Outgrowing QuickBooks?

Outgrowing QuickBooks?

Congratulations, you’re outgrowing QuickBooks

When your business grows, you should celebrate—not suffer. Try telling that to the finance team that’s still trying to make QuickBooks work. It’s just too basic to handle growing organizations with evolving needs. So your team might be compensating with inefficient workarounds and spreadsheets. And you may realize you can’t rely on your basic reports to be of any strategic use. That’s a lot to pay for a “low cost” solution. Find out what makes Intacct the top solution for QuickBooks graduates.

Make the “day to day” easier

If your team is spending hours on spreadsheets, your entry-level accounting solution isn’t doing you any favors. Ditch the extra data entry with Intacct’s feature-rich cloud accounting software solution. Automate multi-entity close and reporting, revenue recognition, project accounting, and more. Save team time today and be prepared for tomorrow with a solution that can handle almost any accounting process you can imagine.

Flex your reporting muscle

Intacct was uniquely designed to give you endless reporting flexibility. Unlike QuickBooks, Intacct enables you to track both financial and operational data in real time. You can easily drill from top-level results down to the performance for a specific entity or location, then down to individual transactions. And you can access your reports from any web browser, on any device. Integrate without IT, and other cloud benefits Organizations that are outgrowing QuickBooks can expect high ROI when switching to cloud accounting. You don’t have to worry about system availability and security—that comes guaranteed. Plus, it’s instantly easier to connect with other cloud-based best-in-class business systems, like Salesforce CRM, so you can share data between systems without human data entry or errors.

Key outcomes:

  • Improve productivity by eliminating manual processes and spreadsheets
  • Get instant visibility into business performance, anytime, anywhere
  • Integrate with your other applications to eliminate data re-entry and information silos
  • Save money, increase security, and reduce IT headaches

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Cloud Software Helps Faith-Based Organizations Reach their Goals

Cloud Software Helps Faith-Based Organizations Reach their Goals

“Drowning in a sea of Excel spreadsheets.“

“Plagued by confusion, delays and lack of confidence in reporting.”

“Cost and headaches of on-premise accounting systems and IT infrastructure.”

“Need for a user-friendly cloud solution that would support anytime, anywhere access while minimizing IT efforts.”

These are just a few of the most common challenges that faith-based organizations struggle with. The good news is Intacct, the customer satisfaction leader in cloud ERP software, is the solution for those problems. And it is not just me saying so, below are a few examples of what leaders from churches around the country are saying about Intacct:

“Intacct has allowed us to bridge the gap between efficiency and being a people- oriented caring ministry.” Dennis Richards, Executive Pastor, Preston Trail Community Church, Frisco TX

“They (the ministry staff) wanted to know right away how they were doing in that new campus, What’s our attendance? What’s our giving? What are our expenses on capital expenditures? (With Intacct) we were able to provide that information, fast.” Randy Bell, Executive Pastor of Administration, Gateway Church, Dallas/Fort Worth TX

“With the efficiencies we’ve gained through Intacct, we’ve kept our staff size low even as we doubled in size. By using the system to manage all of our day-to-day bookkeeping, we’re saving $85,000 or more a year in salaries and benefits, while doing deeper analysis and reporting.” Aaron Goin, Finance Director at Faith Promise Church, Knoxville, TN

“QuickBooks was a good fit when we were starting out, but now we need a more robust financial management system. Intacct will enable us to double the productivity of our finance team while providing better overall control and visibility into the use of our funds. With Intacct, we can continue to grow without the need to immediately add headcount to our finance team—providing a nice savings to the church.” Gay Lynn Martin, Financial Director, Canyon Ridge Christian Church, Las Vegas, NV

Reasons Why Intacct Software is a Great Tool for Faith-based Organizations

  • It’s a cloud-based. Forget about needing an expensive on-premises system.
  • Like the staff at Gateway Church says, good data drives good ministry; Intacct frees up staff time that can be spent on ministry. For example, checks and payments can be reviewed and approved from anywhere via internet so events can be organized, budgeted and funded quickly and easily without running around for approvals.
  • With the Statistical Accounts and Journaling functionality, you can capture and track non-financial data such as attendance, baptisms, missions, members in small groups and volunteers. And then you can produce reports such as the Giving Scorecard in a blink. Just think of how quickly you can produce reports showing changes in worship attendance, variations in giving or average giving per attendee per week. All from one system!
    • You have easier, faster and more accurate reports using Intacct Dimensions. This functionality makes reporting a much simpler process. Gateway Church estimate they spend 25% less time preparing reports.
    • With Intuitive dashboards your church leaders have easy access to real-time key information such as revenue vs. expenses, giving by period, current cash position, attendance and more.
    • Budgeting is so much easier when you have reliable data and analytics.  Preston Trail Community Church reports that with Intacct, the 2015 budget was much easier and delivered ahead of time.
  • Intacct provides immediate access to important data and documents so decision-making is much easier and supporting documentation is easy to access for review.
  • Imagine your church’s executive office being completely paperless. Invoices are submitted electronically and payments are made the same way. Data on incoming funds is available to all pastors as soon as the amounts are posted.
  • Intacct provides open APIs so other software can easily interface with it. This is great for churches that outsource their payroll to a third-party processing company, use expense management software to track business travel expense or use church management software to track membership and giving. Also, with the APIs, data uploading using Excel .csv files is easy and time-efficient.

Lavoie is an Intacct business partner and we have an accounting and ERP implementation team dedicated to helping our clients get started on Intacct.  If you have any questions about how your church or nonprofit can benefit from our products and services, please contact us and we’d be happy to help.

4 Steps for Driving Business Agility and Growth

4 Steps for Driving Business Agility and Growth

Software executives know they need to operate their businesses with more agility because of the pace and volume of change due to innovation and new competitive offerings. C-suite executives grappling with how to turn plans into action faster than ever before need to focus on four steps in order to achieve agility and growth.

1. Rapid Decision Making

Driving business agility requires that leaders have accurate information to make fast, informed decisions. In a recent Sand Hill Group study underwritten by Intacct, CEOs and CFOs ranked “delivering real-time relevant financial information and KPI performance to all stakeholders to drive the business” as most important to their organization. With real-time financial data and KPIs, senior management and board members are in an advantageous position for sound decision making.

Knowing what’s working in the business and what’s not allows leaders to take immediate action, rather than waiting weeks for any real business insight. Having real time KPIs allows an organization to make decisions at the point of need for improved results. The difference between a three-day financial close and a three-week financial close may be the speed advantage a company needs to capitalize on a new opportunity and beat the competition. Outsourced CFOs and finance teams can make companies more agile by speeding up the delivery of accurate, insightful financial data to key stakeholders.

2. Forecasting and Investing

Another process that is nearly as important to software CEOs and CFOs is quick and accurate revenue and expense planning/forecasting. Accurate forecasts rely on a variety of data sources, and CFOs that can unite disparate financial, business and market data in a single ERP application, automatically and in real time, can rapidly deliver holistic forecasts that enable business leaders to stay agile and ahead of the competition.

Let’s say, for example, a CEO wants to forecast the revenue impact of potential product features in order to prioritize engineering and marketing resources. A modern cloud ERP system lets the CFO analyze, in one place:

  • The revenue impact of recent product releases by line of business, by customer, by channel and more, creating a solid foundation for building a forecast
  • The revenue and profitability of new customers by size and vertical to assess the effectiveness of marketing spend

With this depth of visibility into different aspects of the business in a single location, the CFO and CEO are able to make an informed decision on critical investment priorities.

3. Cloud ERP Systems

When it comes to adding and improving financial systems, software business leaders in the Sand Hill Group study indicated their most likely action in the next 12 months would be to implement business process changes, and their second most likely action would be to implement a business intelligence/data analysis solution. Both of these choices make sense for fast-growing companies.

Growth requires change, and business and finance systems that are inflexible or cannot scale at the same pace as the company will not do. By changing business processes, software companies attempt to add speed and reduce wasted efforts, particularly in the finance function, in order to be more agile and responsive.

Likewise, growing companies require business intelligence solutions because they struggle to find the information they need to make informed decisions in a timely manner.

However, there is a way to solve both challenges. Modern cloud ERP systems allow the finance team to efficiently complete the processes they have to do, yet move beyond those processes to the visibility-creating activities that finance teams need to do such as data analysis, forecasting, and operational reporting. This creates a better outcome for the finance team as well as the company than either process change or adding business intelligence alone.

There are real-world examples of finance teams that take advantage of a modern cloud ERP system to streamline processes and perform deeper financial and operational analysis for more accurate forecasting and greater visibility into the entire organization’s performance. A fast-growing U.S. software company implemented a cloud ERP system that delivers segmented reporting and profit and loss statements by multiple dimensions like department, item, customer, vendor, location, project and employee. The system enables the finance team to be more productive by automatically and proactively providing each department with standard reporting for revenue by customer, spending by vendor and costs at a project level.

This allows business leaders to increase agility and optimize their performance by managing against plan and refining the forecast in real time. As a result of this insight, departments can get instant answers without having to ask for key financial information, and executives benefit from deep, real-time insights into the sales pipeline and collections for better forecasts. The added efficiencies from a modern cloud ERP system help a company’s finance team spend less time on transactional bookkeeping and compliance tasks and more time empowering the entire company to focus on strategic, proactive planning, and enhanced execution.

4. Raising New Capital

Software businesses at one point or another need to raise new capital. Surveyed executives in the Sand Hill Group study reported their biggest challenge in this area is modeling future revenue and net income growth. As noted above, accurate forecasts rely on a variety of data sources, and CFOs that can unite disparate financial, business and market data in a single ERP application, automatically and in real time, can rapidly deliver holistic forecasts that demonstrate the full value and potential of the company.

In addition, the study participants rated establishing and enforcing financial processes and controls as their second top challenge in raising new capital. Establishing a robust set of internal controls is something a company has to do in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the company’s accounting and reporting for a financial statement audit and to earn investor and lender trust.

Proper financial controls ensure no single individual has control over all parts of a financial transaction — and generate the audit trail to prove it. A modern cloud ERP system enables CFOs to deliver error-free financial statements and forecasts built on well-documented, carefully organized and approved transactions that support a realistic forecast and high valuation. Well-documented and enforced financial processes and controls make it easier for software companies to raise capital because of the accurate, trusted financial data provided to investors.

With these four enablers of agility and growth in place, C-suite executives and their boards and investors can be confident that the business will perform to expectations – or even outperform.

Four Crucial Enablers for Driving Business Agility and Growth was originally posted on Sandhill.com.