work papers – Cooper Mann Consulting

April 16, 2013November 2, 2017

Workflow is Essential in Document Driven Business

The popularity and proliferation of online applications and cloud computing solutions for business has transformed how organizations manage activities, people and resources. The Internet-connected marketplace has introduced both opportunity and challenge for businesses of all sizes, and much of this focus has been placed on the management and control of digital documents and data.

Electronic document management has been commonly used in professional services business for many years, yet has not always been viewed as an essential technology to apply in the context of organizing and structuring the processing of the document. As clients of these professional firms continue to generate and utilize a great deal of paper documentation and written information, firms continue their reliance upon paper files, shared drives, and other more traditional methods of organizing the work, and storing or controlling access to documents. However, key trends in the industry are causing these approaches to be increasingly burdensome for professional service firms, including:

Need to support multiple offices, geographically disbursed team members, and mobile workers and devices
Increasing use of email as a primary tool for collaboration
Introduction of new risk elements accompanying new technologies
Increasing numbers of forms and document types coming from clients
Rising expectations of clients and increased market competition
Growing need for businesses to increase earnings and profitability with fewer resources
Increasing requirement for knowledge management supporting sustainability, creating the ability to retain and reuse best practices and work produced

Advances in the design and underlying technology supporting many document management solutions today have delivered great capability to firms adopting electronic document management approaches.

Benefits of implementation include the ability to create a centralized, searchable documents base which includes all client-related content, including email communications as well as documents and data files. Easy search, access, collaboration, and re-use of information are enabled, and complete audit trails may be retained. Electronic document solutions also reduce physical document storage needs, reducing costs associated with managing and storing paper files, and can better serve business disaster recovery and continuity initiatives.

While today’s electronic document management solutions may address many of the challenges involved in working with large volumes and varieties of documents and data, there are few solutions on the market which address fundamental issues relating to document processing workflows and how they are impacted by various business or data-driven events, or by the availability of people or resources to facilitate the process.

The growing problem facing businesses today is the volume and variety of information which must be organized, processed and archived. The market is sold on the idea that electronic communications and record keeping will simplify things, but the reality is proving otherwise. Businesses are hoarding information at unprecedented rates and with the ability to collect and generate increasing volumes of digital data, businesses have not simplified their information processing, they have only created a greater need.

Generating and collecting data is not the issue created, nor is ultimately the archival and storage of the information. Rather, the problem created is in organizing the work related to processing this ever-increasing volume of documents and data.

Businesses dealing with documents and transaction-based activities should not only attempt to structure workflows necessary to support the various processes, but must also seek to normalize as much as possible, developing a consistent and methodical approach to the work which results in predictable and consistently high quality service delivery.

The efficiency gained through this structuring and standardization of the work allows the professional services firm to achieve a greater level of profitability for outsourced processing engagements, which are often viewed as low-margin and low-profit activities.

Make Sense?

Read about Using Structured Workflow to Manage Offline Clients | Intuit Accountants News Central

March 26, 2013November 2, 2017

Small Businesses and Performance Data – Analytics are more important than ever

Creating and keeping a competitive edge is critical to building a successful business. Developing a plan, monitoring the plan to make sure the business remains on target, and setting goals for growth and profitability are foundations of business success. But great strategy and detailed planning cannot ensure success because the economy and business environments are unpredictable; no amount of planning is a guarantee that bad things won’t happen and the business won’t experience challenges. On the other hand, regularly monitoring small business performance data can reveal trends and indications that things are not going as expected, and provide a basis for making the decisions necessary to get the business back on track and regain the competitive edge.

Business owners must be prepared to make adjustments as conditions change, acting on decisions made based on business performance data. While business analytics are more important than ever, with businesses facing volatility in financial markets and increasingly globalized competition, finding a way to approach the matter is often the biggest barrier. The growing difficulty – the increasingly expanding problem facing business owners and their advisors – can be distilled down to three particularly noticeable trends.

An Aberdeen Group report from Nov 2011 titled “The Analytical SMB” identifies these trends as More Data, More Users and Less Time.

More Data

The volume of data flowing into organizations is already high and is increasing.
1. The data is complex
2. The data lacks similarity (data is disparate)

The volume of information flowing in to businesses is already high, and is increasing steadily. With all the data collection applications and tools available, and as the business seeks to gain more information and intelligence from more sources, the volume of information gathered by businesses has increased at astounding rates. Technology has adapted to this need, allowing businesses to gather than store vast amounts of data. To be of value, however, the data must be analyzed to find the answers to questions posed. What technology is only now beginning to address is the complex and disparate nature of the collected data. Coming from varying sources and in equally varying formats, data must be “normalized” and related for it to make much sense.

More Users

More business decision makers in more job roles and functions are getting involved
1. More people approaching the problem with their own “brand” of analysis

In a very small business, decisions are generally made by the owner. This is most often due to the fact that the owner is the person who not only knows what’s going on in the business, but is generally the one doing a lot of the work. As businesses grow and bring in personnel to manage various functions, these managers become decision-makers. Decisions are made in businesses at all levels, and as management layers are compressed, those “closer to the action” are being handed more responsibility for the decisions impacting their areas. Without a comprehensive and company-wide framework for data analysis and reporting, these individuals and workgroups find ways to capture and analyze the data they feel is pertinent to their requirement and within their own realm.

Less Time

Timeframe for making decisions is shrinking, and is shrinking at an “alarming” rate
1. The “velocity” (rapidity of motion) of business is increasing

It may be that, in some businesses and markets, certain decisions don’t have to be made with any great speed. Businesses or markets of this type are tough to find these days because the Internet, information technology and connected systems have all but eliminated the effects of time and distance. Just about everything in business today moves at a rapid pace, and that means that business decisions are often demanded on-the-spot, providing little time for detailed consideration and working through the problem. Without the tools and data providing meaningful real-time visibility into business performance, decision-makers may be able to act fast but not wisely, and are most frequently guided by their “gut feel” as to what the right move is.

Driving Small Business Analytics

Business decision makers are now recognizing the need to know more about the business and how it is operating and competing in order to effectively address the choices and decisions faced each day. The cause for this recognition may be due to variable elements, but the conclusion reached was the same: good business decisions require business analytics to support them.

Not surprising was the report finding – that the majority of small business owners felt pressured to adopt a business analytics solution primarily due to the fact that “critical business decisions rely too much on “gut feel”. Surprise! Other drivers listed were lack of visibility into operational metrics, the growing number of people in the business who want analytical capability, the business’s inability to identify and act upon business opportunities, and having less time to make decisions.

Steps to Get There

As with any business project, there are “degrees of success”, and the ultimate success of a business initiative requires that all parties be on board with it. Businesses who recognize a need to improve their analytical capability, but who do not then empower their systems, processes and people, will not achieve the same result as those who do.

Focusing on the business data, it is important to address both the volume and disparity by creating formal data management practices and policies, and implementing systems and processes which assist with the intelligent capture and storage of business information. Simply retaining the data is not useful; it must be presented and applied in a meaningful manner for it to become useful as decision-supporting information. The value of the information increases dramatically when it becomes truly useful to the business. Additionally, by empowering a broader framework for data collection and analysis, businesses extend the “intelligence” to others in the organization, supporting individual and workgroup efforts to make better decisions for their respective areas of responsibility. Of course, if the information is not provided in a timely manner, its value is reduced if not eliminated (hindsight may be 20/20, but that doesn’t help you see where you going to step next). Any approach to building business intelligence should leverage connectivity and integration to provide a timely delivery of complete information how and when it is needed.

What’s the Proven Benefit?

The obvious benefit of business analysis is that business owners are provided with data to help them understand more about the business operational and financial performance. The real and proven benefit is that the information provides a basis for gaining insight into trends and conditions which impact performance, and which support making the necessary decisions which facilitate improvement in various business areas.

The highest level of proven benefit, according to the Aberdeen Group report, was achieved by those businesses who embraced the requirement to know more about the organization and operation, and who implemented a focused effort at building business intelligence.

Fast Facts: Best-in-Class SMBs Achieved 24% year over year increase in new customer accounts sold compared to 12% for the industry average, and 11% for the laggards.

These organizations which achieved the greatest improvement operated from real data rather than being guided by gut and emotion, enabled the entire organization to participate in the development of organizational and business intelligence, positioned themselves to identify and act on new business and market opportunities, and ensured that those who must make decisions have the information and insightful data to support making the right ones.

Make Sense?

Knowing Enough to Run a Successful Business

If you own and operate a business, you probably want to make it successful. Granted, success comes in many flavors, and there are also “degrees” of success, where maybe you do okay but not as well as you’d like (or not as well as your local competitor). Running a successful business, and crafting a business with sustainability and long-term value, takes information as well as know-how. Remember that information = power and you want to be as powerful as possible when it comes to running your business.

While today’s information technologies, mobile devices, and “everything as a service” have the capability to deliver way too much information for the average business owner to make sense of, there are a few areas of the business where investing in a little insight and reporting can make a big difference in the level of understanding you have about the business.

Rather than making decisions based on guesses or gut, business owners should use actual historic data relating to these are key areas (and key performance indicators) to help predict sales and order volumes, estimate cash flows, and forecast profitability.

Getting Customers

The “customer lifecycle” does not start when someone buys from you, it starts when they become a potential customer (often referred to as a target). Even before someone buys, your business may expend resources to expose your brand or product to them on websites, in advertisements, and through other marketing channels. These marketing efforts will (hopefully) result in the generation of qualified leads for the business to sell to. Unless the business understands the costs involved and the efficiency of the marketing and lead generation efforts, it cannot understand the actual cost of getting a new customer.

The next step in getting customers is turning a qualified lead into an actual paying customer. The business will want to keep track of conversion of leads into customers, along with sales data including total sales, number of items sold, and how items were priced. Powered by sales performance data, business owners can learn whether or not their lead qualification efforts are working, if their products are competitive, and if the pricing is in alignment with the industry.

Producing Work

When businesses operate, they essentially produce whatever work product their business model is designed to produce – whether it is a professional service, product, logistical support or whatever. Every business produces some type of work product. This is the operational aspect of the business, and business owners should want to know as much as possible about how well operations are running and how effective the operation is. This isn’t just the cost of production, (the yield expected for a given investment in materials or equipment), it is also about the quality of the product (customer satisfaction) and the quality and value of the service behind it (customer retention).

Keeping Money

Money (more specifically, cash and the availability of it) is the metric that most small business owners tend to focus on. It makes sense, too, given that most small businesses survive based on what they have in their bank accounts. Then again, looking at the accounts receivable and payable won’t tell the entire story, either. Business owners need to know how quickly their customers generally pay, and they need to know how much capacity or inventory they have before needing to buy or develop more.

The message underlying this entire discussion is that fact that you can’t analyze what you can’t quantify (no information = no power), so it is essential that systems be in place to capture information from the business and its activities. Further, recognize that it takes some skill and experience – perhaps from your trusted accounting professional – to put the information together so that it makes sense and is useful.

Make Sense?

J
Measure, Manage and Succeed. It’s all about knowing how to speak the language of finance

December 20, 2012June 27, 2013

Business Owners to Accountants – Tell Me in Real Time

Business accounting is defined as the system of recording and summarizing business and financial transactions and analyzing, verifying, and reporting the results. It sounds pretty dull, and to most small business owners it is the last thing they want to think about. “Accounting” is what happens at the end of the month, quarter or year – or when any type of taxes are due. What matters to the small business owner is their cash flow and cash availability to meet immediate operational demands, and how they will get past today’s problems to reach their future goal of comfortable retirement, leaving a legacy for the kids, or selling the business at a high value. It may even be that, during periodic visits to deliver the monthly paperwork to the accountant, business owners express interest in discussing their ability to meet future business goals, yet these conversations often take a back-burner to simply getting the work processed and reports and returns completed.

Accounting has traditionally been approached as an after-the-fact activity, recording transactions for things that were already done in the business. While this may be a handy approach to getting an annual tax return completed, it really does nothing for the small business owner in terms of providing them with information to run the business. Further, it does nothing toward helping the business owner get to where they want to go with the business, reaching whatever goals they had in mind when they first got started.

Cloud solutions and Internet-based applications have emerged which provide a high level of capability and information to small business owners, much like the E*Trade tools which enabled any user to “take control of their financial futures by providing the products, tools and services they need to meet their near- and long-term investing goals”. Where E*Trade delivered simplicity, insight, and guidance for investors in real-time, so do many of the new business analysis and financial dashboard solutions, but in a business financial context.

Individuals who are focused on meeting their financial or investment goals are very interested in monitoring their progress toward reaching those goals, and guidance often suggests that making adjustments in strategy or approach at certain points along the way may be required. Similarly, business owners have a great interest in monitoring the progress and status of their businesses, and many are taking steps to gain that insight and obtain guidance through the use of online banking solutions and other real-time reporting tools.

By simply connecting financial systems to some of these online reporting tools, business owners are able to gain a significant level of insight into their business operations, including bank balances, cash coming in and going out, and other information which supports making daily business decisions. Unlike a static financial statement or annual report, these dynamic tools can provide business owners with real-time information about their businesses, which is what the business owner is looking for. But guess what? It’s not happening like it ought to.

Business owners are becoming increasingly impatient with their accounting professionals, and are demanding higher levels of service at more competitive rates than ever. Further, many business clients of accounting professionals are gaining a belief that the value their accountant delivers is diminishing as do-it-yourself tools are gaining in popularity due to ease of use and well-stated value propositions. If accounting professionals would only take a proactive, rather than a reactive, approach to working with their clients, this question of value would be much less of a question.

The biggest problem facing these accounting professionals is that they rely upon the client to deliver the work. Waiting around for clients to bring in information for processing, or traveling around to client offices to pick up materials when they say it’s ready, is creating a divide between the client and the accountant which is difficult to overcome. This divide – the lag in time between when business things happen and when they are accounted for – eliminates any possibility for the business owner to operate with all the information they need.

Accounting professionals must become proactive in their relationships with business clients, establishing the initial groundwork for how each will perform in order to achieve the desired result – real-time information for real time decision support. The accountant has a responsibility to not only ensure that the information is processed appropriately and accurately, but also to ensure that it is obtained and processed in a regular, timely manner. Increasing the frequency of capturing and processing data is necessary in order to provide information when it is most useful. This means that accountants must not only organize their workflows to adjust to the new frequency and timeframe for processing, but that they must also be far more proactive in obtaining the source information from clients on a regular and recurring basis.

It has always been a problem to get information from client businesses so that it can be processed and reported on. Now, with the demand for more timely data and “instant insight”, business owners are expecting faster returns on the processing of accounting information even as they continue to be the bottleneck in providing the source data. Accounting professionals and the tools they use will have to adjust to this reality, creating a stronger focus on the organization of work and turning notification and exception handling processes around so that they drive the workflow rather than simply result from it.

Make Sense?

September 21, 2012October 28, 2014

Smarter Online Document Vaults: Document Management for QuickBooks, Microsoft Office and more

Smarter Online Document Vaults

Document Management for QuickBooks, Microsoft Office and more

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?

August 3, 2012July 3, 2017

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.

Make sense?