software-as-a-service – Page 4 – Cooper Mann Consulting

August 23, 2012August 27, 2019

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?

August 21, 2012

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?

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August 9, 2012July 19, 2017

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?

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

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

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