make sure your apps play well with others.
by penny breslin
it’s not just the numbers
software is always changing, and new products come to market quicker than ever before. twenty-five years ago, software such as quickbooks, peachtree, accpac and mas changed how we did accounting. ledger books became a thing of the past as we could now review ledgers on a computer screen. in the last nine years, cloud-based systems have radically changed accounting once again.
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the technology landscape can be confusing, but that will always be the case. your goal is to find what works for you and train your team and clients on a limited number of products that can become the base of your work. we call this our little black dress.
our typical client utilizes some or all of our base apps, then we accessorize with any additional apps a specific client may need. just like business owners drove accountants to accept quickbooks back in the 1990s, so now we are seeing clients already savvy about add-on apps coming to us to assist in the integration and management of the data intersection points. a client who brings an app to you is a great team member and therefore a great client. and one who typically provides referrals, too.
by focusing on your little black dress, you can avoid bright shiny object syndrome, which can tempt you into believing you need to be an expert in every app out there. even in the early days of accounting software, before the explosion of cloud apps that do everything under the sun and then some, it was impossible to know every detail of quickbooks, peachtree and all the other programs out there. the goal today is for you and your team to learn as much as you can about the base accounting program and the apps that best satisfy the most common needs of your clients.
keep in mind that what you consider important – a clean, reconciled and properly allocated financial report – may be considered unimportant to many of your clients. they are focusing on what is happening in their business today and in the future. again, as always, clean financial reports are needed to provide direction for the future and providing that direction is where the firm can shine.
this is where the apps and the role of a bos merge. it’s important to remember that technology is just the enabler. technology is what makes it possible to keep your clients’ financials updated so you can share your insights about the current state of their business with them. you still must add value in terms of the product you deliver and the dialogue you have with your clients. that’s where the true value lies. just as we focus on the clients, team and procedures, we also focus on the products that support our work.
just as your client is outsourcing the managerial accounting function to you, smaller firms should outsource the technology selection to the myriad of accounting practice consultants. larger firms can have a partner with a technology specialty on staff, a citp or cisa. you do not need to be a technology expert to fulfill this role for your clients, but one of your team members should be. let go of those things that remove you from the relationship with the client, not only data entry, but keeping 24/7 current on the latest and greatest new technology. professional education and training are very important to stay at the leading edge of the technology curve, but the leader needs to know the potential and outcome. leave it to others in your team to learn the minutiae of the technology functions.
do you really have time to learn new technology, implement it across your internal members, push it out to clients, make sure it’s all working and then provide the client with actions for today? be realistic on what you can provide and let the rest of the team do their job in supporting you.
there are annual conferences that drive home the apps and the integration training for the bookkeeping and accounting level of work. quickbooks connect and xerocon are good for specific gls. the aicpa shows tend to be more gl-agnostic. all of these events provide training by your peers on how to best integrate apps and pursue certifications.
recommendations on exact applications and software eventually become outdated. so, if things change so fast around here, dorothy, what direction do we pick to reach the emerald city?
find out what you and your preferred clients need. then find the application, it, software, hardware and provider that does the following;
- meets the 80/20 rule of what you and your clients need
- is soc-compliant
- has high recommendations from your peers
- has a deep customer support division
- understands the accounting world
- plays well with other software
let’s discuss some of these in a bit more detail …
meets the 80/20 rule of what you and your clients need
software, unless totally customized for a business, will always have something it just doesn’t do. in the words of the late great gilda radner’s saturday night live character rosanne rosannadanna, “it’s always somethin’, if it’s not one thing, it’s another.”
the last 20 percent is also the 20 percent that’s different with each client, and the 20 percent of the relationship that you work harder in. so, make the 80 percent easy and consistent. the more you make consistent, the more time you can focus on the atypical and discover if it is a profitable atypical or if it is an atypical need that costs more than the value it returns. who better to discover the real cost or profit of the individual nuances of a business than the bos?
keeping the 80 percent the same across all clients is another reason that niching is a great strategy. when you find a set of apps and gl combo that works well for one client, you can roll that out across other clients in the same vertical with minimal changes.
and another adage comes to mind: “don’t let the perfect get in the way of progress.”
case study: in search of the perfect app
recently i did a workshop with a client firm. they were not happy with their tasking application and were considering a move to something else. what that something else was, they did not know, but it needed to do everything their current application did, plus two more features that they were currently utilizing in another application. they wanted a one-stop application for everything.
the problem was, and remains, those two functions are not part of their current tasking application nor any other successful application for a reason. they are not core to the best practices and performance of tasking applications. there are plenty of app integrations that would take care of those two functions. the complaints from one member of the team on those two points gave license for all team members to not fully accept the use of the tasking application. at the monthly price for the tasking application, that is really a costly 20 percent.
plays well with other software
playing well together for add-on apps is a plus. anne bancroft had a great line in a movie, “i never did mind about the little things.” using add-on apps that work well and complement each other, most times allows for that to be true. in 2013 thomas freidmen wrote an op-ed in the new york times on collaboration between competitor companies. you can ignore the political bent, however, the context of cooperative and collaborative competitors in technology was an interesting analogy. it placed in context what we typically recommend as a feature to look for when choosing technology. many add-on products work well with accounting programs. add-on products stretch the accounting and bookkeeping program’s capabilities. some are specific to an industry need, while others are specific to a particular business function.
you will often find apps that have similar functions, but the uniqueness each provides can build a nice overlapping software stack that “minds the little things” for you.
here’s an example: we have a client that sells online and internationally. they have virtual workers and pay by the hour and salary. we have access to their online shopify, xero accounting, dext, gusto payroll and homebase time tracker. these five apps are the back office for this company. for payroll, we first open homebase, select the pay period, click a button and send to gusto in about two minutes. we then open gusto and run the payroll in less than five minutes each pay period. gusto has a native integration to xero so the sync to xero happens automatically with no effort on our part.
the graphic below is the bimonthly recurring task that pops up in our workflow for the bookkeeper assigned to the client. each line of the task is detailed out in the procedure in case a new bookkeeper comes on board. as the bookkeeper does each step of the task, she checks off the step to mark it complete. the only area where we lack control is the inputting of time into homebase. so far the employees have utilized homebase well.
we have the pay period scheduled to pop up in our teamline task to the client’s slack channel. the client can, if they so choose and many do, see the task we have, and can see when we have completed it. the client does not mind about the little things because she can see it all has been done. no questions from us on who and how much to pay, no questions from the client about whether we’ve done payroll or not. payroll is important, but scrambling to collect timesheets for payroll, well, those are the little things that do make you mind. i will let gusto and homebase make the money they need on this client. we have picked up several special projects from this client because we spend time with them on the big picture while we let the apps mind the little things.
what happens if you switch apps?
when choosing the apps that make up your little black dress, or when evaluating a new app, remember to consider what happens if you need to switch to another app. what steps would be needed to extract data from the first app? is it easy to import or transfer that data to the new app? is there any data that may get lost? it might be running the systems in parallel to test your anticipatory set.