Tag: small business

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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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Getting Results: Social Media for customer service is a sword that cuts both ways

In a recent article on Forbes.com, authors Mark Fidelman and Becky Carroll discuss the high cost paid by Southwest Airlines – cost in terms of customer perception as well as obvious costs in dollars – due to a website snafu resulting in lots of customer overcharges – and the part social media played in the entire affair.  There are a number of lessons to be learned from the article How One Defective Social Media Campaign Spawned Millions in Overcharges, but one big message is about the positive impacts of effective and relevant (and timely) customer communications.  Social media is a sword that cuts both ways, offering a platform for both positive, and not so positive, discussions and conversations.

Using social media for customer service has become just as, if not more beneficial than, having an army of agents in the contact center. This is especially true when a crisis hits a company. Gone are the days when a customer service issue was aired solely between a consumer and the company’s contact center (and maybe a few friends within earshot). When things go wrong, consumers take to a brand’s social media channels for several reasons. Forbes.com

Particularly when you factor in the viral nature of social media interactions, and the amazing speed with which ANY message can gain broad visibility, businesses should understand that all those “friends” can turn into an ugly mob pretty quickly if an effective communications strategy isn’t in place.

Whether or not an organization uses social media as one of their official customer service channels, customers will seek out all ways of communicating when they have an issue. How companies choose to respond on social media has a large impact on how quickly a crisis settles down.

But communication isn’t all that is required.  Providing information on a solid course of action, and how revealed problems are being addressed to satisfy customer demand RIGHT NOW is the critical element.  Communications and promises are nothing if they’re not backed up with action in real time.  Actually, the best solution is to not have the problem in the first place, but sometimes you just don’t see it coming (see “unintended consequences“).

Make sense?

J

Is great customer service the entire customer experience?

You know those car commercials on TV, where the sales person is telling the customer about how great the warranty on the vehicle is?  Yeah – the one where the customer wants to know if they should buy a good car, or buy a car with a good warranty.  Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Read more about using the cloud to extend your access and collaboration beyond traditional boundaries.

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Success in the Finance Department: Better Data and Analysis

Success in the Finance Department: Better Data and Analysis

CFOs and corporate controllers are beginning to recognize the increased value they can deliver to the organization when they take a more holistic and comprehensive approach to data reporting and analysis.  The key is in delegation of duties, and establishing the controls and connections which ensure proper (and complete) flow of information throughout the enterprise.  The finance department can easily become overburdened if not structured properly, but can be as easily undervalued if the sole focus is getting the numbers right.

An article on CFO.com discusses some of the elements of structuring the finance department for greater success, and identifies the value of taking a proactive, consultative and analytical approach to business finance.

“For a CFO, “success is not just about getting the numbers right, but also uncovering the story behind the numbers: taking raw accounting information and creating cogent and compelling management discussion and analysis,” says Eileen Kamerick, managing director and CFO at investment bank Houlihan Lokey.

Those who take the big picture into account are more likely to develop an organizational structure that isn’t merely reactive. That will allow staff to come up with more ideas and, ultimately, help drive revenue and run the business. “You have to create an organization so you aren’t in the engine all the time,” Kamerick notes.”


This is a great article… read the entire post on CFO.com here

You’ll find that it makes sense.

J

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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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Accountants and their Clients Online: Who Owns the Data?

Accountants and Clients Working Online: who owns the data?

Mobile device support and remote access to applications and data is becoming a standard requirement for most businesses today.  The “online” working model goes a long way towards addressing problems face when they need to get team members together no matter where they are.  When the information is stored and managed centrally, it is easier to provide access to outside accountants or other professionals.  Yet, while this collaborative working model solves numerous problems, it also introduces a number of issues that neither the business owner nor their outsourced professionals may have thought about.  One of these issues is the challenge represented with dissolution of the engagement, and subsequent division of information assets related to it.  This separation can become unfriendly and problematic if the parties do not have an agreed-to plan.  Quite frequently, disagreements result from the use of subscription-based online services which are not clearly delineated as customer-controlled versus provider-controlled.  In these cases, clients may benefit from the use of a service through their provider, not understanding that the provider ultimately owns or controls access to the solution and maybe even the data associated with the account.

In general, it is safe to take the approach that whoever pays the bill for the service is the owner of the data associated with it.  This “he who pays the bill owns the data” approach is simple and it makes the most sense.  Consider that the individual paying the bill for the services is the individual who is financially obligated for what occurs with the service, so it makes sense that they would have authority over service access and usage.

It is quite common in outsourced and online accounting models for a professional firm to subscribe to services or solutions which help them support various processing needs for their clients.  Solutions such as Bill.com or Paychex provide tools to assist professionals in efficient delivery of various process-support services, such as bill payments and approvals, or payroll processing and reporting.  These tools are utilized as part of the professional service offering, and are generally not directly exposed to the client users (other than in specific contexts, perhaps).  Separating the client from these systems is usually not difficult; the professional simply stops using the solution for that ex-client.   Since the transaction information from the solution ultimately integrates into the accounting data file, the accounting firm can simply return the accounting data file to the client without losing their process support data in the online service.  On the other hand, if the client was the subscriber to the solution and the accounting professional was “invited” to participate with them, the separation would mean that the accountant no longer had access to the online data, and the client would retain use of the solution.

In contrast to a process-supporting solution, separations become far more complicated when the online solution includes fundamental tools for the client like general business application access and data storage.  Consider that a business decides to use SmartVault for its document management needs, and also wants to connect documents and files directly to transactions in their QuickBooks accounting system.  In this situation, the accounting data and the document vault are closely connected, and contain a wide variety of valuable business documents and files.  When the solutions are both run as online services, where the QuickBooks applications are hosted along with the integration for SmartVault, both the accounting professional and their business client can work more closely and in real time, creating much more value in the relationship.  If the relationship does not work out, however, separating applications and data can be a frustrating process for both parties if there isn’t a clear understanding of who gets what.  It would be easier perhaps if the question centered on an accounting data file, but in these situations the problem extends to questions of ownership of source documents, working papers, and even application software licenses.

Accounting professionals need to protect the value of the work they perform on behalf of the client, and the business owner needs to have their business information and applications.  Clearly understanding how to orient subscription based services to protect the interests of both parties is an important element in providing the highest level of professional service to clients.  In some cases it makes sense for the professional to own and control the subscription, particularly if the service is an element which supports professional services delivery.  These tools help you provide services to your clients, and the client benefits from the result of use of the solution.  If the client leaves you, then it is up to them to “tool up” their own operations to handle those processes.

In other cases, it makes far more sense for the client business to own and control their online services, and invite their outside professionals to participate. The benefits of working together are still present, and the remote access and mobility aspects benefit the business owners and team members as much as their remote professionals.  The accounting professionals can preserve their working papers and other work product on their own systems, drawing a clear line between their retained data versus that of the client and making a potential future separation much easier to facilitate.

jmbunnyfeet

Make sense?

J

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Is great customer service the entire customer experience?

Is great customer service the entire customer experience?

I’ve been working with accounting technologies for a long time, and much of that time and activity has been focused on online accounting models and solutions.  The Authorized Hosting Program for QuickBooks is a good example of the type of service model that’s garnered a lot of attention over the past couple of years, particularly since desktop QuickBooks editions continue to be the accounting solutions of choice for new and growing small businesses, even as those businesses look to leverage the cloud for remote and mobile access to business information.  But hosted QuickBooks delivery models vary tremendously from provider to provider, so how does an accounting professional or their client business owner know which service will suite them best?

At the surface, most of the QuickBooks hosting services available today look pretty much alike.  In concept, they are, but in reality the technology each provider elects to deploy makes a big difference in the experience of the hosted service user.  Some deployment models require a lot of 3rd party software to make the service work, and some providers have constructed their own “black box” technology to make the delivery possible.  The result is a wide variety of service models and delivery approaches, some of which may perform better or offer more functionality than others.  But these details are often difficult to discern when evaluating the various provider deliveries, so most folks simply resort to pricing comparisons.  Unfortunately, this isn’t really the best way to measure the quality of the provider or the service.  There’s still some truth to the old adage that “you get what you pay for”, even when a service has become commoditized in the market.  On the other hand, just because a service is more expensive doesn’t mean it is better.

It is often difficult to get prospective customers to see or understand the technical  nuances of any given hosted delivery, so many service providers are trying to find other ways to set themselves apart from the competition.  One approach that’s become quite popular is to tout the availability and quality of the customer service offered by the provider.  While I do believe that quality customer service should be available for subscribers at all times, I also recognize a bit of a problem with this marketing approach.

To illustrate the problem, I’ll describe a conversation I had with a hosted client last year.

This particular client was with an engineering firm, and the company was subscribing to hosting services for a variety of Microsoft applications, including MS Project (not that it matters, really).  Anyway, this client called me up one day just to chat about something that was frustrating him, and that was an issue of irregular system performance.  Sometimes it was really speedy, and sometimes things would slow down to a crawl and nobody seemed to know why.  He said that he and his team members had been regularly in contact with the support department, and that the support team was always cheerful, helpful, and willing to work with them to find out what the issue might be.  Unfortunately, they didn’t find anything, and suggested that the client continue to contact them when there was a problem.  This went on for quite a number of months, and the client continued to be frustrated with the service performance but quite pleased with the support response.  Then he told me a story.

He said that he used to have a Mercedes, and he loved that car.  It was beautiful and fun to drive, and yes, pretty expensive.  The car had frequent issues, and for this reason he got to know the guys at the Mercedes dealership really well.  He knew all of their names, and they knew his.  He even sent them Christmas cards every year.  He couldn’t have wished for a nicer group of people to service his vehicle.

Then he bought a Toyota.  He really liked this new car, too.  It was fun to drive, sporty, and a little more affordable than the Mercedes was.  This car didn’t need nearly as much maintenance as the previous one, and he had far fewer problems with it.  He never got to know the names of the guys in the service department at the Toyota dealership, because he didn’t go there very often.  When he did, the service was fast and courteous – pretty much what he expected.  But the best part was that he didn’t become closely acquainted with the dealership service team, because the car just worked.

You know those car commercials on TV, where the sales person is telling the customer about how great the warranty on the vehicle is?  Yeah – the one where the customer wants to know if they should buy a good car, or buy a car with a good warranty.  Makes you think, doesn’t it?

When you’re looking for a hosting service provider to deliver QuickBooks and other desktop software to you via the cloud, remember that great customer service is only part of the puzzle.   The best solution is the one that just works, and doesn’t leave you needing a lot of support.

Are you on a first name basis with your hosting support team?  You might want to think about why that is.

Make sense?

J

Read more about using the cloud to extend your access and collaboration beyond traditional boundaries.