Aligning Business IT With Business Strategy
Business owners and CFOs are experiencing a crackdown on tax liability nonpayments. Cash is tight everywhere, and agencies will only increase collection and enforcement efforts – especially when it involves a public trust. Whether it is sales tax or payroll tax, noncompliance can mean a whole lot more than just fines and penalties.
via Arrest for Sales Tax Evasion in Tennessee | TaxRates.com.
You’re a professional services provider, perhaps an accountant. Your client is a growing business, and they came to you to prepare the corporate tax return. After several years of faithfully performing this service for your client, you send them the annual email reminding them to bring in the information to get this year’s return completed. When they don’t respond, you call them. And find out that the tax return was completed by another accountant this year, the accountant who took over the bookkeeping. “But we could have done that for you, too”, you say. But now it’s too late, and the client has a different accountant. Consider it an opportunity lost, along with the client.
Is this something you run in to fairly frequently, losing clients to others who provide substantially the same services as you do? It happens to the best of firms, and the secret to keeping it from happening is to be sticky – delivering the services which securely attach the client to your firm – and provide the ongoing value that your business clients can’t do without.
The first place to create stickiness is in your service offering. One-time or annual projects (like tax returns and audits) don’t keep you in front of your client often enough for them to think of you daily, and daily (or at least frequently) is how often you want them to think of you. As the business owner faces daily decisions, do they consider calling you for advice or insight? If not, then you probably aren’t delivering the value, or the sticky service, which will tie your practice to the client for the long-term. Daily bookkeeping, or helping the client keep their books in order, is a valuable service that most small businesses need. While your firm may not be realty interested in performing or supporting the business bookkeeping, it is important to recognize that this level of work allows the firm to be more intimately involved with client business processes, providing a great deal more insight and understanding into client operations than through an annual tax interview. By attaching your firm to the daily activities of helping to account for business activities, you elevate your position from an occasional service provider to a consultant whose advice is sought after on a regular basis. You are now in a position to understand better what areas of business may need focus and attention, and have placed yourself as a trusted advisor who can help determine the best course of action in any given situation.
The other, critical element to being sticky is to make sure your clients know what you can do for them. Don’t assume that each of your clients knows what service or value you can offer them (you know what happens when you assume, right?). You have to tell them; spell it out and thoroughly communicate the variety of ways your firm can help them. Just because you’re an accountant, you should not assume the client will ask you to help them with various business issues. Often, a business owner will face a challenge and not know who to turn to. Seeking out the assistance of specialty consultants is a standard approach, as is turning to IT contractors, software consultants, attorneys, or other service providers. Why not you? Did they know you were available to help with this? If they didn’t call you, then they probably didn’t think this was a service you provide.
Accounting professionals serving business clients must not only make their range of services known, but should also actually ask for the additional business from those clients. Only through consistent exploration and value building, asking the client if services offered might be valuable to them and demonstrating how those services have benefitted others, will the firm begin to make the impact necessary to keep the client coming back, and coming back for more.
When the client comes back for more, you know you’re getting sticky. That’s a good thing.
Make Sense?
J
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?
J
You run a professional services firm, perhaps an accounting firm. You have a wide variety of clients with a wide variety of needs, but the services you offer are relatively standardized. You provide tax return preparation, bookkeeping and financial statements.
What’s not standardized is how you approach each client need, and how you work with each client. You treat each engagement as a one-off, dealing with the client (and the client information) in a manner that suits the client at that time. While this sounds like a great approach, lending itself to a high level of personalization, the underlying result is inefficiency, lack of standards, and a very limited ability to improve your internal profitability.
What you need is a machine – to be the McDonald’s of professional services – delivering consistent and predictable service to your client community. Your service quality doesn’t have to be in the realm of “fast food”, but the point is that you should be using a standards-based approach and applying the same tools and methods to each engagement in a consistent and repeatable manner. You’ll rapidly find that a great many of your clients will eagerly adapt, and begin to embrace and take advantage of the tools you provide to them. For your firm, the result is more predictable performance and increased profitability.
As an example, let’s say that your firm is “tooled up” to provide services using Internet or cloud services. You have a client portal where you can store and share files with clients, and you have mechanisms for securely emailing files and documents to clients as well. Your goal is to get your clients to use the online portal to exchange information with your firm, enabling somewhat of a “self service” model. But many of your clients won’t log in to the portal, and require you to use email to send/receive files and information.
The right approach here is to use the portal no matter what. This is a key element to the success of your overall approach –the strength of your standardized processes. And it’s important to remember that it isn’t a process if you don’t do it the same way every time. Even if your clients don’t use the portal for data exchange, you should still encourage it and put the documents there. Now, you’ll still likely do the email thing – it’s always a good idea to have at least two paths of communication. But if you consistently use the portal as a standard method of making data available for your clients, many of those non-portal users may become users simply because they find that the convenience of any time/anywhere access really works for them. Sometimes it takes letting folks get used to things, but once they do, it becomes second nature and almost an expectation. Once these clients have adopted your standard portal approach, what else can you introduce to them to improve efficiency and effectiveness of the engagement?
You need to help make your firm as efficient and profitable as possible, and to have a quality product (or service) produced every time. Henry Ford’s assembly line is where you start. Create the machine that is the operational level of your business, and establish the tools and standards that will allow for sustainable growth and success.
Make Sense?
J
Read more about Data Warriors: Accountants in the Cloud
Read more about using the cloud to extend “connectedness” beyond traditional boundaries
Article originally published via The Progressive Accountant
Most businesses need a little help streamlining those frustrating back-office processes that remain as barriers to better information collection and use. What sort of processes? Time keeping, for whatever reason or need, is one of them. Maybe employee time spent relates specifically to billable project revenue, or possibly time spent is part of an embedded cost in an engagement. Or, time tracking may simply be a means to capture data on employee productivity. In a lot of situations, getting time records from contractors or employees is like asking them to move a mountain. Maybe there is a mountain to move, depending on how many sheets of notes and handwritten records they’ve got stacked up.
Another process to look at is expense management and reporting, where all those random size receipts taped to a piece of letter paper, credit card statements with lines blacked out with a Sharpie, and spreadsheets of purchase requisitions for things you’ve never heard of before get stacked in the in-box where you not-so-secretly hope a fire will start some time during the night. Someone actually has to go through this information and enter it into the system, and then decide what to do with the requests. When this “someone” is the owner or manager, it means taking time away from actually running the business. When it’s the bookkeeper, more focus may be placed on data entry than on verifying spending authorizations or managing the cash flow.
While almost every business has these time and expense management needs in their business, it is an area of automation and “tooling up” that is often overlooked. One of the reasons for this may be that a lot of the solutions users are asked to implement just aren’t “usable” enough, or don’t really fit the context of what the user needs to accomplish. In order to get the most value out of any business solution, workers must actually use the solution. It has been proven time and again that, if you give people easy tools that make sense, they’ll use them.
Your accounting software may have time tracking with it, but does it make sense for your employees to access accounting just to record their time? How about your contractors? Employee reimbursable expenses paid by credit card can be accessed directly via transaction downloads from the bank, but does it make sense for you to have access to the employee’s account? While there may be many ways to accomplish these tasks, there are only a few really effective ways which deliver the access as well as the security, and the relevant functionality that makes it easier for good workers to capture good data. Selecting a system with the right functionality is key, but finding a system people can and will actually use means you’ve found a real solution, not just a system.
Make Sense?
J
Are you having a hard time understanding the best approach to hosting your business applications – wondering why it costs what it costs, and why some applications seem harder to get hosted than others? While installing applications on your desktop seems pretty straightforward, it may seem like nothing short of rocket science to get an application installed with your hosting provider. And, to make matters worse, a handy little software widget you just bought for $20 now means you must have your own entire virtual server just to run it in the cloud? What’s up with that?
There is a lot of confusion regarding application hosting services, what customers expect from them, and what service providers are reasonably able to deliver. Unfortunately, software developers, customers and service providers are not always on the same page when it comes to trying to solve the problem or making it easier for businesses to adopt the service.
To attempt to address the issue, and to (hopefully) provide some clarity and guidance around the application hosting service model and its use in your business, I will be presenting a session on application hosting, including QuickBooks hosting, at the 2012 Accounting Solutions Conference, presented by the Sleeter Group and being held this year in Anaheim, California on October 22-24. The discussion will include information on typical hosting provider models, as well as application issues and considerations businesses should be aware of when looking to have their software and systems delivered by a 3rd party.
In all fairness, I will not be recommending specific providers, nor will I suggest that any one provider is better than another. Each hosting company has their own strengths and weaknesses, which is true with all businesses. The focus of the session is helping attendees learn what they need to know to begin a basic evaluation of whether or not hosting of their applications makes sense, and to recognize those factors which will impact cost, performance, and usability. Further, I’ll also be talking about how hosting isn’t a standalone solution, and how cloud-based applications and services may be combined with hosted application services to deliver the necessary functionality for the best value (“can you say chunkify!” to use a Doug-ism).
So, I guess you need to come to Anaheim in October to learn some stuff, and then take a day at Disneyland.
Make sense?
J
Get ASC 2012 conference session information here
read more about the confusion over hosted licensing on The Progressive Accountant http://www.theprogressiveaccountant.com/tech-tips/confusion-over-hosted-licensing.html
Cooper Mann Consulting 