ERP software

Article Dean Dorton

Planning is important, but taking action is critical for subscription-based companies if they want to be ready for the upcoming ASC 606 revenue allocation guidelines.

Forward-thinking subscription-based companies have it right by acting now. “But this far ahead?” you may be thinking.  We say, “Yes.” Your company cannot afford to wait. Here’s why:

If companies wait too long to make changes in the way they do their tracking, internal controls, and revenue allocation processes, they can anticipate major obstacles and overwhelming workloads.

By waiting until the last minute, companies that wait will burn out their teams, run into cascading errors in tracking and billing, and ultimately, face the risk of non-compliance.

Expenses, fees, collectability, payment terms, and contracts are all affected by the changes coming for ASC 606.  

Because the changes will affect revenue recognition from beginning to end, that means your current processes will change significantly, from beginning to end, as well.  Also, ASC 606 compliance expectations will not only affect contracts coming in, but also current contracts for future and past revenue.

But here’s the bright side:  Companies that are setting up new processes now will be in a much better position when the ASC 606 changes take effect. These companies realize that not being ready could result in productivity bottlenecking, increased costs, and errors in reporting, billing, or allocations. All of this adds up to a compromise in business success, overall.

Sage Intacct is a best-in-class financial management solution, and the first of its kind that is designed to accommodate the new ASC 606 guidelines, where subscription-based companies need the most help.

Sage Intacct supports finance teams to streamline the upcoming revenue recognition complexities with:

  • Automated reporting that eliminates the headaches of more spreadsheets, helps track collectability thresholds, and flags subscriptions changes or ones coming up for renewal.
  • Deep visuals into revenue and expense forecasts that reflect current guidelines against the new guidelines for more accurate projections, and enhanced views into performance.
  • Billing, both in subscriptions and usage-based, to speed invoicing processes and save time when your workload is already at max capacity.

Don’t get caught off guard. Start planning now with a strong financial management solution so your teams can be armed with the right tools.

Feeling overwhelmed? Reach out! We can help make the adjustment process easier, so your company keeps growing strong even in the face of increased compliance expectations.

Article Dean Dorton

As leaders, CFOs should be able to answer a few key questions about their company’s financial health, to feel confident that business is sailing smoothly on its successful course.  Find out what you need to focus on to mitigate risk and plan for your company’s future financial health.

1. Can I answer confidently that we would have a clean opinion if we face an audit?

Whether your company is in its early stages or is a firmly established business, audits are the standard to gauge the integrity of your financial management practices.

If you don’t aim to engage in a full accounting audit, qualifying for a clean audit opinion can help maintain your company’s reputation for financial integrity and compliance. It ensures that your billing, tax, and fraud checks are in place.

Companies that aim for clean audit opinions can use a financial management software solution designed to keep businesses on track with financial management integrity, fiscal transparency and regulation compliance. A cloud-based financial management solution like Sage Intacct is specifically designed to help their companies comply with ASC 606 and IFRS 15 guidelines.

2. Are we analyzing the best metrics to measure our profitability and productivity?

As today’s businesses grow and change, so do their KPIs. CFOs can stay on top of margins by periodically re-visiting their metrics for relevance, value, and accuracy.

CFOs that spot productivity trends most effectively use cloud-based dashboard features like you’d find with Sage Intacct, to provide the most accurate data, in a snapshot showcasing your data.  From one screen you can customize your metrics and change them at any time, with no waiting until month’s end to get fast answers.

3. If we hit an obstacle or disaster, do I know where we could financially streamline to mitigate risk?

Risk management is part of preparing for the future, and CFOs need a Plan B to protect against unforeseen events. Having deep insights into the details of your company’s financial health ensures that you can mitigate risk effectively.

Sage Intacct’s best-in-class financial management solution offers wide windows into your financials with their unique tagging feature to easily organize, search, and categorize your chart of accounts no matter how detailed.   You can even drill down to source transactions in reporting to catch sight of acute obstacles before they escalate.

Whether you need to rewind into specific transactions to gather a history, or project forward to estimate how your financials will sustain today’s events over the course of time, a best-in-class cloud-based financial management solution can help.  

Contact us. We can offer guidance with your questions about the right cloud solutions to help you lead your company with financial confidence and clarity.

There’s More!

Check out our free whitepaper “Confessions of a CFO”, which highlights critical aspects of financial management that CFOs have concerns about and what the best solutions are.

read the whitepaper

Article Dean Dorton

Essential Financial Management Practices of Biotech Companies – A 5-Part Series

Article 5 – Prepare to Scale with Cloud Technology

The growth trajectory for biotech companies is unique – years of research followed by fast expansion with the success of a product.  Cloud technology is well-suited to scale quickly to meet those changing needs.

Positioned for success today and beyond

Technology played a huge role at the end of the 20th Century and has been accelerating innovation in the 21st Century.  Perhaps the most under-appreciated aspects of today’s technology are how easy it is to use.  Consider how much technology and useful applications reside on your smartphone and within your home.

But what about the workplace?  Is there a technology gap in your biotech organization?  Often cutting-edge technology is used in research and development while, in sharp contrast, archaic manual processes, outdated legacy systems, and spreadsheets are used in the accounting department.  What’s wrong with this picture?

Sage Intacct describes the benefit of their solution this way, “tomorrow’s innovative technology to make your today easier.”  The best result of technology addresses complex problems in a simple but effective way.

However, it’s not enough to simply address today’s problems.  As CFO, you know you need to be planning for the future. Any investment in a financial accounting solution should result in the automation of repetitive processes to increase productivity but also free up your time to prepare for future challenges.

Modern cloud architecture to scale with your growing Biotech business

The word “agile” is not a corporate-speak buzzword for Biotech CFOs – it is a way of life.  As you manage the financials from one funding milestone to the next, you must move quickly, and forecast confidently and correctly.

Inaccurate or delayed financial information threatens the success of the business.  You know this more acutely than anyone else in the organization.

“The reason I recommend Sage Intacct is that it immediately gives Biotech CFOs real-time financial information, but more importantly, a means by which to automate processes that are a waste of the CFO’s time,” explains Philip Massey, CPA and founder of Massey Consulting.  “Last century a best practice was to ‘delegate more.’ Today, best practices urge company leaders to ‘automate more.’ It’s amazing how much changes for the better when a CFO is able to automate even one workflow. As their technology partner, we look to automate as many processes as possible, which gives back precious time allowing CFOs to do more strategic work.”

Functional agility with minimal disruption

The reason businesses are flocking to SaaS models are many;  anytime, anywhere access; higher ROI, lower TCO, a shift from variable OPEX to fixed CAPEX – but also the ease at which SaaS financial accounting can be implemented.  As a noted in an article on the Tech-Savvy CFO, “solutions can be configured and re-configured with clicks, not code, and software can easily ingrate with other best-in-class business systems.”  

The net result:  you are empowered with modern technology, the best accounting features, real-time reporting, and state-of-the-art dashboards with little, if any, disruption and without a hefty investment in personnel or IT costs.

When the time comes to expand, merge, and/or move from a funded model to a revenue model, the configurability of Sage Intacct makes it easy to add new users, new business units, and new software modules.  Again it comes back to the SaaS delivery model which allows you to manage sudden increases in users and transactions, without having to worry about upgrading servers or network infrastructure.

Choose wisely – why Sage Intacct is the experts’ choice

“Biotech CFOs, CPAs and auditors sit up and take notice when I point out that Sage Intact is the only AICPA-endorsed solution for cloud financials,” notes Massey.  That endorsement, combined with the deep functionality that allows Biotech organizations to streamline complex accounting and finance processes.

Given that everyone in the organization wants to see projects completed with a minimum of funding diverted for administrative operations, Sage Intacct’s track record of documented rapid payback and meaningful ROI makes it an attractive option. “Sage Intacct is committed to customer success and they track and report on customer ROI,” said Massey.  “The published statistic is that Sage Intacct customers enjoy, on average, a return on investments of over 250 percent. With the average payback period just under six months. At Massey Consulting we understand that these results may vary. We work with Biotech CFOs and based on their specific situation calculate what they can expect. It’s remarkable just how quickly Sage Intacct pays for itself.”

Massey notes that it’s hard to overstate the positive impact Sage Intacct has for Biotech leadership.  “They have greater visibility, faster analyses, and real-time reporting for smarter business decisions.”

Sage Intacct can also make an impressive boast when it comes to customer satisfaction.  Third-party surveys show Sage Intacct out-performing the other leading brands (both on-premises and Cloud) in overall customer satisfaction.  

“Another area where Sage Intacct outshines the competition is in ease-of-use,” concludes Massey.  “If a solution is not easy to use it delays ROI, frustrates end users, and chews up time. The design of the software makes it easy to learn and users are quickly proficient, leveraging the solution at an optimal level.”

This concludes “Prepare to scale with cloud technology,” part 5 of the Essential Financial Management Practices of Biotech Companies series.  

Click on the links below to read other parts of the Essential Financial Management Practices of Biotech Companies series:

Part 1: Track Costs with Project Accounting

Part 2: Automate Batch/Lot Tracking to Ensure Traceability

Part 3: Support Flexible Reporting, Forecasts, and Budgeting

Part 4: Streamline Business Processes

Article Dean Dorton

There’s no doubt, QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online are massively popular accounting solutions for solopreneurs and small businesses. The solutions are inexpensive and easy to navigate – almost all businesses started with QuickBooks.

One clue that your company has outgrown QuickBooks is an ever-increasing number of spreadsheets necessary to manage the business.
Spreadsheets to assist in ad-hoc reporting.  Spreadsheet to track customer subscriptions.  Spreadsheets to track revenue recognition.  You get the picture.

This multiple spreadsheet workaround is both burdensome and prone to human error. What results is a slowing of business operations: your top staff becomes bogged down in manual oversight tasks instead of focusing on value-added projects that promote growth.

So, if you’d like to free yourself from spreadsheets and other manual processes and focus on business viability and growth and profitability, here’s why Sage Intacct makes sense:

1) It’s automated and accurate, promoting transparency and effective decision-making.
2) It can be used by any type of business, from start-ups and small business to large enterprises.
3) QuickBooks Online may let you create and manage custom invoices, but Sage Intacct includes more robust features: it allows you to centralize accounts payable/receivable, facilitates multi-currency management and multi-entity consolidations, and (through its general ledger system) captures real-time business performance through dimension values.
4) If you have multiple entities, Sage Intacct lets you oversee them in one location. With Sage Intacct’s Root and Entity accounting system, you can set up each entity according to its unique features, e.g, different currencies for different entities.
5) Sage Intacct lets you control user access to sensitive business data. For example, employees can be provided self-service access to the sales order page but be blocked from the reports or purchasing pages. Managers can also call up departmental reports without being given access to the entire company’s financial data.
6) While both Quickbooks Online and Sage Intacct provide dashboards, Sage Intacct’s can be customized according to user preferences or roles. With Sage Intacct, you can use either pre-determined components from the list or create your own performance cards, graphs, and bar charts. To date, QuickBooks Online does not yet have this flexibility.

According to Finances Online, Sage Intacct is one of the top 10 alternatives to QuickBooks, with a reported score of 9.8 and 99% customer satisfaction. Sage Intacct offers definite advantages over QuickBooks Online, FinancialForce Accounting, and NetSuite.

Sage Intacct is a best-of-breed, cloud-based, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution for SMBs and large enterprises, rather than a one-size-fits-all software suite such as NetSuite. Unlike QuickBooks Online, Sage Intacct is also 100% GAAP-compliant.

Sage Intacct’s dashboards and reports are fully customizable and perfect for multi-currency management, inter-entity consolidations, and access control management. Sage Intacct links seamlessly to Salesforce via an effortless point-and-click CRM integration process seamlessly links to Salesforce, even for companies without prior familiarity with the latter. Essentially, Sage Intacct facilitates seamless scalability and is an extremely popular step up from QuickBooks Online.

The Benefits Of Sage Intacct

In 2017, six award-winning companies leveraged Sage Intacct to decrease close times by 60%, achieved an astonishing combined 410% ROI, and saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in reduced staffing needs. These companies were (in no particular order) Meals on Wheels America, Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, Legacy Healthcare Services, DFO, Publisher Circulation Fulfillment, and Workiva.

With Sage Intacct, DFO found that it could consolidate 80+ entities in minutes rather than days/weeks. The cloud-based solution also decreased DFO’s invoice processing costs by more than $250 per invoice. Meanwhile, Meals on Wheels America shortened their end-of-month close times by 33% and reaped increasing revenues with only a 25% increase in staffing.

Workiva (with its powerful enterprise management and reporting/compliance SaaS platform) reportedly gained $500k in value by utilizing Sage Intacct’s robust quote-to-cash process. The verdict is clear: with Sage Intacct, your business will reap the rewards of flawless scalability and agility.

For further help in evaluating how Sage Intacct can benefit your business, contact us. Whether you’re interested in how automation increases staff productivity or how Sage Intacct’s faster cash cycles can boost your business operations, we’re here to answer your questions. At Massey Consulting, we’re focused on solutions that work for you.

Article Dean Dorton

One thing we know – along with accounting, is that great companies stay great by putting their customers first. This is on our list of top success priorities, and it’s a big part of what drives us to do what we do, and how we do it.

By putting our customers first, we learn all about their unique needs. This helps us figure out what products and services will offer the most help for them now, and in the future.

Our goal is to build close relationships with our customers, and stick with them as they grow, to see their company succeed every step of the way. That means we need to offer products that are a great solution for our customers now, and as much as in the future.

We’re Listening

Sure, we are “numbers” people – it’s what we do.  It’s the reason we can expertly help growing businesses without them missing a beat – or a winning goal like we did with the Carolina Hurricanes. But we’re also really good at putting our listening ears on – and leaving them on.

Staying in tune with our customers matters because it means we can offer custom solutions for their unique issues. We’ll help find solutions that streamline financial processes that can scale, to handle new growth challenges in the future.

Staying in tune with customers helps us create solutions that pave the road to their future success.  That’s how we developed our own unique integration product, MConnect, to make our customers’ software solution integrations even better.

We Deliver Long-Range Solutions

We put our customers first by offering a range of products and options that meet their unique needs.

When we met up with Legacy Healthcare, they had trouble moving beyond their current software arrangement. With multiple locations and services, they were building up to 300 different reports a month.  They needed a solution to simplify their complex reporting needs, while also offering flexibility to scale with their rapid growth.

Our financial management expertise comes from working with many other multi-location businesses with growth challenges. By knowing the industry-specific issues, we could show Legacy how Sage Intacct – a best-in-class financial management solution, simplifies and automates their complex reporting setup.

Sage Intacct’s cloud-based solutions boost accuracy and offer the flexibility to streamline month-end closings, while also breathing life into your unique success metrics.

Jay Huffman, Legacy CFO, talks about his experience with us:

“Upon taking my position at Legacy…I had a lunch with Philip Massey and Jim Stubanas… I felt completely at ease with the consulting firm choice afterward and looked to them for advice on moving to a new ERP system.”

Whether you’re a change-making organization like UAB Educational Foundation, or a franchise managing complex reporting with multiple locations, we want to know you!

Let’s connect! We will show you the love by tuning into your company’s unique needs to help drive productivity, boost accuracy, and streamline systems to fit your growing business.

Article Dean Dorton

Essential Financial Management Practices of Biotech Companies – A 5-Part Series

Article 1: Track Costs with Project Accounting

It’s staggering when you consider the contributions biotech companies have made.

Tools that enable less invasive surgery and faster recovery.  Drugs that save and enhance lives.  Devices that improve the quality of life.  Ideas that lead to cures.  Knowledge that leads to innovations.  Research breakthroughs that reduce pain and suffering.  

Right here in North Carolina and throughout the United States, from small startups to companies on the verge of IPO, biotech companies are beginning projects that could lead to even more revolutionary breakthroughs.

It’s not all science and engineering – project management and financial accounting required

From the pre-revenue stages, throughout the funding stages, and up to the ultimate goal of merger, acquisition, going public or simply operating as a much larger, profit-yielding entity – financial accounting is a key component of effectively managing a life science or biotech company.  

Commercialization of biotech research requires a clear understanding of the costs associated with each project.

There are any number of things beyond your control that could threaten your research and projects.  Lack of sound financial accounting practices shouldn’t be one of those threats.  Technology and solutions exist that put you in control of your financial accounting. These are cloud-based and affordable solutions that can quickly bring biotech companies the accounting processes and reporting they need to satisfy funders, maintain compliance, and make data-driven decisions.

Project management and project accounting enhance efficiency and effectiveness

Project management – In any project-centric organization, an efficient, knowledgeable, and organized project manager is worth their weight in gold.  They serve as a go-to in getting up-to-date, accurate information on the project’s progress, obstacles, adherence to budget, staffing, milestone metrics and more.

“Project management is an established discipline, with degrees, techniques, and professional certification.  Yet many of the people who do this kind of work in scientific industries do it without this formal training – or they pick up that training later.”  ScienceMag.org

Project accounting – Equipping your organization with a powerful project accounting system is an essential best practice for biotech companies.  If you have skilled project managers it will make them that much more effective.  However, if you don’t have project managers (in the traditional sense the title implies) and the various responsibilities of project management fall to more than one person (accounting has a role, researchers have a role, IT has a role, etc.) then a project accounting solution is vital.

The project accounting solution you implement should automatically track all costs related to a specific project, for example, drug development – including time, materials and testing.  The solution should also help you accurately allocate shared costs to provide greater insight into potential profitability.

Evolution of Your Accounting Solution and Preparing for Growth

Graduating from QuickBooks – It’s hard to find an organization whose first accounting solution wasn’t QuickBooks.  QuickBooks is a great solution for what it was designed to do.  However, the needs of biotech companies very quickly exhaust the capabilities of QuickBooks.

“Within a biotech company, things begin to accelerate rather quickly,” says Philip Massey, CPA and president of accounting software technology firm Massey Consulting.   “Each project needs to be tracked and meet the reporting requirements of the funder.  When there are multiple projects, multiple funds, and perhaps multiple locations, trying to manage the financial accounting on an entry level system is difficult, if not impossible. I have seen situations where the accounting staff was spending 40 plus hours a month working in spreadsheets to try and sort things out – which is simply an inefficient use of time and manpower, not to mention the high risk of error.”

The other drawback of continuing to use QuickBooks, spreadsheets and other manual processes is the lack of integration between different information systems throughout the organization.  In part three of this series, we’ll address the importance of unified systems in more depth.

Robust project accounting for the long haul – Outgrowing a software solution and implementing a new one will disrupt the organization to some degree.  When selecting a solution, obviously you want the solution to address today’s challenges.  But you also need to think in terms of future needs.

Your future accounting needs may include different phases of funding from the seed stage to angel investors, to various rounds of funding until you reach the Mezzanine level, make your IPO or proceed with merger and acquisition strategies.

The activity of the organization may also change in time from pre-revenue stages – concept and research, through business planning, product development, and maybe several other stages – to revenue generation, expansion and IPO.

You don’t want to be changing solutions every other year – it would be disruptive, expensive and painful.  The point is to select a solution that will sustain your momentum by delivering project-centric accounting that offers opportunities for automation, scalability, tracking, reporting, and greater insight to better manage projects and satisfy the needs of the organization and your funders.

The Ideal Project Accounting System – 5 Benefits

Informed decisions with project insights – there are five ways a modern, project-centric system can strengthen the financial accounting and project insight of a biotech company:

  1. Multiple operating dimensions
  2. A single source of the truth
  3. A statistical book of measures
  4. Self-service reports and custom dashboards
  5. Real-time project visibility

“What multiple operating dimensions means is that the system should allow you to track the various dimensions of the business and research projects,” explains Massey.  

The first to feel the positive effects of best-in-breed financial accounting and project accounting solution will be the CFO, Controller, and accounting staff.  But Massey points out that there is a ripple effect, “The executive management team, the board, and funders will be enthusiastic about the ease with which they can drill down into the areas of concern or exceptions which is facilitated by the architecture of the software – the multiple operating dimensions.

Having a single source of the truth is paramount in providing accurate, consistent, audit-ready, and traceable information tracking and reporting. It comes down to your data being able to withstand the most intense examination.  For as James Wang of San Jose-based QStock notes, “Reporting and accounting must be very clean for biotech companies because they will be scrutinized.”

The system should be able to serve as a statistical book of measures by combining operational and financial metrics for greater insights. The system should be integration-friendly allowing you to look at headcount, locations, and contracts not captured in a standard ledger.

There will be a positive ripple effect of the solution outside of accounting and the executive team.  A modern, cloud-based accounting solution should offer self-service reports and custom dashboards. “Give project managers easy access to data that’s meaningful to their work, and they will be able to manage better and drive faster results,” reports Massey.  “They will know where they stand budget to actual and be able to make data-driven decisions that will move the research forward without fear of over-spending.”

Real-time project visibility means knowing exactly what the status of a project is today – not last week, last month or last quarter.  Real-time project visibility provides optimal control and clarity and gives decision-makers and leaders the data they need to act with confidence.

As you evaluate your next accounting software for your biotech company, get the best software, domain and technical assistance you can.  Look for a consultant who understands and has worked with biotech companies before.  

It’s important to scrutinize not only the software itself but other factors such as customer reviews and references, satisfaction ratings, third-party reviews, and endorsements from accounting experts like the AICPA.  

This five-part series will continue with part two ‘Automation, Tracking, and Traceability’.

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