Cloud Computing

Article Dean Dorton

When businesses start to feel the squeeze from outgrowing their current software applications, typically, they start examining their options. However, as they begin research, they realize that not all accounting software is created alike.

That’s why companies come to us for help. If you’re tasked with choosing a software that can manage your unique workload, and still adequately handle current or upcoming expansion, you don’t want to find out down the road that the software you chose isn’t a good fit for your company.

Because none of us have a crystal ball, our team of experts made up of seasoned controllers and certified accountants guide businesses faced with the challenges of development. So let’s break it down: Microsoft Dynamics 365 versus Intacct. For your business, which is the better choice?

Experience

Between Intacct and Dynamics 365, Intacct wins in experience. Both are close in comparison to core accounting features, however between the two, Intacct holds the AICPA endorsement, while Dynamics 365 does not.

Further, while Microsoft rightfully commands respect and has a long-standing reputation when it comes to office suite software, its cloud-based ERP offering is just getting started.  Intacct, founded in 1999, has been pioneering SaaS and fine-tuning its offerings for over 18 years. Microsoft Dynamics 365 released in November of 2016. With any new release, clients should expect that added time and patience may be required, as the new product irons out the kinks.

For companies that are dealing with their own growing pains, a tried-and-true leader in the industry is going to offer more substantial support, when expanding companies and franchises need support the most.

Accounting Features

While Dynamics 365 and Intacct are both geared toward accounting processes, and both offer an ease-of-use interface based in the cloud, proactive accounting and finance teams need options and flexibility to evolve their financials with the business.

Intacct software offers a great deal of flexibility in reporting and in entering items in the general ledger. With Intacct, users can tag items for endless depth of detailing with the Dimensions module, and can sort and categorize with up to 25 user-defined fields.  Dynamics 365 does not offer the same flexibility of user-defined fields.  

Scalability

Your team may not know exactly how much versatility they may want in 5 years or even 3 years, but regardless of where the company goes, you will still need a software that can sustain performance.

Forward-thinking businesses need up-to-date solutions that won’t cut them short on what they can do in the future. In response to the online marketplace, companies of all kinds need software that will accommodate multi-currency conversions and true intercompany transactions.

Many software options handling intercompany transactions with journal entries and reporting, however, Intacct is the best-in-class leader in multi-currency conversion capabilities, and true intercompany transactions with simplicity and ease-of-use.

Dynamics 365 is ideally designed for the small or medium business. That means somewhere down the line, if your business plans on growing, or expects dealing with more complex intercompany financials, their stand-alone software may cease to be effective for your financial needs in the long-run.

Intacct, a best-in-class cloud accounting solution, specializes in customizable options, and lockstep scalability. It offers time-tested, AICPA endorsed cloud accounting excellence with one-click global consolidations, and seamless integration with other best-in-class cloud solutions.

Whether your business works across town, or across continents, your software needs to do the same. If your teams are wrestling with workarounds, and spending too much time struggling with month-end processes, tedious data collection and ill-fitting software set-ups, it’s time we talk.  

Let our team guide you toward the best option that’s a flexible fit for your company and its changing needs.

Article Dean Dorton

They are becoming the CFO’s go-to source to ensure that finance runs smoothly and there are no surprises at the quarter end.

But leading a smoothly running finance department is a given. Today’s financial controllers must do more. They must be forward-looking. They must always be searching for ways to improve productivity, reduce costs, and streamline processes—including consolidation, the month-end close, management, and financial reporting. They must also scale these processes to handle high growth.

Navigating the financial obstacle course

Chances are that those added responsibilities don’t come with added resources. Outdated, disparate financial systems can’t provide finance leaders with the real-time information needed to adapt quickly to market changes. In addition to accurately stating results, reports must tell a story.

The good news is that many controllers have successfully met these challenges using financial analysis software, and in the process, have made themselves strategic business partners to the rest of the organization.

Let’s look at the six best practices that today’s best-in-class controllers follow.

1. Top controllers cut risk by cutting spreadsheets from their close.

The most effective controllers know that spreadsheets are the wrong choice for managing consolidation and close processes. These controllers are automating allocations, intercompany eliminations, data import from multiple ERP systems, and reclassifications.

They’re minimizing errors due to manual entry, creating standard, repeatable processes, and reducing risk. With the time they save by automating, they have more cycles for the strategic analysis they’re now expected to provide.

2. Top controllers use automation to close faster.

Despite the general expectation that companies should be able to close their books within a week, many organizations don’t achieve that goal for their quarterly or semiannual close. Most companies have a long way to go before they achieve a “virtual close,” in which fully integrated financial applications and ERP systems enable real-time financial statements, on demand.

The top controllers in today’s best run companies overcome these challenges by transforming processes altogether and making use of technology and people to maximize their efficiency. They streamline and automate key close tasks like consolidation and reporting with cloud-based applications. Because these applications reside in the cloud, they’re easier to deploy, use, and manage.

By automating processes and eliminating manual tasks, controllers can allocate their personnel to more value-added activities.

3. Top controllers lead with data and analysis to elevate their function beyond closing the books.

Increasingly, controllers are being asked to provide not only financial data but budget and operational information as well. They do more than simply compile packages of reports—they interpret the data and contribute to decision-making.

Best-in-class controllers automate their reporting processes with self-service tools so they can analyze data without needing a programming degree. They use visual analytics and scorecards to identify patterns in prior-period trends. Reports provide relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) and interactive dashboards that can be consumed across the entire organization.

4. Top controllers pursue a culture of self-service.

Even more efficient reporting doesn’t eliminate the fact that controllers are becoming de facto information sources for both financial and nonfinancial managers. According to the IMA, more than 90% of controllers are being called upon to provide operational data, and many are being used to source business performance and customer data.

The best understand that pulling reports for others takes them away from more value-added, strategic activities. So, to deal with the onslaught of requests, these people are enabling key stakeholders and business users with self-service reporting and dashboards.

5. Top controllers ensure a seamless handoff of consolidated financials to FP&A.

Top controllers deploy business systems that integrate budgeting, planning, consolidation, reporting, and analytics into a single application that can be used by both accounting and FP&A. In the Adaptive Insights CFO Indicator Q3 2015 report, 38% of the global CFOs survey respondents said their organizations had achieved a single source of truth, while 45% said they were working toward a central repository for financial performance data.

A single system makes it much easier to move from close to planning and analysis because everyone is aligned around the same data.

6. Top controllers enable collaboration among a decentralized team.

Finance departments are more decentralized now than ever before, but your accountants still need to collaborate around the close process. Centralized, hard-to-access systems stand in the way of collaboration, as do poorly defined schedules and weak commitments to deadlines.

The best controllers manage their distributed teams by carefully balancing leadership and project management. They create a consistent close schedule that reduces bottlenecks, minimizes surprises, and promotes a culture of unity. A consistent schedule also allows the team to deliver information more quickly.
Repost from Adaptive Insights.

Article Dean Dorton

Repost from Adaptive Insights

When it comes to your company’s chart of accounts, you can’t find a more elemental accounting function. Important? Yes. Sexy?

A chart of accounts provides a snapshot of your company’s financial health—how much money it has, owes, and spends. The most general categories are assets, liabilities, revenues, and expenses. More detailed business functions, projects, divisions, or locations are listed within those categories.

Your chart of accounts will be as complex and detailed as your company needs dictate. A small bookshop may have 50 accounts. A national healthcare company with many divisions and locations will have thousands of categories.

But not all chart of accounts are the same, and a well-structured one is the foundation of a healthy general ledger. A typical chart of accounts has two sections: balance sheet accounts and income statement accounts.

Chart of accounts, part 1: balance sheet accounts

The balance sheet accounts provide a comprehensive view of all the moving parts of your business. It will typically include assets, liabilities, and equity. Here’s a closer look at what that entails:

Assets

At a midsized company, assets that are being tracked might include:

Cash on hand (the balance of your business bank accounts)
Accounts receivable (money owed on pending invoices)
Value of current inventory
Physical property (such as owned office or factory space, vehicles, and equipment), minus the annual depreciation of such assets
Company-owned investments (company stock, investments in other funds)
Intangible assets (goodwill, intellectual property, etc.)

Each account can be listed separately with its own reference number. These assets may vary greatly based on the type and size of the company you’re working for. For instance, a large dairy farm may count 500 cattle (each identified with its own number), as well as a large barn, milking equipment, and feed in its “physical property.”

A software company, conversely, may have far fewer physical assets but much more valuable intangible assets: If the company has produced proprietary software code, that could be valued at millions of dollars, even if the company has minimal physical inventory beyond a few dozen MacBooks.

In ordering your assets list in your chart of accounts, your company should begin with the most liquid assets and list in order from there. Bank balances can be at the top of the chart, followed by inventory, then by short-term (easily liquidated) stocks and investments, accounts receivable (with each invoice separately numbered), and finally, physical property that you do not intend to sell (unless absolutely necessary to keep the business afloat). The visual display should help your financial team get a clear picture of what assets you have and how easily they can be leveraged.

Liabilities

The liabilities section refers to money that your business owes to others that hasn’t yet been paid. Some of the items you might list here include:

Bank loans for equipment and other expenses
Accounts payable to vendors
Payroll expenses (for hours worked but not yet paid)
Expenses for payroll taxes
Employee benefits expenses
Sales tax
Property tax

As with assets, this list should be structured in order of urgency—most likely, your finance team manages payroll expenses on a weekly or biweekly cycle and will resolve that debt on a regular basis. You might have a biweekly or monthly schedule for vendor payments; however, you may need to prioritize certain invoices over others based on each vendor’s terms (i.e., if your company pays its power bill late, that could shut down your entire warehouse—so it’s likely worth making sure the electric company gets paid on time!).

Equity

Equity is a matter of simple math: Do the assets outweigh the liabilities, or vice versa? If the company is running with a net positive, then congratulations—you’re profitable. If the books balance perfectly, the company is on a sustainable path. But if you’re in the negative, what’s going on?

In some cases, it’s fully expected to run a net loss: For instance, if your organization has taken on $1 million in financing for construction of a new warehouse, this loan will take quite a while to pay off in its entirety. If you’re running negative due to a known expenditure that you’ve calculated eventual ROI on, this is not a cause for concern. However, if the math isn’t adding up, this may mean it’s time to either look at raising investor funds to give the company more runway to grow, or look at what operating expenses could be scaled back (more on that in a minute).

Chart of accounts part 2: income statement accounts

The other side of your chart of accounts is the income statement accounts—which should provide a snapshot of your profitability for any particular time frame, as opposed to the long-range view of your balance sheet. In this case, we’ll look at revenues and operating costs to determine profitability.

Revenues

In this section, you’ll track revenues generated from business activities and the date the funds (or credits) are received, including general business income such as:

Invoices sent (accounts receivable)
Income received (this can be broken down by specific customers or by sales of particular products)
Non-operating revenue can be included here, such as:
Interest from business investments
Dividends
Profits from sale of business assets
Rental income
Note that you can also include items like discounts provided or refunds granted here, too—this kind of debit will be listed as a “contra-revenue account.”

Expenses

Expenses represents the broad category of all the associated costs it takes to run a business. In this category, your finance team will track costs associated with items including:

Product costs (such as raw materials and manufacturing, or cost to purchase wholesale goods)
Equipment cost (likely tied to ongoing financing)
Rental costs
Utility costs
Marketing costs
Depreciation of assets
Labor costs

You’ll likely also track some non-operational expenses, such as:

Taxes
Interest paid
Operating losses
Penalties and fines

With income statement accounts, you should be able to evaluate the company’s profitability on a quarter-by-quarter basis, looking at how business expenses and revenue are shifting over time.

While a good finance team can track all the raw data in a chart of accounts, it’s not always easy to slice and dice the numbers to understand what they all mean together—particularly when you’re trying to incorporate information provided by many different lines of business or even different branches of a larger corporation.

A manual ledger may be sufficient for smaller businesses. But as a company grows, it will become increasingly important to move to a software solution that will enable you to automatically update your chart of accounts based on incoming data streams (through integrating with payroll, invoicing solutions, and your business bank accounts), and will provide tools for interdepartmental teams to collaborate on sharing their budget reports. Ensure that your finance team has the right tools it needs to build a comprehensive chart of accounts—and provide effortless reporting that will guide your company on the path to profitability.

Article Dean Dorton

Improve Customer Satisfaction with Intacct and Salesforce Integration.

Growth, the goal of all organizations—big or small—comes with growing pains. More sales mean more customers, more contracts, more projects, more transactions, and more inquiries. Each new customer or prospect brings an increased need for communication and information exchange between finance and sales.

Why do more customers mean more finance involvement?

Well, for starters, typically the sales team doesn’t have access to the system finance lives in. So, they rely on emails, phone calls or text messages to learn about the status of an order, the balance of an invoice, the aging status of a customer account, etc.
There are also those situations where sales and finance need to discuss and handle exceptions. Like when an account manager requests approval for a bigger discount or needs the approval to offer extended payment terms to a customer to close a big deal.

This means that organizations where sales and finance are not aligned, face productivity issues that seriously affect customer satisfaction. What can be done about this? Intacct has a solution for its customers.

Many growing organizations use the Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to manage all aspects of the sales process. To help its customers overcome the challenges that come with growth, Intacct has partnered with Salesforce to integrate these two best-in-class solutions.

With this integration, Intacct customers gain a single source of truth across finance and sales, streamline their quote-to-cash process, and stay on the leading edge with a best-in-class combination of Intacct and Salesforce (1).

Improved quote-to-cash with the built-in connectivity of Intacct and Salesforce

Intacct and Salesforce are connected and talking to each other, so there is a seamless exchange of information between the two systems. They act like two halves of the same orange. For instance, a customer created in Salesforce CRM is automatically created in Intacct without rekeying all the data. And then, when an order is entered in Sales Cloud, the corresponding finance processes such as billing, revenue recognition, and project accounting are kicked off in Intacct. This, of course, means that all the customer and order data moves seamlessly from CRM into the financial process.

Data flows in both directions. This means the sales team has a 360-degree view of the customer—past and current—including the aging of invoices, credit limits, balances, and price lists.

Intacct Collaborate, the Salesforce Chatter embedded in Intacct

The integration with Salesforce includes Intacct Collaborate. A solution that streamlines those non-transaction related communications between sales and finance—those that are typically conducted by email and are very difficult to track.

Intacct Collaborate is the Salesforce Chatter functionality embedded in Intacct. With it, sales and finance discuss and exchange information at the customer or the transaction level without leaving the system they use every day. No more searching for a saved email, the conversation is kept with the quotation or the order or the invoice so it can easily be seen the next time a question needs answering.

The result is your finance and sales teams working together more efficiently.

And with all approvals and supporting data in one place you are audit-ready!

Key benefits of the integration

The integration of Intacct with Salesforce saves time and reduces errors, increases the visibility of the sales team over the customer accounts, and increases the productivity of the finance team by reducing the need to answer inquiries from sales and from auditors.

Contact us so we can tell you more about how Intacct’s integration with Salesforce help your growing organization improve productivity and customer satisfaction by aligning sales and finance processes, data and people.

Article Dean Dorton

Still Using Spreadsheets for Your Accounting? It’s Time to Make a Change

Cloud-ERP-switch-Oct-1-blog.jpgYou are a leader in your company and understand numbers. You know you can gain efficiencies and improve ROI by replacing your current accounting system that relies heavily on spreadsheets with a Cloud ERP.

You’ve read thousands of articles, blogs, whitepapers and advice columns confirming that using Excel spreadsheets to complement your financial accounting software is time-consuming and error-prone.

But, still, you’re not getting any traction with the management team. They’re on the fence. Unconvinced. And you wonder: Why, oh why, do they want to continue to use Excel for finance and accounting functions?

Here are some of the most common objections I’ve heard from people who don’t want to give up their spreadsheets and replace them with an accounting software like Intacct. (And I have an answer and a few facts for each objection… )

“It’s fast and reliable.”

Maybe it’s fast if you’re an expert, but it’s definitely not reliable. Hard drives fail and servers crash. Intacct data in the cloud is protected by encryption, real-time transactional data backup and daily full data backup and is always available (1). Intacct guarantees 99.8% uptime (2).

“With Excel the possibilities are endless.”

Yes, but how much time do you spend creating each report? If you are a fast moving company, then you need reports that update in real time and are available on demand –without spending time to download and combine data entered into a spreadsheet. Intacct reporting gives you the capability to easily create reports, graphs and dashboards using dimensions that are updated constantly with new data, and you can do it all without exporting data to a spreadsheet (3). Use the more than 150 prebuilt accounting or financial reports or build your own customized report within Intacct.

“We already have Excel; it is cost effective.”

Intacct customers average an ROI of over 250% (4). DataXu cut monthly financial consolidations from 20 to 8 days across all entities (5). EZShield is saving a great deal of time on employee expense (6) and WebAssign saved $130,000 in annual salary costs (7). There are many more customer success stories on the Intacct web site.

“Excel is the best tool we have for complex calculations such as revenue recognition”.

Really? Will it handle the complexities that are coming with ASC 606? What happens when the terms change on contracts that have tiered pricing or when contracts are changed to add or drop users? You need an accounting system that will standardize and automate these processes as well as ensure compliance with the new standards. Intacct has a contract and revenue management module that gives you the tools to comply with ASC 606.

I’ve heard many more objections for giving up spreadsheets. For each objection, I always find an Intacct advantage. To name just a few…with Intacct:

you don’t have the risk of handling formulas that could eventually get corrupted.
you always know who made a journal entry or any change.
supporting documents are stored in the system making it easier to answer auditors’ questions.
the system automates your process saving you time.
you have a system that grows as your company grows.

Contact us so we can help you create a solid business case for your company to get an accounting system that will grant you independence from Excel spreadsheets.

Article Dean Dorton

CFOs of Associations and other Member-focused organizations are tasked with providing accurate financials and up-to-the-minute reporting to help their organization best serve its members and manage member benefits such as publications, events, as well as processing member dues and purchases.

Information needed for reporting scattered among multiple systems?

It is not unusual for an association to have multiple software solutions in place to service various aspect of the organization: membership management software, accounting software, e-stores, fundraising – to name just a few.

Typically the more solutions in place, the more work for the financial accounting team: more data collection, rekeying of data, and manual reporting.

Cloud-based solutions working together to bring you the information you need – automatically!

One of the reasons we are so bullish on cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service). Cloud-based solutions are designed to be more open and more easily integrated and interfaced with other cloud-based solutions.

A cloud platform makes it possible to join powerful solutions like Intacct and MemberNation to make exchange of information from one solution to another automatic for easier financial reporting.

Massey Consulting Integrates MemberNation with Intacct ERP Financial Accounting for Associations

Massey Consulting has successfully integrated the popular membership management software MemberNation with Intacct to help our association clients streamline and automate their financials.

With our integration new information entered into MemberNation is brought over to Intacct. For each new journal entry, a transaction is built for Intacct using associated line items. Once all of the lines are processed, the entry is posted into Intacct.

The information brought over from MemberNation into Intacct includes:

• Standard details such as the date, accounts, amounts, etc.
• The memo for each entry populates from the description (which contains the order number)
• The name of the entry becomes the reference number
• Entity/Location (based on a formula using GL account)
• And more

The more numerous your membership, the more valuable this streamlining becomes – leaving you free to focus on analysis of data rather than data gathering.

MemberNation Key Features

• Capture and view all member interactions on a single screen
• Monitor member engagement and quickly identify at risk members
• Staff and member access from anywhere on any Internet connected device
• Built 100% on Salesforce – the most innovative platform in the world

Intacct Key Features

• Robust financial functionality endorsed by the AICPA
• Flexible, dimensional reporting for your association
• Powerful dashboard that incorporate both financial information in Intacct and member information from MemberNation
• On average Intacct customers enjoy a return on investment of over 250% with an average payback period of under six months.
• Intacct ‘Buy with Confidence’ guarantee promises 99.8% system availability, robust disaster recovery, and rapid support response time.

Massey Consulting works with association clients to implement Intacct – the best-in-class cloud ERP solution, the only one the AICPA acknowledges as the preferred provider of financial applications. Intacct brings our association clients the functional depth to automate complex processes and deliver the insights your organization needs.

Massey Consulting works with you to ensure that you get the utmost from the powerful solutions you have invested in.