Cloud ERP

Article Dean Dorton

Cash management can mean different things to different people. It can also have different faces depending on what sector your business operates in. However, at its heart, cash management is the process of overseeing and controlling the inflow and outflow of money through your business—and that can lead to problems.

Read on to discover some of the risks associated with improper cash management and how your company can overcome them.

Three Common Risks of Improper Cash Management

  1. Manual Processes: Too many of today’s modern businesses are still managing their cash flow manually. Whether this means your employees are counting cash by hand, or your CFO is manually entering data into a spreadsheet to track cash flow, these processes can lead to multiple issues—including human error and theft. While we would like to believe that our employees and associates are too-well trained and honorable to make mistakes or act dishonestly, manually tracking and managing your business’s cash is asking for trouble.
  2. Increased Labor Costs: Receiving incoming cash and managing its flow can be an expensive proposition. It’s time-consuming and requires a lot of man-hours and personnel. Your company may even be employing too many people to do this job effectively. Having too many hands in the proverbial pot not only increases the risk of error, but it also results in high labor costs and cuts into your bottom line.
  3. Outdated Information: If your company is operating and making decisions based on last month’s—or even last week’s—data, you’re relying on out-dated information. The future of cash management requires real-time figures and data. Relying on old information puts your company at risk and hampers your ability to properly predict future growth.

How to Address These Issues

The good news is that there is a simple, cost-effective way to address each of these risks. By employing best-in-class financial management software, your company can mitigate, or even eliminate, these issues. Your company needs a comprehensive accounting and financial management software solution with superb cash management capabilities. A best-in-breed option, like Sage Intacct, will replace manual procedures with automated processes, reduce labor costs, and provide real-time reports and statistics.

Sage Intacct’s cash management enables companies of all sizes to see transactions across all checking and savings accounts, as well as credit cards—providing a complete, real-time picture of the company’s money flows. Finance teams can easily import statements from all their financial institutions and automatically reconcile checking, savings, and credit card accounts to spot exceptions, manage bank errors, monitor for fraud, and maintain accurate cash balances. By streamlining payment processing and employing customizable dashboards, Intacct enables the finance team to save time that can then be put toward more value-added tasks.

Defuse The Legacy Software Minefield By Turning To Dean Dorton

Switching to best-in-class financial management software, such as Sage Intacct can not only help you navigate the minefield of legacy software, it can disarm it completely. Streamline your resources, lower IT costs, improve confidence, and save time as you move from outdated systems and into your future.

Contact our experienced value-added reseller (VAR) for a free consultation today.

Learn more about Dean Dorton’s Accounting Software services and products:

Accounting Software

Dean Dorton ERP Team
erpsales@ddaftech.com

Article Dean Dorton

Using legacy software can be like walking through a minefield. The terrain looks familiar, comfortable, and perhaps even safe—but costly issues often lurk within outdated systems. Some of these latent problems include staffing requirements, support, and maintenance obstacles, cost of time, and decreased productivity. Consider how these challenges can damage your business:

Headcount and Staffing Dilemmas

Legacy software isn’t adapted to today’s fast-paced digital world. It often takes years to become fluent in its use. Because legacy accounting solutions require specialized training and skill sets, hiring and staffing can become an issue. Finding employees who know these systems is difficult, and training new-hires into proficiency is a lengthy process. This often transfers into the need for multiple staff positions in order to operate the software. As headcount rises, your bottom line falls.

Support and Maintenance Obstacles

In addition to the hurdle of operating obsolete software, legacy systems need to be maintained. If your servers go down, your business lurches to a stop. Technicians either need to be called in or kept in-house—both of which are expensive propositions. Even if the system is up and running, you may face frequent service problems as the vendor terminates support for the aging software. All this adds up to a bulging IT budget and a maintenance nightmare.

Cost of Time and Decreased Productivity

Legacy software is notoriously clunky and non-intuitive. It takes time and effort to operate. Glitches, lag-time, and lack of mobility plague its users. Legacy software also doesn’t play well with modern applications, which means little to no automation. Data entry is almost always manual, and therefore, error prone. When employees are forced to spend their time laboring over these time-consuming processes, they can’t focus on strategic activities that boost your productivity. 

Defuse The Legacy Software Minefield By Turning To Dean Dorton

Switching to best-in-class financial management software, such as Sage Intacct can not only help you navigate the minefield of legacy software, it can disarm it completely. Streamline your resources, lower IT costs, improve confidence, and save time as you move from outdated systems and into your future.

Contact our experienced value-added reseller (VAR) for a free consultation today.

Learn more about Dean Dorton’s Accounting Software services and products:

Accounting Software

Dean Dorton ERP Team
erpsales@ddaftech.com

Article Dean Dorton

There’s an old saying that everyone loves an underdog. We like cheering for the downtrodden and urging on the slowest runner. However, being the underdog in today’s cutthroat world of business isn’t usually a feel-good story with a happy ending—especially if you’re a finance leader who senses their company is lagging behind the rest of the pack. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. In fact, the majority of CFOs feel they aren’t doing a good enough job at keeping up with change.

Read on to learn about data-driven decision making and how you can use it to propel your organization into the future.

What Is Data-Driven Decision Making?

  • Simply put, data-driven decision making combines the right people with the right processes and the right technology:
    • People: Forward-thinking companies are looking for team members who are curious, creative and analytical. They need people who will monitor data, identify trends, and hypothesize the best ways for their company to succeed.
    • Processes: Today’s financial strategies need to use leading-edge analytic techniques and technologies effectively
    • Technology: Data-driven technology must employ automated financial operations, a multi-dimensional analysis of key metrics, and coordinate data with other systems in real-time

Why Data-Driven Decision Making Is Essential?

Gone are the days when financial leaders had the luxury of focusing on the past. Backward-looking statements and manually entering last month’s figures into an Excel spreadsheet are outdated practices. Knowing what your company’s figures looked like yesterday isn’t enough.

You need to become a data-driven strategist who uses cloud-based financial software with real-time reporting and custom dashboards to keep pace with what your company is doing right now. Not only that, you need to become a technology futurist. By taking advantage of best-in-class financial software, you will be able to use predictive analytics to guide your forecasts and strategically plan for your future.

In fact, Jason Miller, our Business and Technology Consulting Director here at Dean Dorton, says, “Data-driven decision making not only helps with the now, it tells your organization where to go next. Imagine being able to predict where and when to make your next investment. That’s the kind of power data-driven decision making can give you.”

Crossing The Finish Line

The advantages of data-driven decision making are clear. Your company doesn’t need to be the underdog. Let our team help you sprint into the future with best-of-breed financial software provided by Sage Intacct. Contact us for a free consultation today.

Download the E-book – Sage Intacct for the Data-Driven Finance Leader:

Download the E-book

Learn more about Dean Dorton’s Accounting Software services and products:

Accounting Software

Dean Dorton ERP Team
erpsales@ddaftech.com

Article Dean Dorton

What is your idea of accounting utopia? Lounging on a beach while the work is being done for you? Having time to focus on strategic projects instead of fixing spreadsheets and inputting data? The secret to finance and accounting nirvana—whatever that may be for you—is automated integrations, or “automation-in-a-box.”

Automation-in-a-box occurs when best-in-class software that automates key financial processes is integrated into your ERP system. Data and systems communicate with each other, creating efficiency and offering fast, accurate insights into your business’s financial and operational performance. Rather than scrambling to keep up, you have the power to get ahead.

Dean Dorton is proud to partner with top software solutions that both automate core business processes and integrate with leading ERP systems, such as Sage Intacct. These include:

  • Avalara offers cloud-based sales- and use-tax management solutions. Avalara’s end-to-end solutions seamlessly integrate with hundreds of ERP, accounting, e-commerce, and retail POS systems, providing accurate sales and use tax calculation, painless exemption certificate management, and effortless filing and remittance.
  • Bill.com reduces the time you spend on invoice approvals and payments by 60% or more—and significantly reduce your operating costs too. Plus, this cloud-based, fully integrated AP and payment automation solution eliminates your need for manual data entry and all the headaches that come along with it.
  • Martus Solutions is a leader in providing a collaborative budgeting platform for non-profit organizations and businesses worldwide along with flexible reporting for budget participants to create, monitor and manage their budgets.
  • Nexonia offers a flexible, cloud-based web and mobile solution that makes corporate expense reports and timesheets easy, efficient, and automatic. Built with busy financial and operations leaders in mind, Nexonia’s full product suite consolidates corporate spending and time tracking in one convenient online portal.
  • WorkForceGo! Offers a comprehensive suite of workforce management tools, available as a package or à la carte that integrate with Sage Intacct and other general ledgers. WorkforceGo! HCM lets you track and analyze payroll, human resources, time and attendance data—and stay ACA compliant—from any mobile device, laptop, or desktop.
  • Yooz provides the smartest, most powerful and easiest-to-use cloud-based Purchase-to-Pay (P2P) automation solution. Yooz’s unique solution leverages Artificial Intelligence and RPA technologies to deliver an amazing level of automation with extreme simplicity, traceability and end-to-end customizable features.

It’s time to break free from burdensome, error-prone accounting processes and experience the accuracy, insight, and efficiency that automation can bring. Whatever your business requirements, you can trust the accounting technology professionals at Dean Dorton to help you design and implement your ideal automation-in-a-box.

Learn more about Dean Dorton’s Accounting Software services and products:

Accounting Software

Dean Dorton ERP Team
erpsales@ddaftech.com

Article Dean Dorton

The success of your higher education institution depends on the ability to fund all the critical aspects of your college or university: the salaries of professors, coaches, administrators, and staff; a robust variety of programs (academic degrees, athletics, the arts); and building and maintenance, to name a few. You have to keep an eye on the long-term future while answering the demands of today. Tracking key metrics—or outcome metrics—in real time is essential to achieving both current and down-the-road financial health of your private institution.

Outcome metrics for smarter financial performance

Outcome metrics can measure financial or non-financial performance that reflects the effectiveness of your institution. Outcome metrics may be called by many names and can fit in a limitless number of categories. Best results are often obtained by measuring across multiple dimensions for blended scorecards that span activities, capacities, financial results, and other metrics. Well-defined outcome measures are essential to helping you adapt and improve.

For example, breaking ground for a new facility might mean that more students can be accepted, but you still have to consider the total impact in terms of future faculty and staff, utilities, furnishing, and other overhead. How many students have applied and been accepted? How many have applied and been rejected due to classroom size limits? Has that number been increasing?

Outcome metrics for greater accountability and transparency

Competition for funds can be fierce—especially for private institutions. Potential donors, regulators, and others demand greater accountability and visibility. They want reassurance that you are good stewards of the funds you receive—be that from donors, foundations, or other benefactors. They want to see where their money is going and the results that are achieved.

Measuring success with cloud-based accounting software

The right financial management software can greatly simplify the process of measuring and reporting on critical outcome metrics. It can automatically tag and track your data by key dimensions—giving you instant visibility and insights that speed decision-making and help drive the growth of your institution.

The right system can also provide access to statistical data that enables you to automatically calculate key metrics such as financial (revenue), statistical (enrollment), or a combination (revenue per student). Then your system should be able to integrate and calculate those statistics against budgets, plans, projects, and expenses.

For example, you may want to track revenue by student enrollment compared to the prior year. Metrics such as these let you easily monitor, track, and report on outcomes. A best-in-class financial management solution can do it all–within your system of record. Features such as real-time reporting and analytics and role-based dashboards allow you to keep a pulse on the financial health of your school as well as the health of individual projects and programs, and accurately budget for the months and years ahead.

Success starts with Dean Dorton

A new financial management system is a significant investment of time and money. Cloud-based solutions such as Sage Intacct offer higher education institutions rapid deployment, faster ROI, and maximum flexibility to adapt to your changing needs. The accounting software technology professionals at Dean Dorton can provide the expertise and support you need to make the transition from rigid and outdated accounting to fast, accurate, and agile financial management.

Learn more about Dean Dorton’s Accounting Software services and products:

Accounting Software

Dean Dorton ERP Team
erpsales@ddaftech.com

Article Dean Dorton

MSPs face a unique set of challenges when it comes to growth. But the daunting task of scaling your financial management processes and systems to accommodate your rapidly increasing workload is not impossible.

To grow your systems with your company’s success, 4 new mandates can help ease the process:

Modernize Your Infrastructure 

MSPs cannot afford downtime. To mitigate resource-expending bottlenecks, productivity lapses, or service failures, MSPs are wise to embrace modern infrastructures that streamline processes and bridge gaps between finance and project management.

When your teams begin working with a financial management solution designed to support MSPs and contract-based services companies, revenue recognition is more automated, time and expense capture and approvals happen more quickly, billing errors are reduced.

This means finance’s job becomes easier, and the project management’s forecasting becomes clearer. Strong cloud-based financial management solutions often offer much more than just a financial picture. Today’s software can feature key metrics for not just finance, but for operations and project management as well, for a more comprehensive view of company performance.  

Support the Full Project Lifestyle

For an MSP’s success, service quality is priority #1. An ideal financial processes situation for modern MSPs will be capable of supporting project management’s entire life cycle to ensure reliable service.

The most effective way to ensure your company’s teams can access and fully utilize tracking and reporting systems is to ensure your systems’ ease of use. If your teams find it too time-consuming, complex or difficult to use the tracking and validating systems in place, the confidence in your data, and ultimately your service will degrade quickly.

Access Insights Into Key Metrics 

With your on-premises system, are you able to see into whether your projects are staying with time and budgetary margins? If not, your company is not using technology to its fullest capabilities to harness success.

When MSPs work in the cloud, they get real-time insights into budget variances, and tracking on budgeted, billed and actual numbers, for quality control, project targets, and continued focus on customer satisfaction.

Convert Data Into Performance 

Data retrieved from cloud-based systems ensures that your key metrics always offer updated views into performance.

Not only can the cloud offer historical data for decision-making based on past performance, but it can offer to-the-minute insights for stronger forecasts, more strategic sales plans, and smarter bids for enhanced growth.

Sage Intacct, a best-in-class financial management solution offers what MSPs need with:

  • Strong automation for more accuracy and resource control.
  • Comprehensive views into key metrics from highly customizable dashboards.
  • Metering for billing to be based on pay-as-you-use, as well as other modifiable frequencies to fit your service design.
  • Scalable features to add in or remove users, permissions, entities, or locations, to fit your level of growth.

If your business is still working with on-premises systems, reach out!  It may be time to explore a more modern solution, and we can help.