by Saeward Schillaci, The Resource Group

Even for a business with perfect accounting systems and easy-to-manage resources, proper accounting takes time and effort. On the other hand, companies with terrible accounting systems find themselves wasting time and troubleshooting issues constantly.

Realistically, most businesses have an accounting system that is somewhere in the grey zone between perfect and terrible. How does your company decide when its accounting system has crossed the line from adequate to inadequate? For most professional services firms, complex accounting requirements make this an especially important question. Allocating resources, budgeting and forecasting, tracking projects, and billing clients can all be particularly difficult for this industry. How do you decide when it’s time to take the leap and look for new accounting software? In our experience working with professional services firms, we’ve noticed certain broad issues that are a symptom of needing new software. Asking yourself these four questions can help you determine if your current software is holding your business back:

1. How long have you used your current accounting software? 

Just like any other technology, accounting software has a shelf life. After about five to ten years, it frequently becomes difficult to get software updates or support, and software compatibility issues often become common. By the time a system has been in use for a while, the sprawl of customizations and workarounds often means that only a few people really know how to work with the software. In addition, if you have outdated software you might be missing out on a lot of awesome new functionality that has become common since your last implementation. If your software is more than five to 10 years old, you should consider something newer.

2. How many different tools do you use for accounting tasks? 

As businesses outgrow their systems, they tend to end up combining a lot of disparate software in order to complete daily tasks. Spreadsheets get more numerous and more complicated, different pieces of software are used for each different function, and a lack of integration ends up demanding manual data entry. All these different tools can create information silos that are confusing, time-intensive, and error prone. With professional services firms, this can be a major hindrance to productivity and service quality. If you use a different tool for each accounting function, think about the potential benefits of implementing an integrated platform.

3. How difficult is customer billing? 

For professional services firms, keeping track of clients and projects is critical to accurate and timely billing. Firms that have inadequate accounting software often experience their monthly billing as a lengthy nightmare. Inefficient billing processes require constant manual intervention to create service descriptions, apply write-offs, meet client invoicing preferences, and ensure that billing matches the project tracking. If your business’s billing system is a major headache, you should look for new accounting software.

4. How much valuable data becomes buried in your systems or spreadsheets? 

Do you regularly use overly complex spreadsheets to make business decisions? Does forecasting and budgeting feel like playing Clue while sharing one pen with six people? In order to be successful, a business needs to access the right data in order to make effective decisions in a timely manner. Information silos, manual budgeting processes, and outdated software can all lead to buried data. In contrast, a good accounting solution will allow your firm to gain insight with real-time data visibility. If you want easier access to better data, you should seek out new software.

Overall, many professional services firms struggle with outdated, complex, error-prone accounting. If your company can be included in those ranks, you’d be wise to start shopping for better accounting software! Feel free to contact us at The Resource Group for more information.

 

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by Saeward Schillaci, The Resource Group

The options for new corporate performance management (CPM) software can be overwhelming and confusing. Many competing solutions proffer similar functionality and nearly identical taglines. How do these products actually differ? Which ones are better? In this blog, we will compare customer ratings and basic features of Solver’s BI360 and four other CPM solutions.  

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by Gary Volland, The Resource Group

Nonprofits have unique needs when it comes to accounting. From fund accounting to grant administration, program management to compliance reporting – nonprofit organizations often rely heavily on software to achieve their mission. So how do you know when it’s time to select a new accounting software solution for your organization?

 

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by Saeward Schillaci, The Resource Group

Solver’s BI360 Cloud is a Corporate Performance Management (CPM) solution that provides mid-market businesses with budgeting, reporting, data warehouse, and dashboard functionality. BI360 is a popular business intelligence solution that uses the Excel interface and has historically been sold as on-premises software, with the option of subscribing to a web portal. However, as the market continues to shift more and more towards cloud-based financial software, Solver has recently released BI360 Cloud as a true cloud-based solution, in addition to continuing to offer BI360 as an on-premises option. 

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by Saeward Schillaci, The Resource Group

If you’re interested in a mid-market Corporate Performance Management (CPM) solution, Solver’s BI360 is a popular option that integrates with a variety of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and financial accounting platforms, including Microsoft Dynamics GP and Sage Intacct.

Like many CPM solutions, BI360 has three key components to improve business decision-making and efficiency: reporting, budgeting, and dashboards. The data necessary for these three functions is collected from all types of software and all aspects of your business through BI360’s data warehouse. For more information about the basic structure and functionality of BI360, check out this blog comparing BI360 to Microsoft’s Management Reporter.

 

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by Saeward Schillaci, The Resource Group

If you've ever spent more than a few minutes looking at reviews of restaurants, you know that a simple numerical rating system doesn't give a potential customer all the information they need. A Thai restaurant in your area might have 5-star reviews, but you could end up choosing to eat at a 4-star burger joint instead. There are lots of factors to making a dining decision, including location, price, type of food, ambience, speed of service, and preferences of friends. Plus, once you've thought everything over, you might still end up making your restaurant choice based on a whim rather than objective characteristics.

Of course, comparing different accounting software is much more complicated than picking whichever restaurant has the highest reviews. A software buyer needs to consider what type of solution would work best for their company, including major factors such as whether to use a cloud-based or an on-premises model, whether vertical market software or horizontal market software would better suit the company's needs, and the current size of the business as well as any planned future growth. With all of this in mind, this article focuses on describing the differences and similarities between Intacct and five other cloud-based competitors, all of which are horizontal market focused and intended for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

Alright, here's an apples and bananas comparison of Intacct and five other popular cloud-based accounting solutions, followed by in-depth descriptions of each:

 

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by Saeward Schillaci, The Resource Group

Looking for a great Intacct partner to provide expertise for your business as you seek to select and optimize your enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems? We hope you’ll consider The Resource Group, but we also think it’s important to be honest and open about our competition. Here’s a list of seven other Intacct partners and value added resellers (VARs) who come to mind when someone asks us about our competitors. First, we’d like to highlight our organization, but want to be transparent that there are other Intacct Partners out there (and they are pretty good too!). The partners are listed in reverse alphabetical order, to mix things up a little. 

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by Saeward Schillaci, The Resource Group

When researching a potential new enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for your company, you want to know what real customers have to say about its features. It's also important to glean more details than what many reviews provide. Statements such as "Intacct is awesome!" or "Intacct sucks, don't buy it," just don't provide useful knowledge. Rather than you spending time poring through often vague customer reviews about Intacct, we've done the work for you. We found the most common compliments and complaints, and summarized everything here. If you have more specific questions about how Intacct might work for your organization, contact a partner reseller such as The Resource Group.

 

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by Saeward Schillaci, The Resource Group

If you’re looking for a new accounting software solution for your business, you need to know how much each option costs. Unfortunately, this is a complicated question because the price of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution varies immensely based on the needs of each business. On the other hand, there are certain predictable factors that can help you understand what affects the cost of a particular solution.

 

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By Brady Curtis, The Resource Group

You’ve recently implemented a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and now it’s time to calculate return on investment (ROI) on the solution. So, how exactly do you measure ROI on a new ERP solution? Here are the top three metrics used to measure ROI for an ERP software system.

 

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