Accounting

Article Dean Dorton

Since there is no one else in this room to have an opinion, I get to choose what I want to talk about.  I want to dive into a topic that is near and dear to my heart, which is accounting delivery models.  Historically, accounting has been done internally, within organizations.  The owner of a business may start off by creating invoices and paying bills from their kitchen table or the corner of the warehouse they operate out of.  After about 2 weeks of this, the business owner realizes they didn’t start their own business so they can become an accountant so their goal of growing the business to get rich becomes grow the business enough to justify paying someone to do the accounting.  Regardless of the situation, most often someone within the organization was doing the day to day accounting.  I call this the DIY (Do It Yourself) accounting delivery model.

Now, add cloud-based technology allowing multiple users to access an accounting system from any location.  Combine cloud-based technology with automation applications that reduce the number of key strokes needed to input data and drive workflow.  What we have today is an environment in which outsourcing the accounting functions becomes a viable delivery method, one that may enhance the value of the accounting function.

Before you say “I’m out, outsourcing is not for my group, let’s see what they are talking about on True Crime Obsessed (great podcast by the way)” let me ask you a few questions:

  1. Does turnover in your accounting department cause delays in your basic accounting function?
  2. Is your accounting software out of date or prone to crash?
  3. Have you outgrown your accounting software but don’t think you can afford a more robust system?
  4. Do you have good people in your accounting team, but they could be adding so much valuable to the organization if you could re-deploy them to something more meaningful than reconciling the bank accounts?
  5. Is your accounting process full of manual steps?
  6. Does the monthly closing process leave your team in tears?
  7. Are exporting data from your accounting system into excel in order to manipulate the data for the reports you need?
  8. Are you tracking non-financial data outside of your accounting system and building manual reports that combine the financial and non-financial data?
  9. Do you hate hiring accountants?
  10. Do you struggle to use financial statements to tell your organization’s story?
  11. Are you worried about fraud or theft and wish you had someone else to looking under the hood?

If you answered yes to any of these questions then outsourcing might be worth exploring.

Maybe you are thinking that your team could use some help, but you don’t like the idea of outsourcing the entire function.  Maybe you don’t want to risk losing a valuable employee by implementing a big change or maybe you just need someone to offer some guidance at a controller level.  Outsourcing models can be designed to facilitate this.  This is sometimes called co-sourcing.  Examples of co-sourcing might include:

  1. Using outsourced resources to enter invoices and reconciling cash to support the controller you have on staff
  2. Perhaps you use outsourced resources to supervise your clerical staff and to control the month end closing process for you
  3. Maybe you have strong clerical people and a steady controller, but need someone to think big picture about the accounting and finance function.  Maybe you partner with an outsourced CFO

The beauty of an outsourced deliver model is that it can be highly customizable.

Whether you know you want to outsource or would just like to discuss what options could look like for your organization (without any obligation), contact Justin Hubbard or Krista Nash to learn more.

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Article Dean Dorton

This blog is the January Edition of our CFO Minute: A Sage Intacct ERP Series.

THE PHANTOM OF COMPLIANCE— Whether you’re disguised behind a white, glossy face mask, feeling heartbreak and despair or you’re at your desk, hiding behind a handful of incorrect spreadsheets and silently yelling in frustration- we get it.

Life throws us unexpected daily challenges.

And so do new accounting standards. For many finance professionals, revenue management is among the top challenges today. With its combination of loosely defined regulations, evolving standards—such as the new revenue recognition rules under Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) 606 and stiff penalties for noncompliance, revenue management creates unacceptable levels of complexity and variability that often overmatch the resources and expertise of many finance teams. Faced with these barriers, companies are looking to automate revenue management processes to gain efficiency, strengthen compliance, and improve visibility.

Why compliance can’t wait 

 The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) issued ASC 606 to be effective at the start of 2018 for public companies, and the start of 2019 for private companies… Which happens to be NOW! Some companies have yet to acknowledge that they need to abide by these new regulations, but the reality is that the contracts you are writing today that extend into the 2018/2019 adoption date must be accounted for under ASC 606.

Preparing your business for the shift (and staying prepared when it comes along) is a time-consuming process—especially if your accounting system lacks built-in readiness. If you have a subscription-based business, you likely enter into complex contracts and agreements with customers. The new standard requires your company to capture and report on this information, which your accounting system may not currently track.

As a result, you need to identify and remedy critical data gaps before your organization is subject to the risk of fines from the SEC, increased auditing costs, and rippling relationships with your auditor (who isn’t happy that their client didn’t adhere to GAAP guidelines!)

Overall, your company’s reputation and finance department can be negatively impacted if regulations are not implemented.

How Sage Intacct’s automation can help

Fast-growing businesses are choosing Sage Intacct’s leading cloud financial management technology to automate their subscription management and revenue accounting. This can save you and your staff hundreds of hours each month on calculations, manual entry, and reconciliations.

Check out our free datasheet below to learn how automated revenue management can help you:

  • Scale regulatory compliance
  • Speed quote-to-cash by 30%
  • Forecast revenue and get real-time SaaS and software metrics
  • Gain control over revenue, billing, and contracts

Article Dean Dorton

Get It Right, Get It Done: 4 Ways Outsourced Accounting Benefits Your Business

You know the advantages that financial management software brings to your business. Manual processes and outdated reports have gone the way of the dinosaur (unless you think Jurassic Park is real). Your accounting department has never run more smoothly.

However, your finance team may still be spending more time on routine tasks and less on your business’s core functions than you’d like. As your business grows and changes, your accounting functions need to grow and change, too. Outsourced accounting services take care of the day-to-day jobs and provide an adaptable, scalable platform to meet your company’s evolving finance needs.

Consider the following advantages of outsourced accounting services:

1. Enjoy the benefits of the latest financial management software. Your accounting services provider uses the most up-to-date financial management software, such as cloud-based Sage Intacct, so you can be sure your accounting processes are efficient and that you get real-time insights into your growing business. What’s more, the software is flexible and robust to handle your company’s changing needs, including revenue recognition, project accounting, subscription billing, and more.

2. Save on processing time. Why waste valuable human resources on mundane processes like reconciliations, closings, and cash management when you can assign your team to more value-added projects? For example, your finance department could analyze the feasibility of adding a new product line, location, or business model such as subscriptions. Plus you can save on operational costs and channel those funds toward more critical business functions.

3. Help ensure taxes are accurate. Incorrect numbers can create inaccurate tax filings. The result? Penalties and audits you’d rather avoid. Outsourcing accounting services to the pros help ensure accuracy at every level—from transactions to reports—so you can face tax season with confidence, not trepidation.

4. Take advantage of industry experts. Providers of outsourced accounting services use experienced professionals to handle your finances. You can learn the latest tips and get expert advice as your company grows and your accounting needs become more sophisticated. From accounts payable to monthly closing to board and investor financial reporting, you have professionals backing you every step of the way.

With a new year comes an opportunity to do your finance a new way, a better way. That’s why Massey Consulting is proud to announce its merger with Dean Dorton, a top accounting firm, effective January 1, 2019. Now our clients can take advantage of the latest financial management software and free up their accounting team to focus on what’s important—growing the business into 2019 and beyond.

Get the details of the merger and learn what it means for you here.

Article Dean Dorton

When it comes to sports franchises and the professional sports industry as a whole, there are a handful of factors to manage on the accounting side. In Part 1 of our Hat Trick Blog Series, we discussed the compelling challenges of manual data entry, spreadsheets, and lack of real-time visibility that sports CFOs and Accountants may face on a daily basis.

The 3 part series continues with the next two accounting curveballs faced by the sports industry: Managing expenses and having to use multiple systems to track data. Find out how cloud accounting technology is overturning these challenges and providing top solutions to efficiently manage your finances.

Chaos of Travel, Time, and Expense Management 

The sports industry is a whirlwind of expenses. Did your team travel from city to city and what was the cost? Was there a fundraising campaign used this week to increase ticket sales? With so many different directions of revenue streams and multiple expenses to track, your chart of accounts might be two miles long. Managing all these expenses manually, along with your daily accounting, is a migraine in the making.

The Solution: Customizable dimensions and the time and expense module

With Sage Intacct, you can improve your reporting with dimensions and simplify your chart of accounts. You can easily “tag” transactions, as well as operational data, with dimension values. This allows you to add business context to your data instead of assigning transactions to hard-coded individual accounts. Once you create a dimension, you can use it for any transaction- general ledger, receivables, payables, time, revenue management, and more. As your data and business changes, add the dimensions you need to easily track what’s important to your business.

With the Time and Expense module, you can:

  • Access real-time project and team information
  • Have flexibility for your time and expense entry
  • Get real-time visibility to project tracking, billing and costing

take the pain out of time and expense management: check out our data sheet

Using Multiple Systems to Track Data 

How many different systems do you need to glance at to gather all the data you need for one report? You look at Ticketmaster to see revenue from ticket sales, but then you have to make sure the payroll for that day is accurately allocated, and also plug in all your time and expenses. This can mean hours of manually importing and exporting data from other software systems to keep up with reporting demands. In the business of sports, finance teams are in critical need of better technology.

The Solution: Consolidate your data with system integration.

Sage Intacct’s ability to integrate with countless other systems, including payroll, time and expense, sale tracking software, and more allows for easier access to all your financial data in one place. It’s time to ask yourself if your team is seeing the full financial picture. For more information on Sage Intacct’s cloud-based accounting software and tools that will help your sports accounting team, contact us!

This 3-part series will continue with the next two curveballs that the sports industry experiences in accounting and financial management. Stay tuned for more…

view our recorded webinar “the sports of cfo: scoring big through dashboards, dimensions, and automation”

Article Dean Dorton

Whether you’re a fullback running for the end zone or you’re a batter hoping to knock the ball out of the park, or you’re a CFO simply trying to equip your management team with the information they need to make data-driven decisions, everyone has one thing in common– they’re trying to score big.

We all know the endless responsibilities and number crunching that your typical accountants deal with on an every-day basis. But what about the complexities for accountants in sports- one of the largest, most evolutionary entertainment industries in America?

Behind the scenes, CFOs, Controllers, and Accountants for sports teams are scrambling to keep up with budgets, inventory for merchandise, ticket sales, payroll, contracts and sponsorships, managing cash flow, and more.

Don’t let your financial reports be your team’s biggest foe. Check out the accounting challenges that the sports industry is facing today and why Sage Intacct’s cloud financial technology is your best defensive player when it comes to reporting.

1) Manual Data Entry 

We know spreadsheets are the easy, go-to route for budgeting, reporting, and keeping track of all your business financials, but how many hours are you spending keying in data and trying to avoid numerical mistakes at all costs?

For a sports franchise, accounting is a more complex process than just plugging in numbers into Excel- you have to sort and manage ticket sales, sponsorships, contracts, merchandise inventory, payroll, expenses, and so much more. Single-user, error-prone spreadsheets are the serious obstacle when it comes to financial productivity and tracking accurate data.

The Solution: Reporting flexibility and automation.

Sage Intacct lets you click out of those 50+ tabs you have open in Excel. With the ability to streamline your business financials and automate processes such as procurement, fixed assets, and intercompany transactions, you can say goodbye to your spreadsheets for good.

Sage Intacct’s flexible and customizable workflows let you get your finances efficiently processed without the risk of error-prone spreadsheets.

datasheet: flexible reporting and dashboards

2) Lack of Real-Time Visibility 

Click. Click. Click again. How many tabs and pages have you navigated just to find that one report you needed? Financial leaders in professional sports organizations want quick data extractions, trend summaries, and financial analysis. You want the ability to pull the data from last week’s game to see why ticket sales were so much higher than a month ago. You may want to see how much of the year’s budget has been spent on travel expenses so far. If this data is buried somewhere in your accounting system, your reporting processes have essentially lost all functionality.

The Solution: Up-to-the-minute, comprehensive dashboards.

A cloud-based solution like Sage Intacct gives you deep insight into your organization’s financials- all in real-time. With customizable capabilities, you can choose which reports you want to see, from any period of time, with just one click.

Sage Intaccts’s financial visibility lets you get the specific metrics you want at the executive level- anywhere and anytime.

Intacct dashboards

It’s time to ask yourself if your team is seeing the full financial picture. For more information on Sage Intacct’s cloud-based accounting software and tools that will help your sports accounting team, contact us!

This 3-part series will continue with the next two curveballs that the sports industry experiences in accounting and financial management. Stay tuned for more…

Article Dean Dorton

If growth is raising hurdles at every turn in your financial processes, slowing productivity to a halt, you’re not alone.

Find out how forward-thinking businesses tackle their biggest financial hurdles quickly and efficiently.

1. Speed global consolidations: Adding on new entities can cause tedious and lengthy consolidations.

If you are working from an on-premises system, and it’s taking you hours, maybe even days, for global consolidations, it’s time to find a better fitting system.  Choose one that is uniquely designed to handle the issues that multi-entity companies face.

2. Get strong visibility into projects’ profitability with the cloud: Modern businesses work smarter in the cloud.  Because project management financials frequently change, your teams can benefit from the cloud.

When project teams operate from cloud-based systems, they are better equipped with current data to help them stay within project budget margins.  Teams can boost project movement and collaboration, and project managers can have key strategy details to at their fingertips with to-the-minute accurate reporting.

3. Integrate your solutions: When you work with software solutions that integrate well with each other, your teams can work faster, collaborate more effectively, and improve sales funnel fluidity and speed projects down the pipeline.

These days, best-in-class financial management solutions integrate well with other best-in-class solutions to improve data accuracy and collaboration between teams and clients.

4. Take advantage of automation: What once took your team a few minutes, now takes hours. Your on-premises system requires loads of workarounds to complete standard processes, and your teams are facing roadblocks and bottlenecks as a result of data re-entry and transfers, and complex reporting needs.

Growth means your teams need automation help to handle the higher volume of data they’re now managing.

5. Choose a scalable financial management solution: As you grow, your financial management solution will need to grow too. If you are working from an on-premises system now, and are facing rapid growth, it pays to switch to a flexible solution that can handle growth and make complex data easier to manage.

Sage Intacct, a best-in-class financial management solution eliminates the most common financial management hurdles of growing businesses with:

  • Fast multi-entity set-up options, multi-currency conversions, and one-click global consolidations.
  • Deep visibility from continually updated dashboards working from the cloud to showcase your highly customizable KPI’s for fast decision-making and growth strategies.
  • Strong integrations with other popular solutions like Salesforce, to bridge gaps between your financials and the systems your teams already rely on.
  • A high level of automation to reduce errors, provide cleaner audits, simplify your chart of accounts, and speed reporting.
  • A unique level of customization so Sage Intacct will grow and change as much or as little as you need it to.

Tired of struggling through financial hurdles? Reach out to us today to find a solution that fits your unique business.  We are here to help!

Considering cloud-based financial management?

Check out “11 Reasons Companies are Moving to the Cloud This Year”

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