhere while giving remote and mobile users more timely information.

Data Transformation

Using tools with data transformation and cleansing features, Mendelson Consulting and Noobeh can enable preparation of data for reporting without altering the original data in QuickBooks or other original sources.

Large Dataset Handling

For businesses with substantial amounts of data, Noobeh uses Azure elastic data infrastructure to handle larger datasets more efficiently and with greater agility, providing for faster reporting performance.

Long-Term Scalability

As your business grows, your reporting needs will become increasingly complex. Power BI, supported by a strong data infrastructure foundation, can scale to accommodate greater data volume, more complex reporting requirements, and broader analytics needs.

Microsoft Fabric, Azure, and Power BI can provide the foundation for a strong analytics environment, but successful implementation requires planning, data modeling expertise, security design, and ongoing support.

Working with an experienced team helps reduce the learning curve and ensures the reporting foundation is built for reliability, usability, and scale. Mendelson Consulting and Noobeh can help build the data infrastructure and reporting environment needed to turn QuickBooks Enterprise Desktop data into stronger analytics, clearer business intelligence, and better decisions.

Together, Mendelson Consulting and Noobeh bring a rare combination of strengths: deep QuickBooks Enterprise Desktop expertise, practical accounting and operational knowledge, and advanced Microsoft cloud and data infrastructure capabilities. That combination matters because effective reporting is not just a technology project—it requires understanding how the business runs, where the data originates, what leadership needs to see, and how to build a scalable foundation that can grow with the organization.

With Mendelson Consulting’s decades of experience helping QuickBooks Enterprise customers solve real business challenges and Noobeh’s expertise in Azure data infrastructure, Microsoft Fabric, and Power BI, businesses gain more than dashboards. They gain a trusted team that can design, build, and support a reporting environment grounded in clean data, meaningful KPIs, and actionable insight.

Let Mendelson Consulting and Noobeh help turn your QuickBooks Enterprise Desktop data – and the data across your broader operations – into a connected analytics platform that supports better decisions today and scales for tomorrow.

If your team is ready to move beyond static reports and gain faster, clearer insight from QuickBooks Enterprise Desktop and your broader operational data, contact Mendelson Consulting to start building a reporting foundation that supports better decisions today and scales with your business over time.

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Why Small Businesses Need Proactive Accounting

It has been demonstrated time and again that businesses working with experienced accounting professionals can benefit from the strategic financial guidance and compliance support they may provide. Yet these factors alone are often not enough to make the business owner happy. For most small business owners and growing enterprise stakeholders, the lack of proactive advice compounded by slow responses to business requests are the primary reasons for leaving their CPA.

Even if they don’t know how to ask for it, small businesses want proactive attention from their accounting professionals. Small businesses want and need to get information when it matters, and they need help deciphering what the information really means.

It is common for professional accounting firms to simply wait for their clients to provide after-the-fact information from which reports are prepared and delivered long after their relevance has passed. These firms often see no sense of urgency in helping clients address the business issues facing them in real-time.

Business owners attempting to grow a small enterprise from their budding small business especially need the benefit of experienced insight into operational metrics, cash flows and overall business performance. Without this meaningful data and advice delivered in real-time, stakeholders don’t really know what is going on or if they’re on the right path.

Advice on business planning and financial strategies should come to business owners from their accounting professionals, but it often does not. It is interesting that so many firms list business planning and strategy among the services promoted on their websites, yet they just sit back and wait for clients to ask for help.

Regulatory and reporting requirements for businesses are ever-increasing, so it makes some sense that many professional practices continue to focus on taxes and compliance work. Firms may find it challenging enough to keep up with changes to these core services provided. Yet this is why practitioners should take notice and accept that their ability to meet changing market and customer demands is wrapped in their ability to leverage technology to do what people and process can’t do alone.

Information technology is needed to speed up the bookkeeping, accounting and reporting processes, and it takes even more technology to help turn data into relevant and useful information. This is where Mendelson Consulting and Noobeh cloud services can help.
Working with businesses of all sizes and encouraging participation by the accounting professional, Mendelson and Noobeh help businesses implement the technology that facilitates faster collection of information throughout the business and then applying solutions that reflect those numbers in ways that helps users visualize the meaning of the data.

Mendelson and Noobeh help CPAs and accounting professionals remove threats of competition and irrelevance by helping them work closer with and deliver greater value to their small business clients. Applying proven, innovative technologies with improved processing methods and controls leads to better information provided in a timelier manner, which returns to the client as a better result offering greater insight. This is what small businesses want from their CPA, and Mendelson Consulting and Noobeh Cloud Services helps professionals deliver it.

jm bunny feetMake sense?

J

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For Franchise Business, Platform Agility Helps Deliver Customer Value

In every corner of the franchise world, businesses are talking about growing value. Customers are pursuing lower prices and are spending less, and the competitive marketplace often pushes businesses into a race to the bottom. With pressures coming from all sides – rising labor and supply costs, inflation and the cost of capital, changes in consumer spending habits – franchise operations are looking for ways to differentiate themselves and delight customers while supporting profitability and growth.

Value is not simply a discounted price on an item. To the buyer, value is often found in the quality of the product or service, and fast friction-free transactions made without errors. New bundles of products and offering new add-ons may also improve the customer’s value perception. The introduction of online and mobile ordering and partnering with third-party delivery services is not only an enhancement to the customer experience but can open new revenue streams by reaching new customers and serving current customers better.

Understanding where changes might be made to not only improve value to the customer, but also to the business and stakeholders, is the challenge. Only through close monitoring of operational and financial data will businesses understand what adjustments are needed to achieve the desired results. Yet the complexities of data collection, integration and reporting often pose barriers to exposing the information needed to fully inform stakeholders.

Mendelson Consulting and Noobeh Cloud Services understand that many franchise organizations are faced with challenges in identifying, collecting, combining and reporting on their operational and financial data. Working with Microsoft Azure and having team members and partners experienced in working with a wide variety of financial and operational systems, Mendelson Consulting and Noobeh help businesses create the foundations for flexible, agile and massively scalable data collection, storage and analysis.

From standardizing accounting systems and processes to establishing data lakes and foundations for data analysis and reporting, Mendelson Consulting and Noobeh have the range of services and solutions and partners to help support new, established and fast-growing franchise operations. Its about delivering more value… to our clients and to theirs.

jm bunny feetMake Sense?

J

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Report Right or It’ll Cost You (double)

Report Right or It’ll Cost You (double)

paper-stackReporting requirements for business just keep growing, and so do the penalties for doing it wrong.  New this year and just in time for the annual reporting season (makes it sound almost fun, huh?) are new forms to file and an increase in penalties for not making an effort to get the information correct and into the hands of the proper recipient. Failure to file by the due date can cost businesses $250 per item, up to $3,000,000 in penalties ($1,000,000 for small businesses).  Add to that the warning about intentionally not filing or having an “intentional disregard of the requirements to furnish a correct payee statement”, which carries a penalty of at least $500 per payee statement and has no maximum penalty. Clearly, the cost of making sure the information is correct and filed in a timely manner is far less than the cost of not getting it done – or done right.

Growing problems around wage and revenue reporting have caused the IRS to pursue a variety of measures over the years to try to improve information reporting.  The Affordable Care Act has also had quite an impact on wage and benefit reporting, increasing reporting requirements substantially.  From the introduction of health plan reporting on W2s to the new mandatory forms 1095-C and 1094-C (for applicable large employers), businesses of all sizes are feeling the pressure.

February 2016 marks the date when employers and healthcare providers are required to file those shiny new IRS information returns regarding employer-provided healthcare coverage, providing a copy of the return to each employee much like a W2. The information would then enable the IRS to enforce rules established under the Affordable Care Act by revealing whether an individual might be eligible for a premium tax credit, or if an employer may be subject to non-compliance penalties. Penalties for failing to comply essentially double in 2016.  And the IRS suggests that a “good faith effort” standard will be applied to information reporting, offering no relief for employers that fail to make the effort to file timely and correctly.

It wasn’t very long ago that 1099 filing requirements expanded substantially, forcing businesses to get far more detailed in their production of information to the IRS and to payment recipients.  While this filing requirement impacted businesses both large and small, most lived through it (with the help of their trusted accounting professional!) and were able to comply.  That effort informed the IRS on a wide variety of business payments and expenses not previously tracked, in particular payments made for services and non-employee compensation.

The increasing scrutiny of wage and earning information may also help in efforts to curtail tax refund fraud.  Identity thieves use stolen (or borrowed) social security numbers to file false tax returns early in the year. Unfortunately, with the IRS motto of “pay first, prove later” the cross checking won’t likely be done until after the refund check has been sent. Once the task is performed, however, the taxpayer could end up getting a letter from the IRS stating that more than one tax return was filed using the social security number, they owe for a tax year for which they did not file a return, or the IRS indicates that wages were reported from an employer the taxpayer doesn’t know.

The IRS expects tax refund fraud to top $21 billion by 2016, which is an increase of 223% from 2013 numbers. Tax refund fraud costs every taxpayer.  No wonder the IRS is getting tougher with the penalties for not filing information returns accurately or on time.

jmbunnyfeetMake Sense?

J

Following is the text from the IRS, which outlines the “Increase in Penalties for Failure to File Correct Information Returns and to Provide Correct Payee Statements — 31-JUL-2015

L. 114-27, section 806, increased penalties for failure to file correct information returns and provide correct payee statements for information returns required to be filed after December 31, 2015.

Penalties are discussed in Section O in the General Instructions for Certain Information Returns. The penalties in the bulleted list under “Failure To File Correct Information Returns by the Due Date (Section 6721)” are revised as follows.

  • $50 per information return if you correctly file within 30 days (by March 30 if the due date is February 28); maximum penalty $500,000 per year ($175,000 for small businesses).
  • $100 per information return if you correctly file more than 30 days after the due date but by August 1; maximum penalty $1,500,000 per year ($500,000 for small businesses).
  • $250 per information return if you file after August 1 or you do not file required information returns; maximum penalty $3,000,000 per year ($1,000,000 for small businesses).