automation

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

Happy New Year! 2019 is here, a time for new opportunities and potential for growth. The subscription economy, a newer business model that focuses on the customer relationship rather than products or services, is definitely growing. According to researchers, the subscription e-commerce market has increased by more than 100% a year over the past five years.

You can get just about anything you want on a subscription basis—streaming video, meal prep in a box, software, and even designer gowns. Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora, notes the wide range of payment choices that subscription companies are allowing their customers: pay-as-they-go, pay-per-subscription monthly, or via a long-term contract. “The point is to have flexibility,” he says.

He adds, “The Subscription Economy has increased the intimacy between SaaS companies…and their customers. In the Subscription Economy, every company must better manage a direct, complex, responsive, multi-channel relationship with its customers…. The shift to the Subscription Economy brings with it the need for a completely different approach to building your business.”

Just send me the bill—my way

In the subscription economy, billing is much more complex. Instead of the order-centric model, subscription billing is adapted—within reason—to the needs and preferences of your customers. As your business grows, the complexities will only multiply. Add in the new revenue recognition guidelines (ASC 606/IFRS 15), and the need to automate your billing processes becomes all too clear.

Order-centric financial solutions don’t scale in the subscription economy, where customer relationships reign supreme. Limitations include:

  • A fragmented customer lifecycle across separate orders for upsells, down-sells, and renewals
  • Lack of ASC 606 tracking for performance obligations over the customer’s lifetime
  • Complex tracking and forecasting of revenue streams, including the inability to see billed, unbilled, and paid billing across both recognized and deferred revenue
  • Lack of separate schedules for billing and revenue

Whitepaper: How Automating Your Billing Lets You Scale with the New Subscription Economy in 2019

As a result, you’re stuck using error-prone spreadsheets that don’t allow you to scale.automating subscription billingTo address the diverse needs of your customers and support growth, you need a contract-based financial solution that provides a single system of record to automate billing, revenue recognition, forecasting, and SaaS metrics. You save time calculating, reconciling, and aggregating data, resulting in faster quote-to-cash cycles and faster period closes.

In our whitepaper, “Finance’s Guide to Automating Your Subscription Business,” financial management experts at Sage Intacct offer 5 key steps to ensure predictable revenue:

  1. Integrate systems for quote-to-cash
  2. Establish contract based billing
  3. Build end-to-end revenue management
  4. Create real-time SaaS and GAAP dashboards
  5. Forecast the future

Learn how to scale your billing through automation, so you can grow your business with confidence in the new year and beyond. 

download the free copy of the whitepaper here

Article Dean Dorton

CPA Insight: How Cloud Technology Can Speed Your Year-end Closing in 2019

A conversation with Philip Massey, founder and President of Massey Consulting, on the challenges of the year-end close and how cloud technology can turn those challenges into opportunities and set the stage for future innovation.

Q: What are the biggest challenges that companies face as they close their books for the year?

A: If you have an older legacy system, the actual process of closing the books is the main challenge. You have to follow manual, step-by-step processes for the subledger, inventory module, general ledger— everything. And whatever you do, don’t double-click a button because you might reset and have to start over! It’s difficult, but essential, to ensure the numbers post in the right place. Otherwise, you can’t close out the current year and start the balance sheets for the new year. Reporting is often a big challenge come January or February.

Q: Which features of cloud financial management solutions would be most helpful for closing the books at year-end?

A: When you get a new cloud financial management solution, such as Sage Intacct, the old way of closing the books seems insane. To me, it’s akin to driving across the country when you could fly. That’s because, with Sage Intacct, you literally have to do nothing to close the books at year-end; it’s a self-close system. On January 1, 2019, all you do is log in and see the live numbers for the day. You simply fix any input errors, and the system will automatically adjust your numbers based on the changes you made. For smaller companies, closing the books takes hours; for larger companies, it takes days or weeks—but with Sage Intacct, closing the books takes no time at all.

Q: What do you see as the biggest challenges and opportunities for finance teams in 2019?

A:  Automation will play a significant role in 2019, with a trend toward artificial intelligence shortly after that. It will be difficult to take advantage of these new technologies if you have a legacy, on-premises system. They are not nor are they capable of advancing fast enough to leap into intelligent automation. A cloud-based solution such as Sage Intacct, on the other hand, is built to integrate with and provide finance with all the benefits that intelligent automation has to offer.

Q: What benefits will finance see from intelligent automation in 2019—especially related to the close?

A: To start, intelligent automation can greatly improve accuracy by creating a self-checking environment, so finance can focus on analytics. For example, the system could point out variations or potential areas for review, such as a less-than-profitable product line. Finance will know what the machine doesn’t—that this product line supports more-profitable lines of business and can override what the machine recommends. It’s the humans that need to review the data and the trends. As automation takes hold in 2020 and beyond, accounting will have more analysts and fewer data entry specialists on the team. Larger companies will realize the benefits of intelligent automation first. Thanks to cloud technology, however, smaller companies will also be able to leverage those advantages based on economies of scale.

Q: When evaluating financial management solutions in 2019, what should companies look for?

A: Remember that there is no single system—or even group of systems—out there that is right for everybody. That being said, I would encourage organizations of any size to:

  1. Examine where they are with their accounting software and what manual processes are they still doing.
  2. Analyze this status quo to determine if it’s actually helping your business.
  3. Look at alternative solutions that might be out there, such as a midmarket package that automates these processes.
  4. Turn to the professionals for help. Selecting and implementing a technology solution require a significant investment of time and resources. The most successful deployments result from a partnership between trusted business technology experts and the finance team.

Article Dean Dorton

How SaaS Companies Can Master Revenue Recognition and Compliance with Sage Intacct

For private companies, the compliance deadline for ASC 606 revenue recognition criteria is mere weeks away—starting fiscal year 2019 (or after December 15, 2018). Subscription-based business such as SaaS companies may be feeling some trepidation as the time nears. And no wonder. ASC 606 has been called “a perfect accounting storm, the likes of which has not been seen since the late 1990s.”

ASC606-5Steps 

(image from Idaciti.com)

Revenue management—especially with ASC 606—creates unacceptable levels of complexity and variability that often overmatch the resources and expertise of many finance teams. Faced with these hurdles, companies are looking to automate revenue management processes to gain efficiency, strengthen compliance, and improve visibility. To accomplish this, successful businesses rely on cloud-based financial management software such as Sage Intacct that allows them to:

1. Connect systems. Streamlining the quote-to-cash process by integrating front- and back-office systems eliminates duplicate data entry between finance and the rest of the business, which saves time and reduces errors. Sage Intacct connects to critical business systems within the organization, such as CRM, services management, and subscription management to create a complete ecosystem for revenue management.

In this model, all stakeholders in the company have access to the latest customer data when they need it, in the applications that they use most. This is possible because Sage Intacct is built with open application programming interfaces (APIs) as a central part of its architecture, making it a simple and straightforward task to create integrations among disparate software products.

2. Automate processes. Each company’s revenue recognition process varies according to its unique business model, products, and markets. To automate this complex process, revenue managers need the ability to codify the applicable rules through flexible templates and schedules that reflect the nuances of their business. The process must drive the automated calculation of both recognized and deferred revenue schedules and forecasts based on contract terms, subscription length, project milestone, and more—and integrate with the general ledger.

Automating the revenue recognition process can dramatically cut staff workload, reduce spreadsheet errors, improve accuracy, and eliminate cumbersome calculations and reviews that delay closings. Perhaps, most importantly, automation helps provide a single point of audit and reconciliation.

3. Analyze the business. Sage Intacct delivers a solid picture of both current and deferred revenue by showing a real-time snapshot of future revenues, projected renewals, and total deferred revenue stretching months or years into the future. What’s more, it allows finance to analyze the impact that changes to products and pricing can have on revenue, improving forecast accuracy.

Sage Intacct lets finance teams dig deeper to understand the true dynamics of their business, with visibility into both financial and operating data, and flexibility to view the business through multiple lenses—for example, understanding data and metrics by customer, vendor, employee, product, or project—to make better long-term, strategic decisions.

As your business grows and becomes more complex, Sage Intacct can meet your needs as you add products and services, increase revenue, acquire or partner, expand internationally, or even go public. Sage Intacct’s flexible architecture was built for the cloud and is infinitely scalable and adaptable to meet your needs. And as December 15th draws near, Sage Intacct allows your finance team to connect systems, automate processes, and analyze the business to achieve superior revenue management.

(blog image found on Avanade.com)

Get started on your journey to revenue recognition mastery today—contact the experts at Massey Consulting.

Article Dean Dorton

It just isn’t enough to focus solely on your mission, or your expertise in today’s market. To stay relevant in business, you also need to focus on using modern technology.

If you’re still using an outdated, on-premises style system like Great Plains, you may be spending too much time and too many resources gleaning insights from your data. That outdated type of set up can, in time, leave you scrambling to keep up with competition.

If your teams suffer inputting mountains of data into Excel, or other disconnected systems, take longer to close the books, or if you don’t have updated company performance at your fingertips, there’s an easier solution.

UPLIFT YOUR MODERN ACCOUNTING TEAM

When teams move from Great Plains to Sage Intacct, a best-in-class cloud-based financial management solution, accounting teams can work faster and smarter.

Executive teams, finance, and stakeholders can work with current performance metrics and reporting data from customizable dashboards.  Sage Intacct’s flexible electronic workflows mean a lot more decision-making can happen faster, which just can’t be done with static, in-house based systems.

WORK FASTER WITH MORE AUTOMATION

Automation for a great number of manual tasks allows frees time up for more focus on strategy. Sage Intacct’s configurable architecture means your company can set up transaction tracking, electronic approvals and a number of operational processes to suit your unique structure, to save time, reduce errors, and focus on growth.

MORE VISIBILITY INTO INSIGHTS

No matter your metrics, and how frequently they change, working in the cloud means you can have access to your company or organization’s performance, with to-the-minute data accuracy, from wherever and whenever you need it.

With a powerful cloud-based financial management solution like Sage Intacct, your company can have access to not just financial, but operational data as well. This offers your key players a clearer direction for stronger growth strategies and as many performance updates as they need.

KEY EXPANSION TOOLS

As your company grows, on-premises financial management software often cannot streamline your workflow by integrating with the other software solutions you rely on. In addition, when it comes to setting up entities, working in the cloud offers a faster, easier way.

Sage Intacct offers integrations with many other key solutions, so you won’t need to reinvent the wheel to streamline your workflow and boost accuracy. And as your business grows, Sage Intacct’s fast entity setup feature means your solution will scale with your business today, and in the days to come.

“With Sage Intacct, we have a true cloud system that streamlines our financial processes and gives a wide variety of people in our organization real-time visibility into key financial metrics from anywhere.” – Jennifer Sharp, Senior Accounting Manager, IslandWood

If your business is growing and you’re still using Great Plains, contact us for help in more easily scaling your financial processes with your business.

9 REASONS SAGE INTACCT BEATS DYNAMICS GP

Looking to accelerate growth for your business, but your on-premise solution is stifling those possibilities? Check out our free whitepaper to discover 9 reasons Sage Intacct is blazing past Dynamics GP when it comes to financial management capabilities.

download it here

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”

download our whitepaper