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Innovating the General Ledger: Multiple Books

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Harris) — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:38:00 +0000

In my introduction to this series on Innovating the General Ledger [see post], I discussed my passion about the GL and how it desperately needs a facelift. Although much of that post centered on my personal opinions, today begins the presentation of real world stories that back up my position and demonstrate how the innovation I suggest can yield real value for business users. I’ll start with how companies need multiple books – whether they know it or not.

A couple years ago, I met with one of our larger customers who was really pushing Intacct to add a “13th month” to our GL. Intacct does this already – we support odd periods like four / four / five week months in a quarter and we support 13 evenly sized months over a year. But this customer wanted the 13th month to be special. He wanted it hidden and to consist of just a single day – December 31st. Of course we could have accommodated this idea, but I really wanted to understand why.

It turns out that in many industries, accountants accrue liabilities at the end of the year. These accruals actually affect the entire year, but because they can only be determined at the end of the year, they would distort monthly results if they were posted in December. In other words, accountants in these industries need to view yearly or monthly financials with and without these accruals. Years ago, some smart accountant figured the way to solve this was to squeeze in an extra month at the end of the fiscal year. Problem solved. Except that you still couldn’t see accruals when viewing monthly results. Only annual data could be viewed with or without them.

At Intacct, we decided to take a different approach. The problem that intrigued us was accountants needed a way to run a library of financial reports over different “sets” of financial results. I may want to see my financials with and without year-end adjustments; with and without tax adjustments; in both US GAAP and in IFRS; or perhaps using the accrual method and also the cash method. In short, we decided that what accountants really needed was the ability to keep multiple books. Then, based on how they want to see their financials, they choose which journals to include in each book. For example, to solve the year-end accruals problem they could create a “Year End Adjustments” journal that only shows up in the “Accrual Method with Adjustments” book. Now accountants have ultimate flexibility. Voila!

This is one example of taking a customer request to the next level. While doing what they ask might solve an immediate problem for one (or many) users, truly understanding the root cause of the need leads to a better strategy to improve the flexibility of the entire general ledger for all customers. Now you’re meeting needs customers didn’t even know they had and providing them with ways to improve the way they operate. That’s value.

In the next post, we’ll talk about another innovative change in the general ledger: dimensions. I’ll also explain what a real dimension looks like compared to the imposters that some vendors try to pass off as real ones.

Be sure to subscribe to the Intacct blog to get the next installment in this series. You can also follow me on Twitter (@aaron_r_harris) and Intacct on all our social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. To network with other people interested in cloud financial applications, be sure to join the Intacct Cloud Accounting group and the CFOInsights group on LinkedIn.

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Innovating the General Ledger: The Time for Change is Now

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Harris) — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:28:00 +0000

I've spent some time over the past year writing about how to build cloud applications. Now I’d like to take a short recess and write about another topic near and dear to my heart: the general ledger. I’m sure I just lost half of you – probably more. But stick with me.

The general ledger (GL) is not exactly the kind of topic that attracts a huge readership, but read on and you’ll see the beauty in the simple elegance of “debits equal credits” and “assets equals liabilities plus owners equity.” To most people, the general ledger is that boring class you have to take to get through business school, but really the general ledger is the answer to many business riddles.

The general ledger has been around for centuries accomplishing two tasks that sound simple, but in their implementation are actually quite difficult.

First, the general ledger allows you to track values over time. It’s easy to get a balance in an account today, but to get a balance in an account on any day historically requires some sophistication.
Second, the general ledger knows the difference between a balance and a change in balance.

We all learned the three basic financial statements when we went through our accounting curriculum. The income statement reflects the revenue and expenses in a given period that affect owner equity. The balance sheet shows balances in assets and liabilities at any point in time. But what makes a general ledger magical is the statement of cash flows.

A true general ledger can take the starting balance in a period for cash accounts, show the impacts of revenue and expenses for the period (this is the change I referred to above) and show the ending balance for the cash accounts in a way that ties out beautifully. It’s surprising how many low-end accounting products struggle with this concept. If you want a litmus test to separate the fake GLs from the real GLs, see if the GL can create a statement of cash flows using the cash-method.

As valuable as the GL is, no one has taken the time to innovate it so it can reach its full potential. And I have a theory as to why: I believe that over the last couple decades, all the innovation in GLs has been created by accounting software users – not accounting software vendors. Accounting software vendors simply listened to what the users wanted and blindly gave them exactly what they asked for without understanding why.

It’s time for vendors to step up and contribute to the innovation of the GL. Accounting systems have gotten very good at producing financial reports, but the power inherent in the GL has been overlooked. Companies are looking for more mature systems that will allow them to manage their financials the way they want, without being forced into a box created by a vendor’s limited capabilities. Users want more sophisticated functionality that aligns with the way they run their businesses, such as:

The ability to run financial reports over various sets of data
Company-specific dimensions that can be budgeted, managed and tracked
Tracking business results that fall outside of the confines of GAAP

The remainder of this blog series will discuss how we can meet these more mature organizational needs and how vendors can turn the slow evolution of the GL into a revolution while creating real business value for their customers.

People often joke when they see how passionate I am about the general ledger. Honestly, I don’t blame them. But if you manage to stick with me through this series, I suspect you will appreciate the simple beauty of how the trial balance ties out perfectly every bit as much as I do.

Be sure to subscribe to the Intacct blog to get the next installment in this series. You can also follow Intacct on all our social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. To network with other people interested in cloud financial applications, be sure to join the Intacct Cloud Accounting group and the CFOInsights group on LinkedIn.

What the Online Sales Tax Bill Means for Your Business

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Olson) — Fri, 10 May 2013 20:18:00 +0000

This week the Senate passed The Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013 (MFA), a bill that could radically alter sales tax obligations for your business if you sell into states where you don’t currently have the obligation to collect and remit sales tax. Earlier this week, Intacct partner Avalara announced a new resource to help small and medium-sized businesses understand what these changes could mean to them. Here is a quick snapshot...

MFA: The Basics

In its current form, the MFA would grant states the power to require remote sellers to collect sales tax, even in those states where they don’t have a physical presence, such as a distribution center or data center.

To exercise this authority, states will have to meet certain tax code requirements. If the bill becomes law, many states could meet these requirements and start making remote sellers collect as soon as 180 days after the bill passes. [See interactive map of when states could implement MFA.]

Which Businesses Would Be Affected?

If you are a remote seller, whether you make sales online, over the phone, or via catalog, you might have to start collecting sales tax in states where you aren't currently required to do so. However, there is an exception for businesses that make less than $1,000,000 in total remote sales per calendar year.

Note: this does not apply to organizations that are considered exempt, such as religious, educational, or charitable organizations.

To learn more about the Marketplace Fairness Act, how it might impact your business, and what you can do to get ready, be sure to visit http://salestaxchanges.com/. To learn more about handling sales tax management within Intacct, click here.

Industry Insights – A Conversation with Marcus Wagner

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Olson) — Wed, 08 May 2013 20:49:00 +0000

Marcus Wagner

It has been a few weeks since our last Intacct Industry Insights post. Our conversation this time is with Marcus Wagner, CPA, the founder and CEO of AcctTwo Shared Services, LLC, a business process outsourcing (BPO) firm for small and midsize companies, based in Houston. Marcus has nearly 20 years of experience working with companies in the areas of financial accounting and auditing, process and internal controls consulting, and management advisory services. He began his career at PricewaterhouseCoopers, in the financial audit and risk advisory practices and was a co-founding partner of accounting firm Calvetti, Ferguson & Wagner.

Our conversation with Marcus focused on business process outsourcing and how this can help SMBs. Here are the highlights…

INTACCT: Why did you move into business process outsourcing by starting your own firm?

MARCUS WAGNER: In my career, I've had a lot of exposure to the Fortune 500, ERP software, and outsourcing. When I was working at PwC, I had one big oil and gas client that outsourced its entire accounting department to IBM. I saw that the company was getting a much higher quality of processes and more timely reporting as a result, and that the economics were better for them, too. When I left the company and started the CPA firm, I saw many of our customers working with QuickBooks and struggling because they couldn't hire accounting staff. Sometimes even the receptionist was handling the accounting duties. It dawned on me that if a $65 billion oil and gas company that already has plenty of internal resources could get benefits from outsourcing, then surely SMB companies could benefit even more. There is a huge untapped opportunity in the marketplace of which we've really only begun to scratch the surface.

INTACCT: What is the role of technology in your new firm?

MW: All of the big outsourcers in the 1990s were using ERP systems, SAP primarily, so when we created AcctTwo in 2010, I knew that technology was going to be very important. One of the first things that we did was go out and select an accounting package, and that ended up being Intacct. This technology has really been core to the success of our company, due to the sophistication it brings to companies at a lower cost, and the scalability. You can grow to be a multi-location and multi-currency company, and you won’t miss a beat with Intacct. As well, because it’s in the cloud, so it allows us to work virtually. That means we can help our clients anytime, from many different locations, and we are all working from the same platform.

INTACCT: What are your clients’ needs and how do you help them?

MW: We often see a common set of needs from our prospects. They are outgrowing QuickBooks and need a more sophisticated solution. When you talk to managers and executives, they are frustrated because they are not able to get the financial statements or reports they need and the data they do get is too old. If they have an auditor or bank that needs quarterly information, it is really painful because pulling all the data together is a manual and often brute force exercise. And then, turnover in the back office is often high. These might be part-time people, maybe someone who’s partially retired or a young person who is looking for their next stepping stone, and it’s hard to keep people in these jobs.

INTACCT: How do you provide the services?

MW: We operate in a shared-service environment. We set up our accounting and back office functions as one big department that serves all of our clients. So we have a team for AP, billing, cash management, GL, and banking. To be successful in this business, you have to be real-time all the time. If you look at how this work is often done, it’s by CPAs who come in at the end of some period of time and trim up the books for transactions that have already happened. But that’s why executives are not getting the information they need in a timely manner, because the work is done in a batch mode. Meanwhile, customers are writing checks and billing their customers every day. So what we do is reconcile their accounts and process bills and invoices daily. This makes us more efficient because we can spread out the workload, and it gives clients as real-time a set of information as possible.

INTACCT: The concept of business process outsourcing isn't new. So what has changed, generally speaking?

MW: There are two things converging together. The first one is the maturity of cloud technology. To do what we do for all the clients we have, we couldn't be using QuickBooks and enterprise-class systems like SAP are too expensive. Previously, the logistics of giving external access to systems wasn’t really possible or was too costly, using remote workstation technologies such as Citrix. So the economics and the technology have come a long way and it is creating considerable change in the CPA industry. Public accounting firms have realized they have a huge opportunity to offer outsourcing services to clients. However, the SMB market is still learning that this is a viable solution, so we focus on educating them. Our firm wants to begin offering additional services for clients beyond the transactional work, into strategic areas like financial planning and budgeting and analysis. The result of that would be helping clients run their business on a very dynamic basis by integrating all this data that we have been collecting and providing useful intelligence.

INTACCT: Now, how about a couple questions just for fun…

You are based in Houston, what is the best kept secret about the city?

MW: Most people don't realize that Houston is one of the most ethnically diverse, international cities in the U.S. All ethnic groups are currently a minority today; there is no majority. Because we are the "Energy Capital of the World" and are a major port, we have people from all over the world visiting and living in Houston. You can walk through the Galleria shopping district and hear foreign languages being spoken all around you.

If you want a gourmet dinner, where’s your favorite spot in town?

MW: I love La Dolce Vita on Montrose in Houston. It's a casual Italian restaurant that says it specializes in pizza, but I love the appetizers. They have so many different and interesting starters that are like "Italian tapas”... you can order a bunch of them to share with friends and try different flavors.

What is your favorite way to unwind?

MW: I enjoy playing golf, traveling or just sitting on the back deck watching my kids play.

To stay connected with Marcus, you can follow him on Twitter (@wagnermarcus). You can also follow Intacct on all our social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. To network with other people interested in cloud financial applications, be sure to join the Intacct Cloud Accounting group and the CFOInsights group on LinkedIn.

Do you have an idea for someone you think has interesting industry insights we should interview? Send us your suggestions for consideration.

Previous Intacct Industry Insights Conversations:

Industry Insights – A Conversation with David Cieslak

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Olson) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 16:30:00 +0000

David Cieslak

Our latest Intacct Industry Insights conversation is with David Cieslak, a principal with Arxis Technology, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in the implementation and support of accounting and business management software. David specializes in accounting systems, information security, the Windows operating environment, cloud computing and project management. He has been working in the accounting technology industry since 1989 and is a frequent speaker for the California Society of Certified Public Accountants (CalCPA), the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and other state accounting societies.

Our conversation with David covered a variety of topics, including the market for midsize financial systems, best-of-breed versus single-vendor suites, and reporting challenges from SMBs. Here are the highlights…

INTACCT: How would you describe the market today for midsize financial systems?

DAVID CIESLAK: The market today is in state of transition. You've got the legacy on-premises solutions that are feature-rich and very deep and wide, but their architecture doesn't support more than one working paradigm. In financials, there’s not a huge proliferation of cloud offerings yet, but the cloud is the paradigm going forward from a deployment and infrastructure perspective.

Most cloud vendors are feverishly working to back fill key features and functions, so you may not necessarily find the depth of functionality compared to on-premises systems yet. There is room for more competition and we expect to see more companies enter the mix. It’s also becoming clear that cloud vendors should specialize and have a tight market niche. That appears to be the winning strategy for new entrants.

INTACCT:So is best-of-breed becoming the predominant model?

DC: It has traditionally been much more challenging to do best-of-breed with on-premises solutions because of the lack of standards and complexity of the tool sets. Vendors in the on-premises space were almost forced to come up with an all-in-one strategy. Cloud-based products, however, are much more open and can interface with other systems more readily. So it’s not just a marketing pitch. It really is how these newer products are designed.

INTACCT: Is this creating more complexity though?

DC: Sometimes I do worry about companies creating one big monstrous mash-up. The other problem is that because of the consumer IT movement, the mindset is about supporting lots of point solutions. But all the iPad applications in the world aren't going to run an entire organization. Companies still need a strategy and an understanding and agreement of what is the overall solution and which tools are going to manage it all. Beyond specific technologies such as single sign-on, it’s about managing all the applications at a high level. This will be challenging for all organizations. There is now a different type of management need with the cloud.

INTACCT: Yet running and managing software is much easier today for businesses, right?

DC: Clearly, there are pieces that are not only easier but have been eliminated altogether— including routine support, updates, and maintenance. On top of that, software is better able to support the mobile workforce. It is smarter and much more flexible. Yet, companies still need to deal with designing the overall solution and making sure that it meets and supports corporate needs and goals.

INTACCT: Reporting is becoming a strategic business capability, thus the focus on Big Data. What are the challenges that small and midsize companies still have in this area?

DC: Reporting is the holy grail of any of these financial systems. Data is not the problem. Companies have captured data in multiple places. The question is, do we have tools that are powerful enough and easy enough to use, so that we can report in a timely basis. We need ad hoc tools and at the same time, support for predefined metrics, dashboards, and KPIs. All of the products on the market are trying to come up with better reporting tools. Intacct has very strong capabilities, but it’s an ongoing process.

INTACCT: The cloud makes the notion of being “open” and sharing easy. But do finance people like that change?

DC: It is culturally hard for some finance people. Vendors need to ensure that app and data security is very strong. Users get queasy if they can’t adequately control access, or think the cloud might expose the secret sauce of the business. There has been caution in moving finance to the cloud, because doing so is not going to catapult the business into some new level of success. Directors need confidence that the software is tight and right for the business and they will wait to move until they’re sure of that. Confidence is key for buyers, especially in the area of data security.

INTACCT: Now, here are a few fun questions…

What’s a fun thing to do on a night out on the town, in your town?

DC: Night time entertainment options are virtually limitless in Los Angeles. Great food and amazing wine are my personal weakness so evenings out always include a fantastic meal! I also enjoy attending college sporting events (Go Bruins)!

Which celebrity could you trade places with for a week?

DC: Since I’m a drummer, I would love to spend a week sitting in for Simon Phillips with Toto. That would be the rush of a lifetime.

What is the craziest thing you've done lately?

DC: I ran my first half-marathon on January 5th. It was a night time run through the streets of downtown Los Angeles, past City Hall, then in and around Dodger Stadium. After rounding the bases inside the ballpark, the run returned to the Staples Center and LA Live downtown for the after party. What a blast! Definitely on next year’s to-do list!

To stay connected with David, you can follow him on Twitter (@dcieslak). You can also follow Intacct on all our social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. To network with other people interested in cloud financial applications, be sure to join the Intacct Cloud Accounting group and the CFOInsights group on LinkedIn.

Do you have an idea for someone you think has interesting industry insights we should interview? Send us your suggestions for consideration.

Previous Intacct Industry Insights Conversations:

The Anatomy of a Best-in-Class Multi-Entity Financial Management System

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Olson) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 20:29:00 +0000

As we discussed in our post last week, operating a multi-entity, global organization without a flexible financial management system can be an expensive venture, riddled with add-on software tools, manual processes, poor visibility, and high labor costs.

A modern, cloud-based financial management system can alleviate many, if not all, of those worries and leave your organization well-informed, operating in real-time, and functioning efficiently. To achieve this feat, however, the solution must encompass a tremendous breadth and depth of functionality, including...

A sophisticated multi-entity structure to:

Allow each entity its own chart of accounts
Support local taxation rules
Accommodate individual reporting requirements
Enable both entity-specific and global consolidations
Automate inter-entity transactions and eliminations
Support various ownership structures by entity

Automation and control to:

Automate costly manual processes
Increase productivity
Reduce errors
Enable real-time consolidations whenever needed
Provide access to transaction detail
Process payments and transactions between entities, even in differing currencies

Multi-currency capabilities to:

Eliminate manual reporting and consolidation
Gain real-time visibility into currency gains and losses
Allow each entity to operating in its native currency
Facilitate buying and selling internationally

Superior visibility to:

Improve reporting and decision making
Provide consolidated, real-time views at both local and global levels
Analyze along different dimensions of the business
Measure performance with access to both local and global KPIs

Sounds too good to be true, right? Not really. A solution of this caliber exists and it’s called Intacct. For high-growth companies, Intacct provides a foundation to handle complex, multi-national operations in real-time. This allows companies to reduce costs, gain visibility, and grow more confidently. Intacct offers everything I described above, as well as the core accounting qualities you need to optimize your financials.

For Intacct users, there are a variety of benefits that truly impact their businesses. For example:

Anytime, anywhere access to real-time information via the cloud to ensure data consistency and improve management alignment.
Automated financial workflows that increase productivity, accelerate period-end closes, eliminate the need for add-on software, and lower overhead and labor costs.
Real-time, multi-dimensional analysis to improve business visibility and decision-making.
Comprehensive audit trails simplify the audit process, satisfy auditor needs, and enable tighter controls.

We've helped thousands of high-growth companies overcome their multi-entity challenges such as complex regulatory frameworks, geographies, laws, currencies, and others items that typically bring financial operations to its knees. For example, companies using Intacct to manage their global financials report cutting the time required for their monthly close by up to 75%, while others cut global transaction processing time by up to 80%. As you can see in the video below, our customers rave about Intacct's capabilities…

Click image above to launch video page or visit http://bit.ly/Z2oVjl

Choosing the right financial management system is an important decision and can make a huge difference to your business. Click here to learn more about what Intacct offers for global businesses. I would also encourage you to attend our upcoming product tour for multi-entity businesses on April 9, at 10am PT. You can register for that webinar or any of our other educations sessions and product tours at http://us.intacct.com/about-us/events.

Be sure to follow Intacct on our social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. To network with other people interested in cloud financial applications, be sure to join the Intacct Cloud Accounting group and the CFOInsights group on LinkedIn.

Map Image Credit: 123RF Stock Photos

Industry Insights – A Conversation with Bob Scott

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Olson) — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 18:32:00 +0000

Bob Scott

For our latest Intacct Industry Insights conversation, we recently had the pleasure to talk with Bob Scott, the executive editor of The Progressive Accountant. Bob has provided information to the tax, accounting, and mid-market financial software community for more than 20 years, first as technology editor of Accounting Today, and from 1997 through 2009 as editor of its sister publication, Accounting Technology. For the past decade, his weekly Bob Scott’s Insights email newsletter has provided insight and analysis for the reseller community.

Our conversation with Bob covered a variety of topics, including cloud accounting applications, CPA collaboration, and the consumerization of business software. Here are the highlights…

INTACCT: Are cloud applications changing how accountants and accounting firms work?

BOB SCOTT: They are changing things slowly. Accountants are not technology laggards, but they are frugal. Firms will move quickly if they see a return on investment, such as with online tax research. Buying multiple monitors is another trend that was huge for them. They quickly saw the value of having more than one screen on their desk. Anytime that technology can help improve processes, you are better off. Accountants tend to use elements of technology when they see the need, which means it's not necessarily all tied together. They're not really sitting down yet and thinking about how technology can help them redesign their firm. So I think when it comes to the cloud, it is still an unknown for many accountants.

INTACCT: Is this somewhat shortsighted of them?

BOB SCOTT: I don’t think it’s a matter of being shortsighted. It’s just that adopting new technology is difficult for most people. They are focused on doing their business, not on understanding technology trends. That’s why they often need outside advice, such as from resellers or consultants, to not only make the move, but to understand that change might be to their advantage.

INTACCT: Do CPAs really care about being able to better share information and collaborate with colleagues, due to new technologies?

BOB SCOTT: If your job doesn't involve collaborating to begin with, then you really may not care. The main thing for accounting types is avoiding the re-entry of data. They are very keen on avoiding errors and having the ability to communicate electronically from anywhere. There’s no such thing as a snow day at this point, as long as you have access to the Internet. Anything that allows a CPA to keep billing hours is good news, and if the cloud allows that, then yes, they do care. It's also important for managers because they can use the cloud to always be updated on the status of projects. And they're doing this in their own office by walking around with a tablet. That simplifies the process of finding a document and people really appreciate that.

INTACCT: Are accounting software systems still too difficult and unpleasant to use? Should they really be as easy as Facebook, or are users expecting too much?

BOB SCOTT: There is a difference between ease of use and the ability to understand processes. No matter how easy the system is to use, people still need to understand the basics of accounting if they are using these systems regularly. The more important thing is the ease of completing tasks. Software has a way of making us feel dumb. Users tend to get frustrated and discount the software too fast, and then they don’t use it. Users don't need to read the whole user manual, but instead should focus on what they need to know to do their job. There's got to be some investment in learning made by the users. It's never going to be as easy as "paint by numbers."

INTACCT: Speaking of ease of use, how has “consumer IT” and social media affected financial and accounting apps when it comes to interface and design?

BOB SCOTT: I think it affects all the vendors because people these days learn a lot about technology through using Facebook and their mobile phones. Technology is less intimidating to most people because they have learned so much in the last few years. Technology is now intuitive to our culture. As a software vendor, however, if you're not incorporating tenets of consumerization and social media into your product, someone else will. You've got to respond to those trends.

INTACCT: Now, a few final questions just for fun…

What is the most memorable movie or show you've seen lately?

BOB SCOTT: I want to see a lot more of “Confesiones de una Doctora” – Confessions of a [female] Doctor. It’s a series done in Germany, but run on the Spanish stations. I put the closed caption on and off to help with the Spanish. I watch “Criminal Minds”, “Big Bang Theory”, and travel shows like “Rick Steves’ Europe” as much as possible and quite a bit of “Antiques Road Show.”

What would you do if you weren't a writer?

BOB SCOTT: I would run a small, nonprofit organization, such as a community organization. I have been on the board of directors of our community pool since 2000, and president since 2005. From my experience there, I think my temperament is as a turnaround person – go into something that has a lot of problems to be fixed.

If you could take a month off of work and travel, all expenses paid, where would you go?

BOB SCOTT: Manhattan is on my list. I commuted there for 25 years and it is only 28 miles away. I want to spend two or three months just living in the city to experience all the cultural opportunity, the events, the atmosphere, and all the ethnic food. If I had to choose a foreign city, it would be Paris. I have a saying that you can’t go to Paris often enough and that’s for similar reasons as New York: the cultural opportunities and French cooking.

To stay connected with Bob, you can follow him at Twitter (@BobScottInsight) and follow his posts on the Bob Scott’s Insights page. You can also follow Intacct on all our social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. To network with other people interested in cloud financial applications, be sure to join the Intacct Cloud Accounting group and the CFOInsights group on LinkedIn.

Do you have an idea for someone you think has interesting industry insights we should interview? Send us your suggestions for consideration.

Previous Intacct Industry Insights Conversations:

The Cost of Managing Multiple Entities in a Global Economy

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Olson) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 19:01:00 +0000

Companies today face multi-entity and global business management issues far earlier in their life cycle than ever before. It’s not uncommon for a small company to start their business in one city, then open an offshore development office, house customer service in a yet another location, and grow to have sales offices scattered across the country and internationally – all within the first few years of business. As exciting as that kind of growth sounds, it’s a nightmare to manage for a traditional financial system.

In a multi-entity environment, each office typically operates autonomously, subject to varying currency, tax, and reporting requirements – such as currency translation, exchange gain/loss accounting, local reporting, and an increased risk of non-compliance. But that’s not all they have to deal with. In addition to managing organic growth, mergers and acquisitions are common in many industry. And with each new business acquired comes more separate entities, their unique challenges, and often a second financial management system.

Presented with these challenges, finance team often struggle to perform critical tasks such as consolidation, reporting, and analyzing operational and financial information across the disparate sites. They are forced to use cumbersome spreadsheets and add-on reporting solutions along with their traditional financial systems to try to cobble together meaningful data to help management make informed decisions. Instead, the process is manual, slow and error ridden. Data from the multiple entities is collected and consolidated manually, currency conversions are calculated by hand, and the number of inter-entity adjustments and eliminations increases.

The use of multiple systems and the lack of automation lead to two critical problems for multi-entity or global businesses: diminished operational visibility and a dramatic increase in cost. For example:

No real-time business visibility or consolidated view of your business – Traditional financial systems struggle to provide decision makers the information they need in a multi-entity environment. They are unable to drill down into supporting transactions, can’t compare performance across regions, and often end up with different versions of the same report. All of these factors contribute to confusion and the inability for leaders to properly manage the business as they are unable to measure performance, make informed decisions or control risk.
Increased financial staff costs – It takes a tremendous amount of time to manually consolidate data from multiple entities, account for the currency, tax and reporting variances between them, and correct the evitable mistakes that result from manual work or duplicates. To handle the additional workload, finance departments are forced to hire additional staff just to keep up.
Longer financial close process – The manual nature of the financial process leads to lengthened period-end closes. Without timely information, the business lags behind the pace of the market and their competitors, reducing business agility and response times. The only way to accelerate the close process is to add additional staff which, of course, increases labor costs.
Increased IT cost for add-on functionality – When faced with an inept financial solution, a considerable amount of time and money is spent finding software that will fill gaps or provide workarounds. Multi-entity companies who choose to take this road throw spreadsheets, reporting software, and financial consolidation solutions at the problem only to wind up with higher costs, increased complexity, and a piecemeal solution that still doesn’t provide the functionality or real-time global visibility they need.

The only way to operate efficiently and effectively in a global, multi-entity environment is with a modern financial management solution that offers sophisticated support for the specific issues that these organizations face. A few of the key features that enable this level of support include:

Cloud-based architecture – By its very nature, the cloud removes access restrictions and provides real-time and on-demand visibility.
Automation – Automating time-consuming processes reduces errors, lowers labor costs and speeds closing, consolidation, and reporting efforts.
Professional-strength financial functionality – With support for core accounting standards, as well as complex global financial management, a professional-strength solution will combine usability with sophisticated functionality and enterprise power and performance to make a tangible impact on the business.
Flexibility – As a business evolves, the financial system should be able to adapt as well to support new geographic locations, acquisitions, or ownership structures.

In next week’s follow-up “CFO Insights” post, we will discuss in more detail how choosing the right financial system really can overcome these challenges and revolutionize your global operations. In the meantime, to learn about how Intacct can benefit your global operations, I encourage you to register for one of our upcoming Product Tours at http://us.intacct.com/about-us/events.

Be sure to subscribe to the Intacct blog to stay updated on future CFO Insights posts, and follow Intacct on our social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. To network with other people interested in cloud financial applications, be sure to join the Intacct Cloud Accounting group and the CFOInsights group on LinkedIn.

Image Credit: 123RF Stock Photos

Industry Insights – A Conversation with Brian Jacobs

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Olson) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 18:44:00 +0000

Brian Jacobs

It is time for another Intacct Industry Insights interview. We recently spoke with Brian Jacobs, co-founder of Emergence Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that invests exclusively in early and growth stage technology-enabled services, including SaaS and cloud applications. Brian has more than 20 years of venture capital experience, including previous investments in BigFix, HireRight, WebTV, nQuire, Lexar and many others. He currently serves on the boards of Intacct, YouSendIt, InsideView, Bill.com, Janrain, and Donuts.

Our conversation with Brian covered a variety of topics, including changes in the SaaS market over the past 10 years, go-to-market strategies for cloud vendors, and trends in the cloud financial applications space. Here are the highlights…

INTACCT: Emergence Capital has been focused on SaaS investments since its founding in 2003. What have been the biggest changes in the past ten years?

BRIAN JACOBS: Our firm has grown up with the SaaS industry. Our first investment was Salesforce.com. There were a lot of challenges back then. Customers were worried about security, reliability, and controlling access to their data. People didn't think it was possible to integrate cloud applications with traditional on-premises applications, because most were behind the firewall then. I remember when the Dreamforce conference had just 500 attendees.

All of that has changed. Last year, Dreamforce had 90,000 registered attendees. The cloud has become the standard for applications of all types. Fortune 500 companies are entrusting SaaS vendors with their most important data. They realize that they are getting the best reliability and security possible, much better than they can achieve on their own. Cloud apps are now connected through simple APIs to more sources of data and other applications than we ever thought possible.

INTACCT: Have you been surprised by how the market has developed?

BJ: The move to the cloud has happened a lot faster than we expected. We never guessed that the shift would accelerate and be the standard just 10 years after we started Emergence Capital.

We were surprised at how slowly the large incumbent software vendors have been in the move to the cloud. It's easier to build a SaaS business if you are a start-up with no money, then if you are a huge vendor with tens of thousands of customers. Those giants have to figure out how to migrate customers, without completely cannibalizing existing revenue in the process. It is very hard to transform from a product business to a service-based business. The big guys are being forced to buy SaaS vendors, because they can't transform their businesses fast enough.

The architectural shift is delivering further innovation that was hard to foresee initially. We now have seen cloud companies bring social connectivity, such as Lithium or InsideView, or mobile technologies, like Veeva Systems or ServiceMax.

INTACCT: Which big company has handled the transition better than others?

BJ: SAP has worked hard to write its own cloud applications from scratch. They had to restart the effort a few times, but they appear determined to succeed. They have also completed two multi-billion dollar SaaS acquisitions, Ariba and SuccessFactors. Wall Street thinks these were smart choices. The real test will be if they can avoid ruining these companies, by allowing them to grow organically. The best way for a big software company to move into the cloud is to buy strong startups and then leave them alone. It is very difficult to integrate a SaaS business into a large on-premises company, because they require different strategies to succeed.

INTACCT: What channel and go-to-market strategies will be critical in 2013 for Cloud and SaaS players?

BJ: Salesforce pioneered the use of telesales software. That was disruptive at the time and helped them become the market leader in CRM. Telesales is now a proven SaaS strategy, but the best companies are innovating further. Some have developed powerful channels to expand their market coverage. Intacct has demonstrated a lot of leadership here. VAR channels are used to the on-premises model, so it takes a lot of education and hands-on partnering to help them learn how to add value to a subscription service.

Freemium is another new model for selling business software which takes advantage of the consumerization of enterprise applications. Companies like Yammer, Evernote, and YouSendIt have succeeded by appealing to individual workers. Employees learn about technology in their personal lives and bring those solutions into the workplace. When they can easily share pictures and videos on Facebook, they wonder why it’s difficult to share simple documents with co-workers. As a result, enterprise developers are placing far greater focus on the user interface and intuitive design.

INTACCT: When it comes to cloud financials, what trends or developments are you seeing right now?

BJ: People are sensitive about their financial information and processes, so initially, the move to the cloud was slower than any other category. However, we've now reached the tipping point. Financial executives have seen other departments benefit from cloud applications and they realize that robust cloud financial applications, like Intacct, will lower their total cost of ownership and provide more security and reliability than their on-premises installations. It is really hard to develop a new general ledger because it takes years to mature and test. Intacct launched over 10 years ago and has been used by thousands of customers in hundreds of industries.

Nobody wants to change their general ledger, but until now, growing companies have had no choice. Because cloud apps scale better than traditional software, companies never need to migrate from system to system as they grow. Intacct has customers that have grown from start-up through IPO, and they've been able to stay on the same financial system the entire time.

INTACCT: OK, now a few questions just for fun…

How would you spend a perfect Saturday?

BJ: Cycling in the mountains. During the week, I have a crazy schedule, sitting in board meetings and meeting dozens of entrepreneurs. I need some time to myself to think through what I learned during the week. Time on my bicycle helps me see the broader patterns.

What is the last book you read that you couldn't put down?

BJ: I just read “The River of Doubt” by Candice Millard. It chronicles Teddy Roosevelt’s journey down an unexplored river in the Amazon rain forest I am inspired by the accomplishments of historical figures who didn't have access to the technology we have today.

If you could get front row/VIP tickets for any sporting, music, or other event in the world it would be?

BJ: That’s an interesting question, because the front row isn't always the best place to see a game, but it’s a great place to sit in a theater, and I like to watch ballet. The dancers are really athletes that create art with their bodies. It is team sport, because their balance depends on the movements of their partners. Strong dancers can be breathtaking to watch.

To stay connected with Brian, you can follow him at Twitter (@brian_emcap) and follow the Emergence Capital blog. You can also follow Intacct on all our social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. To network with other people interested in cloud financial applications, be sure to join the Intacct Cloud Accounting group and the CFOInsights group on LinkedIn.

Do you have an idea for someone you think has interesting industry insights we should interview? Send us your suggestions for consideration.

Previous Intacct Industry Insights Conversations:

Industry Insights – A Conversation with Lindy Antonelli

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Olson) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 21:22:00 +0000

Lindy Antonelli

Our latest Intacct Industry Insights interview is with Lindy Antonelli, one of the nation's top experts in cloud accounting and financial management solutions. Lindy is a consulting partner at Armanino LLP and founder of the Cloud Accounting Institute. As one of the 10 fastest-growing firms in the nation, Armanino offers a broad range of audit, tax and consulting services to public, private and non-profit mid-market companies with domestic and/or international operations. The firm’s cloud practice focuses on migrating organizations from legacy entry-level and mid-market on-premise accounting software to Intacct’s cloud financial applications.

Our conversation with Lindy covered topics including migrating to cloud accounting systems, integration, and cloud security. Here are the highlights…

INTACCT: What are a few best practices for migrating clients from legacy accounting to cloud solutions?

LINDY ANTONELLI: We follow the Business Simple methodology, which I trademarked six years ago. It is built around communication. We start by working with the client to establish budget, time frames, and goals. We get together at various “success points” during the project, such as after the configuration and before user training. At those points we review the budget, discuss our progress and refine our timeline and project plan for a successful go-live.

INTACCT: Is it hard for clients to abandon their on-premise systems?

LA: Legacy accounting systems tend to be highly customized. If we were working with Microsoft Dynamics, for instance, we would install it on their server and then suddenly, it becomes a unique solution for the customer. Then the customer has to deal with the complexity of maintenance and upgrades on a highly-customized application. With the cloud, it's all based on standards. We implement the same way for all of our clients and make sure that the functionality works well for everyone. Sometimes, we need to work hard to get clients to think differently, to envision a new and better way of working. There is a subset of people who simply want to open the server closet and touch the dusty box, look at the blinking lights and know that their data is right there. But there are also a lot of business-savvy people running finance departments today and they are seeing the true benefits of having standard GAAP accounting processes, easy interfaces, and not having to maintain an IT-intensive system. Managing the hardware and software components is no longer their problem with cloud. They can focus on the functionality and improved visibility, plus the gain the benefit of a lower total cost of ownership.

INTACCT: How have software integration challenges improved or changed in the cloud?

LA: Cloud software tends to be best-in-class solutions, so that you can pick and choose the best applications for your business. Cloud publishers realized from the beginning that they had to get really good at managing integrations. They have web services and APIs so that customers can interface the application with their websites or other applications. This can all be done at a low cost, using a relatively easy process. And guess what, the integrations don't break with upgrades. Of course there are solutions like NetSuite which automatically integrates CRM, finance and other applications into a cloud suite, but then you're stuck with everything the way they want you to have it. Those vendors won't have the best module in each area. So that is the trade-off.

INTACCT: How much harder is it to integrate cloud apps with legacy systems?

LA: It depends on the legacy vendor. They must have created APIs and more importantly, the APIs must be open and accessible. You will likely need a programmer to write the interfaces when they are not open.

INTACCT: What should a customer ask vendors about their integration capabilities and support?

LA: The first question is do they have open APIs that are public and downloadable from their site? One customer of ours went down the road with NetSuite, did a proof of concept, but then discovered that their APIs were not as open and easy to use as expected. They decided to go with Intacct. So a proof of concept is an excellent idea, and you also need to know about any required tools to do the integration. Finally, what will this all cost?

INTACCT: A recent AICPA survey found that the top barrier to adopting or expanding accounting solutions is security. Any thoughts on that?

LA: It's interesting, because we also did a survey of business and finance professionals recently through the Cloud Accounting Institute, and security was second on the list after integrations. Cloud finance vendors are going to be compliant with the top standards. For security, it is SSAE 16, formally SAS 70, and that is the marker that a vendor has strong protections and metrics for privacy, uptime, and security. Achieving the standard requires vendors to spend millions of dollars on their data center and on security technologies. If I am working with a nervous prospect, I will ask them, can they afford to spend millions of dollars on their security? Usually they say no. So with cloud solutions, customers can take advantage of the best security for a low cost.

INTACCT: Now a couple questions just for fun…

What are your favorite things to do in Chicago?

LA: It depends on the season. In the summer, it is tennis, golf, swimming, and most anything else outdoors. In winter, I enjoy snowshoeing, ice skating, shopping, and movies in front of the fireplace.

What is your most memorable vacation?

LA: Sanibel Island in Florida is where my family and I have been vacationing for spring break for many years. We love the shelling, biking around the island, and the laid-back attitude when we are on “island time.”

If you could start over, what career might you pursue?

LA: I love tennis and wish I would have pursued it further in high school and college. But in reality, I love what I do professionally – getting to work with really smart, interesting people who also have a great passion for what they do!

To stay connected with Lindy, be sure to follow the Cloud Accounting Institute blog. You can also follow Intacct on all our social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. To network with other people interested in cloud financial applications, join the Intacct Cloud Accounting group and the CFOInsights group on LinkedIn.

Do you have an idea for someone you think has interesting industry insights we should interview? Send us your suggestions for consideration.

Previous Intacct Industry Insights Conversations:

Traditional Financial Systems: A Long, Winding Road to Nowhere

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Olson) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 22:31:00 +0000

The business world today is highly competitive, collaborative, and distributed. In order to gain a sustainable advantage, every stakeholder must make intelligent decisions based on real-time information. Companies rely on their financial systems to provide them with real-time, actionable, and relevant data that will help them build, plan, define, measure, and drive performance.

Traditional financial systems typically lack the analytic functionality to support the intelligence needs and speed of business most companies operate. This lack of real-time information hinders management’s ability to apply their knowledge and leadership to its fullest extent, and stunts employee contribution.

To get the actionable information they need, finance organizations are often forced to augment their systems and processes with cumbersome Excel spreadsheets or costly add-on reporting solutions. Although this strategy is meant to support critical planning and forecasting activities, the opposite often occurs. Instead of real-time, accurate intelligence, they get a long, winding road fraught with:

Delays – The CEO needs the latest consolidated financials. The best finance can do is offer reports that are already weeks old – or reports based on today’s numbers that will be available next week.
Inconsistency – After distributing reports via email several times, the CEO, CFO, COO, and the board of directors now have five different versions of the same report – each with different versions of the truth.
Security Risks – Security is compromised when someone accidentally emails confidential reports to a vendor instead of the board of directors.
Errors – To create reports, the finance staff has to download data from one or more financial systems and aggregate, manipulate, and format the data in a spreadsheet – providing ample opportunity for errors and reducing finance productivity.
Reduced Productivity – Because processes that incorporate spreadsheets can’t be automated, finance staff has to work overtime to create, format, and distribute reports – and they have to do it over and over again. This wastes staff time and costs the company money.
Audit Costs – Auditors determine that because key finance processes include spreadsheets, they require closer scrutiny – at a cost of $200/hour. And that’s before they find the inevitable errors.
Compliance risk – Manually created spreadsheets increase the risk of fraud and Sarbanes-Oxley non-compliance. Auditors examine everything again at an additional $200/hour.
Increased Software Costs – The controller gets a $100,000 invoice for add-on data warehousing and reporting software – plus an HR request for $100,000/year for IT staff to manage them.
Complexity – New add-on data warehousing and reporting software requires assistance from an IT staff member to implement and maintain, as well as to create necessary reports – adding to IT costs for every report.
GAAP Issues – Data in add-on data warehousing and reporting solutions or spreadsheets diverges from GAAP financials, increasing the risk of making decisions based on data that is different from the finance system of record.

Finding Visibility in the Cloud

Moving to a cloud-based financial system like Intacct can help companies achieve the real-time visibility they need, without the cost, risk, and complexity of a traditional, on-premises system. Companies who have implemented cloud-based financial systems highlight several significant benefits over their previous on-premises system, including:

Real-time access to the information they need, from a single system
Instantly view business information customized to the needs of each user
Easily create ad-hoc reports to support specific initiatives
Provide a visual snapshot of the company’s performance to executives
Save thousands of dollars by eliminating manual processes and add-on tools

These benefits only scratch the surface of the opportunity that lies with real-time visibility through cloud financials. Listen to what our customers have to say about the business visibility benefits they've seen with Intacct [video]. I would also encourage you to register for our upcoming product tour focused on reporting:

Intacct Product Tour: Key Reporting Features and Functionality

Thursday, March 14, 2013 at 10:00AM PT

Check out all our upcoming educations webinars and product tours, and be sure to follow Intacct on our social media channels: Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. To network with other people interested in cloud financial applications, join the Intacct Cloud Accounting group and the CFOInsights group on LinkedIn.

Photo credit: allison.hare via Photopin cc

Industry Insights - A Conversation with Bob Spinner

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Olson) — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 21:02:00 +0000

Bob Spinner

Our latest Intacct Industry Insights interview took place with Bob Spinner, a Managing Director at Sigma West, an early to mid-stage venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. Sigma West has been an early cloud evangelist with investments including: Demandbase, Docusign, oDesk, Responsys, Strava, YouSendIt, and Intacct. Previously, Spinner held senior level positions at three start-up companies, all of which went public: Extensity, Clarify, and Sybase. Spinner’s focus is on applications and infrastructure with a particular focus in Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing. Spinner also sits on the Intacct Board of Directors.

Our conversation with Bob covered topics including concerns around cloud computing, elements of a successful cloud start-up, and the differences between being a CEO and VC. Here are the highlights...

INTACCT: What is the level of concern today among companies moving to the cloud?

SPINNER: The cloud is the most important evolution in corporate IT over the last 15 years. Just look at every venture funding announcement or speak to any CIO, and this is clear. That said, any cloud provider must prove its ability to protect the resources of their customers. IT organizations at some companies have thousands of man-years in building secure environments to ensure their data is protected within its four walls. Handing over the protection of their key IP, computer resources, or customer data will not happen without ample consideration. This creates tremendous opportunities for vendors that can minimize that risk.

INTACCT: How do you define a successful cloud software start-up?

SPINNER: Building a successful software company is a challenge under any circumstances. A cloud solution has some unique characteristics, which benefit both the provider and the customer. For example:

Highly satisfied customers. No company can be successful without satisfied customers. However, nowhere is this more clear than in a recurring revenue model, where the initial purchase is a small part of the lifetime value of a customer and customers are asked to continually renew their commitment. This means customers need to get unique value, get it fast, and get it again and again.
Competitive offerings with a culture for innovation. With the advent of the cloud and mobile platforms, the rate of new development has accelerated dramatically. It isn't enough that companies can develop an interesting solution. They must be able to defend it over time. Innovative and open-minded company culture and leadership is the foundation for a company’s continued leadership.
Innovative go-to-market strategies. The cloud has presented new opportunities for reaching customers and provisioning services. Freemium solutions, self-service provisioning, free trials, e-commerce and adoption of new technologies have changed the high touch sales model of the past. However, this isn't simply an investment in a new go-to-market strategy but a new approach to product development, communication, training, partner development and customer outreach.

INTACCT: It sounds like one of the big differences in evaluating companies today is the consumer IT factor?

SPINNER: The way enterprises are buying technology has changed. This has both changed the opportunity for new start-ups to reach the enterprise, as well as set a higher bar for technologies to be adopted in the enterprise. Some examples include:

The aesthetics of business applications are changing. Business users now require that their applications are as elegant and simple as those on their mobile devices for their personal use. This means that the vendors providing the new apps must design accordingly.
The line between personal applications and business applications is changing. There are many applications that are used for both business and personal efforts. This creates an interesting opportunity for new companies to market to individuals who can then serve to endorse these technologies for the enterprise.
These personal and business applications will co-exist on the same devices – often the work device. How the enterprise deals with this evolution can affect both the culture of their company and the integrity of their business data.

INTACCT: Enterprise software has been more or less dominated by a few huge vendors over the past 20 years. Is the cloud going to democratize the software market or will companies grow and consolidate just as always?

SPINNER: Having observed multiple shifts in enterprise software over the last 20 years, the one thing I am confident of is that there will always be start-ups that innovate and larger successful companies that will thrive. As a venture investor, we are betting on the innovation of young companies. Some of those companies will become the larger companies of the next decade and some will be acquired at what we hope will be very high multiples.

INTACCT: What’s more fun: working as the CEO of a start-up, or on the VC side?

SPINNER: As a CEO and as a sales leader before that, I was emotionally in one company all the time. The highs are higher and the lows are lower. There is nothing like it when you are winning. As a venture investor, I currently sit on eight boards, which means I learn a lot quickly across many markets, technologies and market strategies. I love the concurrent challenges and learn a lot working with many great executives. All in all, I am happy with my current role and believe I am a much better investor because of my time as an operating executive. It has crossed my mind, however, that after nine years in the venture business, I may be a better CEO if I were to do it again.

INTACCT: Now a few final questions, just for fun...

Would you call yourself a technology gadget geek? What products get you excited outside of work?

SPINNER: I am a modest geek. I think I have every version of every Apple mobile device ever made. I love the technology behind bicycles and their components, and have allowed myself better equipment than I deserve. My GPS systems all load to Strava where I track all my rides.

Can you have a life as a Silicon Valley VC? If so, what do you do for fun?

SPINNER: Absolutely. I don’t think anyone can be happy or successful for long if they do not have activities outside of work that keep them healthy and happy. My family of four women (my wife and three daughters) has always been my priority. Beyond that, I have always been a workout nut. It gives me some cover for the lack of discipline in my eating. In the past two years, I have been addicted to a fitness program includes spinning, rowing and stretching. And I still maintain a close connection to my roots to the New York area where my identical twin and the rest of my family reside.

Be sure to follow Intacct on all our social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. To network with other people interested in cloud financial applications, join the Intacct Cloud Accounting group and the CFOInsights group on LinkedIn.

Do you have an idea for someone you think has interesting industry insights we should interview? Send us your suggestions for consideration.

Previous Intacct Industry Insights Conversations:

Nemo's Reminder... The Up-Time Benefits of the Cloud

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Olson) — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 22:27:00 +0000

Digging out from 'Nemo'

Each new natural disaster -- such as recent monster winter storm Nemo -- seems to stir up great stories about how companies were able to keep their businesses running despite the potential for horrible disruption. Many of these stories revolve around cloud-based applications, and how they provided access to critical business information from home or from the local coffee shop when employees couldn't make it in to the office.

While these news-hyped stories get all the attention, natural disasters are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to downtime. Heather Clancy over at ZDNet has an interesting post today with data from disaster recovery vendor Quorom looking at the most common causes of SMB downtime:

"While natural disasters often inspire small and midsize businesses (SMBs) to reconsider their data backup and recovery strategies, they aren't the most common cause of downtime.

Hardware and software failures, and human error are far more common, according to data compiled by disaster recovery vendor Quorom from an analysis of its global customer base.

Hardware failure is the biggest culprit, representing about 55 percent of all downtime events at SMBs, while human error accounts for about 22 percent of them, according to its analysis. That compares with about 5 percent for natural disasters.

It takes an average of 30 hours to recover from failures, which can be devastating for a business of any size."

Intacct and other leading cloud vendors discuss this topic with prospective clients all the time. While much of the discussion centers around cost savings of not having to implement, manage, and maintain your own data center in house, there is also the performance aspect of it. Simply put -- typical small and medium-sized businesses don't have the resources to provide the robust infrastructure a cloud vendor can offer.

At Intacct, protecting your financial data is the critical foundation of our mission to earn and maintain your trust. This includes ensuring you have access to your data. As a pure cloud-based system, we benefit from a software architecture designed from the ground up for maximum network performance. As our CTO, Aaron Harris, discussed in a previous post [Cloud Applications Done Right - Part 3: Scalability, Availability, and Performance], we can leverage economies of scale to deliver superior up-time and performance. We can take critical steps most SMBs can't afford to implement to ensure our system is available and operating at peak performance at all times -- from using server pools with load balancing to offering world-class disaster recovery.

As a financial software vendor, whose applications are the heart of a business, we can't afford to skimp. Intacct runs in Fortune 100-class data centers in San Jose, CA, operated by Savvis, and in Sacramento, CA, operated by Herakles. These world-class data centers feature:

7x24x365 monitoring and operations
Multiple fiber trunks
Mirrored RAID storage
Standby servers
Redundant network components
Redundant uninterruptable power supplies
Parallel redundant generators
Full application and data recovery within 24 hours in case of a major disaster

In addition, we've built a specific set of operational characteristics into the system that has helped to ensure the highest levels of privacy, availability, integrity, and security for our customers for more than 12 years. And these aren't just casual commitments, we back these up with our Buy with Confidence℠ guarantee and provide full transparency around our real-time system status at http://us.intacct.com/status. Best of all, this guarantee is provide at no additional cost to our customers.

While a natural disaster such as Nemo might help to remind SMBs about the importance of disaster recovery and system availability, these topics are always top of mind for cloud vendors like Intacct.

Tell Your Story...

If you have an interesting story of how Intacct's anywhere, anytime availability
has helped your business, we would love to hear about it.
Send a note to polson@intacct.com.

Be sure to check out our upcoming events, and follow Intacct on all our social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. To network with other people interested in cloud financial applications, join the Intacct Cloud Accounting group and the CFOInsights group on LinkedIn.

Photo credit: pixbymaia via photopin cc

Improving Business Visibility for Better Analytics in Finance

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Olson) — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 23:53:00 +0000

In a recent article over at EPM Channel, they highlighted some interesting results from their Finance 360° Insight Survey, which looks at where Finance is delivering game-changing value, where they are not, and what can be done about it. Two of the items that really caught my attention were:

While half (50%) of the senior finance executives polled believe that Finance can deliver “game changing” decision support, less than 15% say that’s what is actually being delivered today. And 10% rate decision support as “Unsatisfactory” or even a “Failure”.
An overwhelming 70% of senior finance executives said they know Finance spends too much time on mechanics, too little on analysis.

[Download the full report here - free registration required]

I'm not exactly sure why the numbers surprise me. The reporting and analysis-focused sessions at our annual customer and partner conference are always packed. You can never learn enough about ways to improve your business analytics and finance teams understand they need to spend more time on this. It is through access to increased business insight that finance teams can go from being "bean counters" to being true business advisors for decision support.

Intacct customers consistently praise the increased business insight they receive once they switch to our cloud financial applications. Whether they outgrew QuickBooks or moved from outdated, on-premises mid-market software from the likes of Microsoft and Sage, the story is the same. In their previous financial system, they were typically bogged down by time-consuming data re-entry, exporting of data to other systems like Excel, or struggling against a lack of flexibility in creating the reports they actually need to make informed decisions.

Take for example Signal 88 Security. In a recent case study, Signal 88’s revealed its corporate finance team saves over 20 person-hours each week using Intacct that were previously spent manually creating franchise-level reports for cash balance, payroll, invoices, and accounts receivables. These reports are now populated and shared easily using Intacct. Furthermore, franchise owners can log into Intacct at any time to view reports and dashboards for their entity – a powerful benefit for the many owners who operate their security businesses during nighttime hours.

Signal 88 Security's CFO, Laura Vodvarka, shared: “Now that we have greater transparency and don’t need to worry so much about time-consuming data entry, invoicing, and reporting, we can do more profitability analyses for our franchises. Intacct helps us advise them on all kinds of financial best practices, such as where they can grow and how they can adjust invoice terms and timing to improve cash flow.”

Another good example is The Knowland Group. Knowland’s leadership team regularly reviews executive dashboards in Intacct that summarize the profitability of the organization, as well as general finance overview reports that highlight bank account balances and aging cash flow for daily financial management. The finance team easily modified Intacct’s wide variety of pre-built reports to create collection and transaction reports for specific accounts. In addition, Intacct’s multi-dimensional general ledger tracks key attributes for all data and transactions, making it easy to provide every manager in the company with their own personalized dashboard to view detailed transaction information to help them make decisions for their department or location.

Jeff Haslow, CFO at The Knowland Group, commented in their recent profile: “With Intacct, we now have access to real-time financial data from anywhere, so we can look at our profitability, collections, budget vs. actuals, you name it. Our senior management team can see what’s going on in different departments at any given time, and make decisions to change direction or curtail activities based on budget assessments or other key financial information.”

There are plenty of additional examples. Here is a good video featuring several other customers talking about the benefits of using Intacct's reporting and analytics to see their business in new ways:

[View the video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rot5h2Slmg]

In the end, it is about having a financial system that gives use easy access to the data, metrics, reports, and dashboards to analyze the business and find ways to make improvements. If you want to learn more about Intacct's reporting and analytics capabilities, I would encourage you to attend our upcoming educational webinars.

Be sure to follow Intacct on all our social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. To network with other people interested in cloud financial applications, join the Intacct Cloud Accounting group and the CFOInsights group on LinkedIn.

Industry Insights - A Conversation with John Dillon

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Olson) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 19:06:00 +0000

John Dillon

For our latest Intacct Industry Insights post we interviewed John Dillon, an Intacct Board Member and the CEO of Engine Yard, a San Francisco-based application platform as a service provider. John has 30 years of experience building successful technology companies, including serving as President and CEO of Hyperion Solutions, CEO of salesforce.com, and CEO of Navis, LLC. He started his career as a systems engineer for EDS and held sales management positions at various high tech companies including Oracle Corporation. John holds a B.S. in engineering from the United States Naval Academy and an MBA from Golden Gate University. He served on active duty in the nuclear submarine service for five years before beginning his civilian career.

Our conversation with John covered topics including where to host cloud-based applications, trends in cloud computing, and the changing role of IT. Here are the highlights…

INTACCT: Engine Yard is a platform as a service provider. Are there different variations of that term in the market? Where does your company fit in?

JOHN DILLON: We focus on helping developers design, build, deploy, and manage applications in the cloud. We have 2,500 customers in 58 countries. Our company has been doing this longer than anyone else and we focus on orchestrating everything for developers. We run our service on top of third-party cloud providers such as Amazon, although we can work with pretty much any provider. Initially, we were focused on Ruby on Rails, but we have also added PHP and Node.js.

INTACCT: What are the top considerations for IT and developers today, when determining where to host their apps?

JD: Companies need a commercial grade product to build reliable and scalable apps that change all the time. Our job is to make sure all the pieces in the stack work together so the development team doesn't have to worry about infrastructure. Developers use our service to eliminate headaches, time, and expense, so they can focus on creating killer apps. Managing an application platform requires skills that aren't all that common and outsourcing this area allows developers to focus on design and writing code without distractions.

INTACCT: What are some of the important trends you think we’ll see in cloud technology for 2013?

JD: This market is happening very fast. We are re-engineering and upgrading everything in the application stack with cloud technologies. The question should be, what isn't going to change? Right now we are experiencing the most explosive growth opportunity in 30 years because of connectivity, low-cost computing power, data centers at your fingertips, and the fact that people can build apps from anywhere. There is so much unmet demand in the industrial and consumer population. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for investment in data center technology, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and other tools that have historically been available in the on- premise world. All of those technologies are being redeveloped now by start-ups.

INTACCT: How long will it really take for enterprises to make the switch to cloud computing? Many of them are still nurturing their legacy applications.

JD: There's no point in ripping out something that is working well. But if you're looking at new applications, it's a great opportunity to use SaaS. It's been proven that modern, cloud applications can run more securely and reliably than internal applications. Consumers are also much more comfortable using these apps to manage their personal lives. Cloud vendors are more committed to working with you along the way instead of just taking all your money upfront. All that equipment inside companies is so expensive to buy and maintain, and that all goes away with SaaS. Large companies are building whole new app stores where employees just pick an app from the menu. At the same time, we're not going to shut down all the data centers. For those large companies that already have the infrastructure and personnel, it's going to be a slower transition.

INTACCT: You've held leadership positions at some very large, prominent tech companies. What lessons have they offered you to be successful at Engine Yard?

JD: It’s important to have a sense of urgency about everything we do. We have to make critical decisions to hire the right people, build the right product, and get it to market before our competitors. We also make sure we have a relentless focus on providing value to customers. That’s the only reason you’re in business, and you can never lose sight of it.

INTACCT: With SaaS and the Cloud, internal IT departments are undergoing considerable organizational change. What is the key value IT people offer today to their companies?

JD: There’s an opportunity for IT to partner with business managers and increase innovation. By embracing the cloud, IT groups can provide more resources at lower costs and in shorter time frames The company can accelerate the pace at which it releases new products and services, which will drive higher customer satisfaction and engagement.

INTACCT: Now a few questions just for fun…

If you weren't working in your current role, what would you be doing?

JD: I’d want to open a chain of small boutique local food stores.

If you could go back in time, what year would you visit? And why?

JD: I’d go back to the late 1950’s in New York City. It was a place full of energy and new ideas where business, art and culture were changing the world―much like Cloud is today.

What is your favorite restaurant in San Francisco?

JD: Boulevard.

If you want to stay connected to John, be sure to follow him on Twitter (@johndillon). You can also follow Intacct on all our social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. To network with other people interested in cloud financial applications, join the Intacct Cloud Accounting group and the CFOInsights group on LinkedIn.

Do you have an idea for someone you think has interesting industry insights we should interview? Send us your suggestions for consideration.

Previous Intacct Industry Insights Conversations:

Potential Church: Improving Efficiency with Intacct

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Olson) — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 23:05:00 +0000

Nonprofit organizations are one many vertical markets where Intacct really shines. Last week, we issued a press release on White Ribbon Alliance and the success they've seen moving to Intacct’s cloud financial applications. This week, we have a new story to highlight – a case study on Potential Church (www.potentialchurch.com). This is an organization that currently uses Intacct across 13 church locations, cutting its monthly close process in half and saving around $80,000 a year in financial staffing costs from improved efficiency compared with its previous financial software.

Intacct does a great job of helping nonprofits, especially faith-based organizations of all types, manage cash, provide visibility to management, and stick to strict budgets. In the case of Potential Church, they previously used QuickBooks to support their accounts payable process, invoices, and deposits, but found that the system just could not keep up with the organization’s needs as it grew.

Potential Church evaluated several new options, including Microsoft Dynamics, before selecting Intacct as its new financial system. After just a six-week implementation, Potential Church saw immediate improvements in its accounting processes. With Intacct, the church reduced time spent on monthly close by half, Accounts Payable processing by one third, and weekly revenue recognition from five days to one.

Reggie Alexis, controller at Potential Church, noted: “Rather than constantly struggling to keep up with incoming requests for data and specific reports, we now consistently report financials in a timely manner and feel confident that we can respond to any new request easily.”

Intacct also helps with fund accounting and enables church staff to better manage budgets for new programs. With the organization’s annual women’s conference, for example, the program team is able to map costs to actual funds coming in from registrations – helping them track their expenses to plan, and avoid overspending on the event before funds have been raised.

Potential Chuch has extended the value of Intacct even further by integrating the system with other key business applications. For example, the church leverages the pre-built integrations between Intacct and Bill.com for paperless e-payments, ADP for payroll, and ExpenseCloud for expense reporting.

Added Reggie Alexis, "Because of our streamlined processes, our existing finance staff is in a great position to support Potential Church even as we add another ten campuses or so. As a matter of fact, we were able to reduce our accounting staff by one and avoid another full-time hire, saving us approximately $80,000 each year as a result of the extreme efficiencies we've gained with Intacct.”

Want to read more about Potential Church’s success with Intacct? Download the full case study here. To learn more about how Intacct helps nonprofits streamline financial processes and improve performance, I encourage you to attend one of the upcoming Intacct webinars.

The Knowland Group: Streamlining Processes and Gaining Insight with Intacct

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Olson) — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 18:00:00 +0000

Intacct launched a new customer case study this morning on The Knowland Group, a leading provider of business development solutions for the hospitality industry. The Knowland Group is another great example of a company that had outgrown the capabilities of QuickBooks and graduated to Intacct's cloud financial applications. Knowland’s finance team had been using four instances of QuickBooks, and struggled to keep up with the company’s ongoing business expansion. It took three people 2-3 days per month to consolidate financial data from Knowland’s three entities without a common, integrated chart of accounts or transaction support for remote locations.

This is a story we hear often with rapidly growing companies -- they eventually reach a point where they need a more robust financial system. In Knowland's case, the finance team specifically wanted software that could streamline revenue recognition, multi-entity management, foreign currency transactions, inter-company transaction reconciliation, and reporting.

The Knowland Group evaluated several options, including NetSuite, before selecting Intacct as its new financial system. Just six weeks after starting its implementation, over thirty Knowland employees began using Intacct to streamline and improve important workflows and processes – from the monthly close, to billing over 2,000 customers and receiving over 2,000 payments per month, to financial reporting. The move to Intacct has already enabled The Knowland Group to shorten its monthly close time by 15 days every month.

Intacct’s seamless integration with other key business systems has also provided significant time savings and enabled the company to connect its various best-in-class business applications. Knowland has connected Intacct to Adaptive Planning for budgeting, Sererra applications for fixed assets and collections, ADP for human resources, TPro for credit card processing, and even Silicon Valley Bank’s lockbox service, which imports Knowland’s banking data into Intacct.

Improved financial visibility was also a huge benefit from the move to Intacct. Knowland’s leadership team regularly reviews executive dashboards that summarize the profitability of the organization, as well as general finance overview reports that highlight bank account balances and aging cash flow for daily financial management.

As Knowland's CFO, Jeff Haslow, notes: “The best thing about Intacct is its flexibility. It can handle the large amount of data we have and the large amount we will continue to add, while providing the multi-entity composition and the foreign currencies we require, so that we can grow without pain. Thanks to Intacct, our finance team has been able to keep up with the company’s rapid growth without increasing headcount.”

Want to read more about The Knowland Group's success with Intacct? Download the full case study here.

Industry Insights – A Conversation with Greg Sands

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Olson) — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 20:38:00 +0000

Greg Sands

For our first Intacct Industry Insights post of 2013, we interviewed Greg Sands. He is the founder and managing partner of Costanoa Venture Capital, a $100M early stage investor in cloud-based services that leverage data and analytics to solve real problems for businesses and consumers. Greg has many years of experience as a successful investor at Sutter Hill Ventures where he was an early investor in Intacct, as well as companies such as Merced Systems, QuinStreet, Feedburner, and AllBusiness. Prior to Sutter Hill, Greg was the first product manager at Netscape Communications, wrote the initial business plan, and coined the name Netscape. He currently serves on the boards of DemandBase, Guardian Analytics, Inflection, Intacct, LinkSmart, QuinStreet, and Return Path.

Our conversation with Greg focused on strategies for growing Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses, big data, and the future of cloud financial systems. Here are the highlights…

INTACCT: You've discussed freemium as a smart strategy for growing SaaS businesses? Why so?

GREG SANDS: A core challenge for SaaS companies is building awareness and generating high-quality leads. We are living in a world where the old-fashioned tactics of top-down selling just don't work well enough anymore. Start-ups need to build a product that attracts users and gives them a way to interact with the software and collaborate with others in the community. This is helpful for the vendor, because early on, they can see if the product is doing useful work and has so-called “product market fit.” But it is also a really good way to build a scalable revenue model. It forces you to be “product first” and if you can deliver value for users and build the paid user base you can build a tremendous business. To make it work, the app has to be self-provisioning and developed for end users not buyers.

INTACCT: I imagine that is pretty hard to do.

GS: Yes, but it's an interesting model for start-ups because it forces the company to build high quality products. The core idea is that at an early stage, the company should focus on building great products that solve real problems for their users and on optimizing product market fit. This allows the team to learn critical lessons about the market and adapt quickly. Another major benefit is lower-cost marketing. So much of SaaS start-up capital is spent on sales and marketing. If a company can achieve product market fit early on, it will also reduce long-term sales and marketing costs. The mindset is: product first, sales and marketing second.

INTACCT: Does the freemium model pose risks for developing a profitable pricing model later?

GS: No, I don’t think so. It just means you need to do a stellar job on the paid product. If you know your market and your long-term users, this can work well. However, if you build a down-market freemium product for smaller companies but know that paying customers will be large enterprise accounts, it's a mismatch. It'll be extremely difficult to build enough value on top of the product for enterprise customers. Instead, build the freemium product for the individual user within the enterprise, and when he or she wants to add features or collaborate with their peers, they need to upgrade to the paid version. There are many good examples of this model, such as Yammer (now owned by Microsoft), DropBox, or Risk I/O in which Costanoa is an investor.

INTACCT: Big Data is another focus of yours. A lot of people think Big Data is yet one more moniker for BI. How do you counter that?

GS: The data volumes in our world today are huge. These volumes are at a much different scale than 10 or 20 years ago. When we were working on launching Netscape, it was clear even then that "Internet scale" was going to be a lot bigger than enterprise scale computing. Enterprise BI tools were beginning to break back then. Over the past several years, social and mobile has dramatically increased scale again and that has led to the creation of new sets of tools for storing and managing all this data. Tools like Hadoop and MapReduce are examples of these new tools.

INTACCT: What is Costanoa looking for in Big Data vendors?

GS: I like to talk about “applied big data” which is the concept that companies can solve new business problems using these technologies. How can we aggregate, curate and originate new and proprietary data, leverage the Big Data platforms and use them to drive business value? A canonical example is Demand Base which is revolutionizing Business-to Business marketing. The company has created a system that attaches business information to IP addresses, so when users visit your site, you can optimize your messages to them based on their company, company size or sector. If someone is coming to you from a small company, your offerings and messages will be different than if they are coming from the Procter & Gamble IP. B-to-B marketing is incredibly inefficient. It’s hard to drive traffic to your site, hard to convert users to leads and hard to convert leads to sales. Big Data technologies like DemandBase applied to this problem can double conversion rates at each step of the process, but B-to-B marketing is just one example of a process where Applied Big Data can change the game.

INTACCT: How do you define a successful start-up, especially a cloud company?

GS: It begins with finding a problem and talking to users. If you can create value for users, especially business users, you can usually build a pretty interesting company. Revenue, profits and business value come from focusing on users and product first.

INTACCT: What changes do you see for the cloud financial sector moving forward?

GS: The world is definitely moving to cloud financials, across companies of all sizes. There is no reason for anyone to have an on-premises financial product, especially in the mid-market Cloud firms eclipse on-premises when it comes to collaboration and features important to CPAs. They can deliver better up-time and security than most internal systems. One thing Intacct has done which is really innovative is building effective channel relationships. They have sought to establish partnerships with companies in local markets. Customers still need people on the ground to help deploy their solution. SaaS has been a direct-sell model traditionally, but the Intacct channel model is one that I think others will follow.

INTACCT: The VC industry has taken a beating in the last few years. Is this a risky time to launch a new fund?

GS: It’s always a risky time to launch a new VC fund—as for any new company. On the other hand, I would say right now is an incredible time of innovation. There have been enough challenges in the VC world that there is less competition now than in years past, so that's an advantage. The top challenge still is to find really great entrepreneurs, and fortunately, there is no shortage of talented people in these newer areas. The SaaS market is growing very quickly. We are still early in the days of finding useful implications of applied big data and the “consumerization of IT” is still developing too. These are substantial trends and there should be many companies created and some big ones built in these categories in the coming years.

INTACCT: Now, how about a couple questions just for fun…

There's a lot of natural beauty in the Bay Area. Where's your favorite place to enjoy the outdoors?

GS: Almost anywhere on my bike. I love riding the hills of the peninsula. Once you get to the backside of the Santa Cruz Mountains, it’s like being in a different world. Tunitas Creek and West Alpine are as good cycling as anywhere.

What is the best movie you’ve enjoyed lately?

GS: I don’t watch movies very often, but did get out recently to see Argo, which I thought was great. Historical fiction is a favorite genre in books and movies but sometimes makes it difficult to separate reality from fiction.

The President’s coming for dinner. What’s on the menu?

GS: I’m calling Sarah Piccolo to come cater. She’s picking up fresh salmon in Bolinas, and making a kale salad with some Morrocan couscous. It’s what she did when we hosted the National Champions Stanford Women’s Soccer team for dinner last year. If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for the President. He doesn’t want me to cook.

If you want to stay connected to Greg, be sure to follow him on Twitter (@gsands) and follow the Costanoa Venture Capital blog. You can also follow Intacct on all our social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. To network with other people interested in cloud financial applications, join the Intacct Cloud Accounting group and the CFOInsights group on LinkedIn.

Do you have an idea for someone you think has interesting industry insights we should interview? Send us your suggestions for consideration.

Previous Intacct Industry Insights Conversations:

Intacct Food Drive... It's the Home Stretch

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Olson) — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 18:37:00 +0000

Since just after Thanksgiving, Intacct has been running a food drive for the Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties. We're now in the home stretch. This is the final week we will be collecting food and monetary donations. As with our food drives from past years, this has been a great experience for the entire Intacct team. I am once again impressed with the generosity of Intacct employees and the effort they have put into the cause.

We've already surpassed our total from the last Intacct food drive, but we are still a little short of this year's goal. To date, Intacct employees have collected/donated more than 1,200 pounds of food. We've also donated just shy of 10,000 meals via online cash donations. Even our off-site employees are getting in the spirit, collecting food and donating to their local food banks. Later in the year we'll also go a step further, heading onsite to the food bank warehouse to help sort and process food donations.

Want to join our efforts and help us reach our goals? Why not make donation of your own to the Intacct food drive at http://bit.ly/IntacctFood. Every dollar donated helps to connect hungry children, families, and seniors to the nutritious food they need.

Here's a look at a couple of our filled bins...

Be sure to follow Intacct on all our social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Looking Back at 2012 to Move Forward in 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Olson) — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 15:30:00 +0000

2012 has been a great year for Intacct. We seen outstanding growth and we are well positioned for continued growth in 2013. The Intacct partner program is also expanding rapidly, adding several new Top 100 firms in 2012. Meanwhile, Intacct is enabling our customers to grow and take their businesses to new heights -- increasing finance team productivity and effectiveness without the need for additional hiring.

As we head toward the new year, we wanted to take a quick look back at some of our most popular blog posts from 2012...

Back on Valentine's Day, we took a look at "The Marriage of Front Office and Back Office Applications." In this post, we looked at the powerful connection between two best of breed applications - Salesforce CRM and Intacct. This post included some great results from the CFO of RedVision Systems. Even though the company grew more than 150% since implementing Intacct, they haven't had to add any finance staff.

In March, we looked at "Managing Your Global Business with Intacct." Some of the greatest financial management and accounting challenges arise within multinational organizations that must contend with complex regulatory frameworks, geographies, laws, currencies, and other issues. It is important to have a financial management system designed not only to handle this complexity, but ideally, to shield the finance team from that complexity.

March was also the month we looked at the five steps to buying cloud financials:

One of most popular and most read posts covered "The Power of Multi-Dimensional Reporting for Finance." In that post, we discussed how transforming your finance organization from just logging the numbers to becoming a strategic business resource requires unlocking the power of your business data, to gain faster time to insight and improved performance across all of your business units.

One of my favorite posts looked at going "From QuickBooks to Successful IPO and Beyond with Intacct." I love posts about customer success. Several Intacct customers had highly successful IPOs in 2012, and it was great to see them thrive using Intacct.

Along those same lines, we had a great post on "Helping Nonprofits Reduce Costs and Improve Financial Visibility." From charities, trade/membership associations, and cultural institutions to charter schools and faith-based organizations, nonprofits are moving their financial applications to the cloud to gain better control over their finances, improve operations, increase transparency and minimize costs.

2012 also saw the launch of our very popular "Intacct Industry Insights" blog series. We sat down with a variety of industry influencers to get their take on everything from cloud computing and SMB finance trends to accounting best practices and channel strategies. During the year, we spoke with Cindy Jutras, Seth Fineberg, Thomas Wailgum, Charles Hylan, Marc Rosenberg, Wayne Schulz, Mark Gillingham, Isaac O'Bannon, Dennis Howlett, Randy Johnston, Bob Anderson, Doug Sleeter, Vinnie Mirchandani, Rick Telberg, Erik Asgeirsson, Marshal Kushniruk, Alan Radding, Rhianna Collier, Frank Scavo, Ben Kepes, Kathy Yakal, Darren Root, Laurie McCabe, Daniel Hood, Jeff Kaplan, and Mike Vizard.

Another popular series of posts was from Aaron Harris, Intacct's CTO, looking at "Cloud Applications Done Right." Aaron is just getting started on the series, sharing his first four posts looking at the best practices and guidance for building and operating cloud applications:

We hope you have found at least some of our most popular posts from 2012 helpful. We have a bunch of great stuff planned for 2013 -- including new Industry Insights posts, the continuation of Aaron's "Cloud Applications Done Right" series, and several new CFO Insights posts (be sure to join our new CFOInsights group on LinkedIn).

If you haven't already done so, be sure to subscribe and get our blog posts delivered via email (look for the subscription box on the left side of this page near the top). You can also follow Intacct on all our social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Happy New Year!

How to Find a Sustainable Competitive Advantage

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Olson) — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 21:08:00 +0000

Back in October, we invited Geoff Colvin to speak at Intacct Advantage 2012. His keynote was one of the best sessions I've attended at a conference in many years. Through a mixture of humor and business insight, Geoff walked through how he sees the best companies growing and winning in today's tough economic environment.

If you aren't familiar with Geoff Colvin, he is an award-winning thinker, author, broadcaster, and speaker on today's most significant trends in business. Geoff has an impressive background, serving as a longtime editor and columnist for FORTUNE and interviewing some of world's top executives during his career.

In his session at Intacct Advantage 2012, Geoff talks about ways to find a sustainable competitive advantage. He outline four key things the smartest companies do:

Innovate their business model
Manage for value
Build their human capital
Get radically customer-centric

If you have some time, I've provided a link to the video of his keynote address below. It is well worth listening to what Geoff has to say. It will get you thinking about what you could be doing at your company to gain a competitive advantage.

View the video on YouTube: http://youtu.be/fGVbqsg9QlQ

Geoff provides this thought about successful companies near the end of the video, stating: "What they are doing often seems contrarian... They are changing their business in the way that other people are not. They are putting money into things that others companies are not putting money into right now... This is what the most effective, successful, growing companies are doing today. They're winning." He adds: "Think of it this way - even in this challenging, difficult environment, some companies are going to grow and win... it might as well be you!"

Want to read more insights from Geoff Colvin? Check out his recent articles. If you haven't done so already, be sure to follow Intacct on all our social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You can also join our new CFOInsights group on LinkedIn - it's a great place to network with other finance executives.

Image: 123RF Stock Photos

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Cloud Applications Done Right - Part 4: Risk Management and User Guidance

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Harris) — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 21:57:00 +0000

In Part 3 of this blog series, I presented my take on how to overcome the scalability, availability, and performance arguments against cloud applications. First, I talked about using server pools to handle large workloads and distribute different types of work across separate servers to protect thousands of users from the one trying to run a ten thousand page general ledger detail report. The second piece of my argument highlighted the unique position that cloud vendors find themselves in – as both the provider and the operator of the application. With this perspective they can better manage computing resources, design features to take advantage of specific server configurations, and optimize their processing power. Today, we will complete this thought by looking at two more ways to ensure reliability: managing risk to maximize uptime and training users to optimize their application’s performance.

Cloud users expect their applications to be available – always. Managing that expectation comes down to managing risk. And managing risk requires simplicity. Technology is moving forward at an incredibly rapid pace. At Intacct, we have lots of opportunities to incorporate promising technology to incrementally improve performance or scalability, but if that technology adds even the slightest increase in complexity, we avoid it because it increases risk and adds cost.

One of my favorite examples of this conundrum is storage area networks (SANs). At scale, SANs offer very compelling performance improvements and may even reduce overall storage costs. However, SANs require specialized skills to operate and are incredibly complex to implement. So what happens when the SAN goes down? The system goes down… for everyone. And, because SANs require sophisticated skills and knowledge to operate, bringing that SAN back to life may not be a trivial exercise. For these reasons, at Intacct we prefer good old-fashioned RAID arrays attached to our servers. When disks fail, we simply replace them – at our convenience. We’ve never had a single minute of down time caused by a hard drive failure.

The final way to improve performance is to simply be smart. Users need to know how to use the system in a way that will give them the best result. But you have to do two things to make this work:

Make sure that the best result is far better than what they would otherwise get running the system locally.
You have to teach them how to get it.

Let’s take the large report example again. If a user really wants a ten thousand page general ledger detail report, they can go into their web browser and run the report expecting Intacct to return the results. But if that happens, the browser would likely crash or time out waiting for the report, causing lots of frustration. So, to proactively educate our users on how to get the best result, Intacct will actually kill the report early and give the user a message telling them it would be better to run this particular report “offline.” When this happens, we route the job to the special large report servers and process it safely and confidently, while the user is busy doing other activities.

When designed correctly, and when operating at scale, cloud solutions not only provide better availability than their on-premises alternatives, but they also provide better scalability and performance. As a first priority, we protect the system from any abuses from a single user, but we also have a tremendous pool of resources available to that single user to run reports or process jobs that are beyond the ability of a single local server. That ten thousand page general ledger detail report is probably impossible to obtain in a comparable on-premises system – especially if you want to allow other users to process invoices while that report is running.

We’ve come a long way at Intacct in overcoming the arguments of cloud applications and proving that scalability, availability, and performance are not concerns, but some of our biggest strengths. Our availability consistently exceeds 99.99% and we’re continuously pushing the envelope on performance. And happily, we’ve removed those cameras from the data center I mentioned last time. Nothing provides greater comfort than simply making sure the system is always up. [See Intacct's Buy with Confidence guarantee.]

I look forward to your comments and feel free to follow me on Twitter (@aaron_r_harris). You can also follow Intacct on all our social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. To network with other people interested in cloud financial applications, be sure to join the Intacct Cloud Accounting group on LinkedIn.

Read Previous Posts in the "Cloud Applications Done Right" Series:

photo credit: pr_ip via photopin

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Industry Insights – A Conversation with Cindy Jutras

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Olson) — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 20:29:00 +0000

Cindy Jutras

This week’s Intacct Industry Insights conversation is with Cindy Jutras, an expert in analyzing the impact of enterprise applications on business performance. Cindy runs her own analyst and research firm, Mint Jutras, from Windham, New Hampshire. She has more than 35 years of corporate experience in manufacturing, supply chain, customer service, and business performance management, including senior executive roles with Aberdeen Group, SSA Global and interBiz, a former business unit of Computer Associates.

Our conversation with Cindy covered trends in the ERP industry, predictions for the financial applications space, and lessons SMBs can take from the enterprise, among other things. Here are the highlights…

INTACCT: What are your predictions for the ERP industry in 2013?

CINDY JUTRAS: Several trends that began in the past year or two are beginning to gain momentum, and one of them is the willingness to consider apps in the cloud. The expectation is that people should be able to access business applications anywhere from the Web, so there will be more acceptance of the multi-tenant SaaS model, such as Intacct. The desire for cloud applications will also be fueled by the increasing demand for accessing enterprise data on mobile devices. Executives want to access the data on their own now, and ask specific questions while using their tablet. Companies that don’t get on the ball with more modern infrastructures incorporating mobility and the cloud will be left behind because they won’t be able to deal with the growing volumes of data.

In social media, while senior execs aren't typically on Twitter and Facebook, they do want the level of collaboration and visibility that social technologies can bring. This is especially true on the customer engagement side. That may drive them to say they want to be able to handle unstructured data, which tends not to reside internally and will significantly increase volumes.

INTACCT: How about predictions for financial and accounting apps specifically?

CJ: CFOs will need to do forecasting, planning, and monitoring at a more granular level than ever before. This might involve forecasting by product line, customer, geography, and other variables, and then combining these data points together to make well-informed decisions. This is a requirement to cope with the growing level of competition and complexity in their businesses. The global nature of business is creating this demand for deeper insight. Most people still make decisions based on a gut feeling, but that has to be supported by real data today. Another must-have is interoperability around electronic invoicing and payments, because customers and suppliers are demanding it.

INTACCT: What can enterprise software vendors learn from consumer and Web software providers?

CJ: One thing I hear from the successful big companies is that they finally understand that they need to listen to their customers. Small firms do that naturally, while bigger vendors are realizing that they need an intimacy with customers that they have never had before, in order to make the best strategic decisions. So they're spending more time and effort on their channels, and senior management is spending more time with customers, including the small and medium enterprise customers. Major vendors like SAP know that the really big companies, the Fortune 500 customers, are pretty saturated. Those companies made their investments in enterprise software years ago, and they are not going to change them out soon. It's interesting that for SAP, about 80% of their business comes from small and medium customers, which they define as $500M and below.

INTACCT: What lessons can SMBs take from the enterprise, regarding best practices in software deployments?

CJ: Look to the software and your solution provider to help you define the best practices and don’t try to reinvent the wheel in your implementation. If you do, you’ll have shorter deployment times and probably, faster ROI. Everyone likes to think they are unique in how they run their business, but how different is accounts payable from company to company? If the vendor is promoting a set of processes and practices, it's likely that they learned them from doing many long consulting engagements at large enterprises. Those lessons can be applied down market. The problem sometimes in small companies is that creativity is rewarded, so accepting a proven practice isn't viewed as creative. But creativity in deploying financial software is not the best way to approach innovation.

INTACCT: How can finance departments make better use of IT analyst services as they are navigating change?

CJ: I try to differentiate myself by writing for the end user who doesn't speak tech and doesn't know all the ins and outs of the big companies. A lot of the other analysts will crank out a nice, well-researched brief that's like a New Yorker giving directions: it's only helpful if you know where you're going! The average end-user does not have the time, or the inclination, to keep up with all the trends and terminology; my job is to translate that for them and help them understand the impact of technology on their business.

INTACCT: How has the role of the IT analyst changed over the years?

CJ: In my experience from being an analyst for the past seven years, we can’t just speak to the IT department anymore; we need to go to the business user. Analysts need to understand the business problem and determine how they can solve it. It's really not about proving how smart you are, but about helping users and companies. Users are demanding more because the consumer apps are so easy to use, but they still don’t necessarily know what they want.

INTACCT: Now, here are a couple questions just for fun…

How do you like to unwind?

CJ: I probably have more hobbies than most, so I have lots of different avenues. I like to describe myself as “black, green, and blue.” I am a black belt (actually, I have three in different styles of martial arts), with a green thumb, who has won blue ribbons for my cooking. A reconstructed knee keeps me from much physical martial arts training, but I stay involved with the cultural arts including Japanese calligraphy and sumi (black ink) painting.

What's on the menu of a perfect dinner, and who's joining you?

CJ: A perfect dinner is at least four to five courses, and always includes soup. The menu will vary, but being half Italian, is likely to also include pasta. In the summer in New England, it will include vegetables from my garden. I am known by the adults in town as “the soup lady” and by the kids as “the cookie lady.” Who’s coming? A small group of close friends or family.

What do you do when you need a break from the New England winter?

CJ: I don’t really. I love all the seasons, including winter.

If you want to stay connected to Cindy, be sure to follow her on Twitter (@ERP_cindyjutras) and read her posts on the Mint Jutras blog. You can also follow Intacct on all our social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Be sure to join the Intacct Cloud Accounting group on LinkedIn to network with other people interested in cloud financial applications.

Do you have an idea for someone you think has interesting industry insights we should interview? Send us your suggestions for consideration.

Previous Intacct Industry Insights Conversations:

Cloud Applications Done Right - Part 3: Scalability, Availability, and Performance

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron Harris) — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 18:39:00 +0000

This is the third post in my series on cloud applications done right. In previous posts [Part 1 and Part 2], I talked about how multi-tenant cloud solutions are less expensive, more secure, and allow for more powerful customization than their on-premises alternatives. These outcomes often surprise buyers who may think they are compromising on these factors in order to get a cloud solution with the convenience of anytime, anywhere access. However, those same buyers do expect cloud solutions to be more stable and reliable than their on-premises alternatives. I can easily prove cloud solutions are more reliable while also being more cost effective, but it’s difficult to replace the sense of security buyers feel with an on-premises solution knowing that Bob, the IT guy, is a phone call away when the server goes down.

In the earliest days of Intacct, we tried addressing this problem by putting web cams in our data centers. I’m not kidding. The idea was that if you can see the actual servers containing your data, you would feel more comfortable. But here’s the rub: the psychology behind cloud solutions requires the buyer to let go of certain aspects of control. In exchange for letting go of that control, they expect to not have to think about it – they expect the system to simply work.

So the bar we have to meet for scalability, availability, and performance is substantially higher than it would be for an on-premises solution - and we have to essentially offer zero downtime. This is possibly the most challenging design problem for cloud vendors. At any given time, we may have tens of thousands of active users all sharing a common pool of resources. How do you allow the corporate controller to run a ten thousand-page general ledger detail report while hundreds of other innocent users file expense reports, approve purchase orders, or look at dashboards? Better yet, how do you allow a programmer to run parallel processes loading invoices via Web Services without taking all those available processes away from other users? We call this protecting the 10,000 from the one.

The answers are surprisingly simple. Through economies of scale, Intacct is able to invest in pools of resources dedicated to specific types of activities. In the case of the corporate controller trying to run a very large report, Intacct routes that particular request to a pool of servers dedicated to large reports. What’s nice about very large reports is users don’t expect immediate results; they just want to get them in a reasonable amount of time. In this case, Intacct queues up the report and runs it from a server configured to handle very large amounts of data reliably. Because it’s queued, Intacct can manage the load based on other demands of the system and allocate a fair amount of resources across companies. If we find that we’re not delivering reports in a timely manner, we simply add more servers to the pool.

Mimicking this strategy would be very difficult for a local IT shop to manage. Bob would need to either buy a bigger server or add a second one. But in both cases, the systems would not know how to balance or route transaction processing requests vs. large report requests to take advantage of the server configuration.

This brings me to the second answer. Cloud vendors design their solutions under the expectation that they are both the provider and the operator of their applications. Their features are designed, not for some arbitrary server configuration, but for a specific pool of computing resources that does nothing but run the applications designed for it. This marriage of application and data center design leads to an operation optimized to handle many thousands of concurrent requests, from simple transaction processing to very large report requests.

In Intacct’s case, we’ve created pools of servers dedicated to several different types of activity. We have web servers handling requests from our browser-based user interface, a pool of servers handling “offline” requests (like large runs of scheduled invoices), a pool of servers running large reports, and a pool of servers dedicated to web services API calls. We also have pools of servers that do nothing more than cache information so it’s readily accessible to any pool of servers and reduces load across the entire operation.

Load balancing to help with performance optimization.

Sound complex? Actually, it’s quite simple. All of these servers are identical. They all run the same operating system (Linux, in our case), have similar hardware configurations, and run the same code. In production mode, we ask each server to assume a personality and a different job. The advantage comes when we see that one pool of servers needs more workers, we simply ask one of the other servers to assume a different personality.

With these design considerations, we are able to distribute and prioritize requests to handle the peaks and valleys of our workload. However, there’s more to it than just server pools. Check back next week for the second half of this topic, when we tackle the intangibles of scalability, availability and performance in cloud applications: risk management and user guidance.

I look forward to your comments and feel free to follow me on Twitter (@aaron_r_harris). You can also follow Intacct on all our social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. To network with other people interested in cloud financial applications, be sure to join the Intacct Cloud Accounting group on LinkedIn .

Industry Insights – A Conversation with Seth Fineberg

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Olson) — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 18:53:00 +0000

Seth Fineberg

The week’s Intacct Industry Insights conversation is with Seth Fineberg, the technology editor of Accounting Today and Editor in Chief of AccountingTechnology.com. Seth has been a financial and business journalist for the past 20 years and served as associate editor for Accounting Today from 2002-2004. He was also Managing Editor of ChannelSeven.com, one of the first online publications to focus on interactive advertising and marketing. Seth has also written articles for The New York Times, Reuters Newswire, AdAge Magazine, Adweek Magazine, iMarketing News, Fortune Small Business, CNNfn, B2B Magazine, Media Magazine, Electronic Media, and many others.

Our conversation with Seth covered top accounting trends for 2013, the role of cloud computing as firms evolve, and technology spending in the coming year. Here are the highlights...

INTACCT: Your Manhattan offices were affected by Hurricane Sandy. How did cloud-based applications play a role in keeping the staff productive?

SETH FINEBERG: Without the cloud, we wouldn't have been able to put out the December issue of Accounting Today or keep our sites and newsletters current. In Battery Park, where our offices are located, the water had come up high enough that it had caused flooding in the building. Fortunately, our disaster recover servers kicked in from an offsite data center, so we could all set up shop from home or wherever and continue to produce content. It was a good wake-up call that businesses cannot keep all of their data and technology in one location. You have to have a backup site. Even though we've had a few hiccups, we were able to continue working and be productive even without access to our office. This was also possible because we use a lot of Web-based applications to run our business, such as Outlook Web Mail, iProduction for our Web site and online versions of our page production system.

INTACCT: What are accountants and other experts you speak with saying about the fiscal cliff?

SF: It's still very divisive and unclear. It’s all coming back to the working middle class. Obama has been stuck on the $250,000 cap for defining wealth, but is this an arbitrary number? It depends so much on your situation--where you live, are you self-employed or receive corporate benefits, your family expenses and so on.

INTACCT: Let's talk a little about accounting firms. What do you see as the top trends for 2013?

SF: Top of the list is that accounting firms are looking beyond delivering tax and compliance services. It's all about client service and staying relevant. Firms are experimenting more with the cloud and paying close attention to their clients’ needs. Beyond quarterly taxes and audit work, firms can do BI on financials and see where clients are competitively speaking, where they are spending and where can they cut back. Another area is in business process outsourcing. Firms are providing valuable work in bookkeeping, payroll, and controller-level activities such as financial planning. So the accounting firm essentially becomes the virtual CFO for a company that doesn't want to invest in hiring that person. This is a service that's in demand right now and also provides recurring revenue streams for the firm.

INTACCT: What IT changes must occur in firms to make that leap?

SF: Bring the IT consultant in when the firm is looking to evolve; he or she can help map a plan for the next five years. This may involve upgrading some of your business systems to enable the transition to a service-oriented firm. Look to IT consultants as an advisor to help grow your business. Changes may come from simple software purchases, while others may involve an overhaul of the firm’s entire IT systems from servers to telecom. Aside from all of that, it’s really not all a technology or IT decision but a practice management decision.

INTACCT: What is the role of the cloud as firms evolve?

SF: The cloud more easily allows accounting firms to try out new business models. Virtualization technology is also critical, because it creates redundancies for disaster planning and enables fast remote connections for employees. This requires some investment to switch from on-premise and legacy systems, but over time it's going to save money. The added expense of new technology is nominal compared to what the firm can gain in revenues from these new full-service areas. They will see client retention increase and revenues. More and more, virtual and cloud technologies are becoming a cost of doing business.

INTACCT: When it comes to technology, are you seeing any propensity by firms and their clients to spend more or to make do with what they have?

SF: There is more pressure today to spend in order to stay competitive. In some firms, 10% of their entire budget is going toward IT next year. There are definitely more firms that are open to change right now, but most of them really need a strategist who can come up with the right plan for the business.

INTACCT: Which specific technologies are being adopted most rapidly right now by accountants?

SF: They are interested in anything that can help them better serve their clients and be more efficient across the board. That could be workflow and document management, portals, collaborative client tools for sharing files and data, online systems for billing and mobile access to practice management systems. Technology that is allowing firms and their clients to work together securely online is an enormous trend. This makes everyone so much more efficient while also tearing down the walls of data so that clients can compete more aggressively and make sound financial decisions.

INTACCT: Now for a few fun questions to help our readers get to know you a little better…

What is your favorite place to go in New York on the weekends?

SF: With the kids: Most museums, Brooklyn Children’s, Natural History, or any of the parks here. Without kids: I have a handful of Asian and Italian restaurants my wife and I love as well as a couple of bars in the neighborhood we still enjoy.

What is the best book you have read lately?

SF: Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. It came out 12 years ago, and I finally got around to reading it. (I am a foodie!)

If you didn't live in New York, you would you like to live….

SF: That’s a tough one, maybe in the Bay Area.

If you want to stay connected to Seth, be sure to follow him on Twitter (@SethTechEditor) and read his articles on AccountingToday.com. You can also follow Intacct on all our social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You can also join the Intacct Cloud Accounting group on LinkedIn to network with other people interested in cloud financial applications.

Do you have interesting industry insights you’d like to share? Do you know someone else that we should interview? Send us your suggestions for consideration.

Previous Intacct Industry Insights Conversations: