Industry Insights – A Conversation with Daniel Hood

Daniel Hood

This week’s Industry Insight’s conversation is with Daniel Hood from Accounting Today. Daniel is the current editor-in-chief and also worked as managing editor of Accounting Today for 15 years. A graduate of Georgetown University, he has also served as a business editor for the New York Daily News, and as a production editor for The Wall Street Journal Europe. He is the author of five novels and a guidebook to New York City.

We sat down with Daniel to discuss the intersection of cloud computing and the accounting industry.

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Channel Momentum… Accelerating the Cloud

Intacct continues to grow at a rapid pace – we grew new business last quarter by nearly 70% over the same period a year ago. Our growth rate is consistently faster than our competition because we continue to hit on all cylinders – from our direct sales efforts, to our business process outsourcing efforts with CPA’s and the AICPA endorsement, and our rapidly expanding business partner channel.

Over the last two years Intacct has made a considerable investment in our channel partners and the overall Intacct channel program. In 2011, we saw a six-fold increase in new business from channel partners over the same period in 2010 – and that growth continues this year. What is the secret behind the success of the Intacct channel partners? It starts with the partners themselves.

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Industry Insights – A Conversation with Jeff Kaplan

Jeff Kaplan

Welcome to the second installment of our Industry Insights blog series. We’re inviting some of the top minds from across the cloud computing, financial applications, and SMB markets to sit down with Intacct and share some of their insights on a variety of topics.

This week our conversation is with Jeff Kaplan, the managing director of THINKstrategies, a strategic consulting firm focused on helping clients capitalize on the migration of the technology industry from a product-centric to a services-driven business model. Jeff is also the founder of the Cloud Computing Showplace, the largest online directory of Cloud-based solutions. As a former industry analyst at IDC, Dataquest, and META Group, Jeff is widely considered a top thought leader in strategies for SaaS, Cloud and Managed Services.

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Industry Insights – A Conversation with Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard

Today we are kicking off a new series on the Intacct blog called Industry Insights. We’re inviting some of the top minds from across the cloud computing, financial applications, and SMB markets to sit down with Intacct and share some of their insights on a variety of topics. On a weekly basis (or thereabouts) we’ll be talking with top analysts, bloggers, industry practitioners, and other influencers to discuss the trends they are seeing in the industry.

Our conversation this week is with Mike Vizard, a blogger for IT Business Edge. Mike has been covering enterprise IT issues for 25 years as an editor and columnist for publications such as InfoWorld, eWeek, Baseline, CRN, Computerworld and Digital Review. We spoke with Mike to get his take on the progression of companies moving toward cloud-based financials.

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The Best Cloud Accounting Software for Small Business

For many small businesses, QuickBooks, Peachtree, and other entry-level financial applications offer an easy and affordable first step in managing their business. However, as these companies begin to grow – reaching 20 to 100 employees – spreadsheets and entry-level accounting programs are no longer acceptable. These growing small businesses need a true corporate-caliber financial management and accounting system that centralizes data, automates financial processes, eliminates dependence on spreadsheets, promotes team collaboration, and streamlines consolidations and closing the books.

The May 2012 issue of CPA Practice Advisor features a nice review of the top cloud accounting software for small businesses. The article notes that this is a rapidly growing segment of the business management tools market and that real-time collaboration between client and accountant, as well as better importing tools, have made these solutions a compelling alternative to traditional, locally-installed applications.

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Here's to All the (Jelly) Bean Counters

In addition to being Earth Day, today is also National Jelly Bean Day. Nothing like combining two things I love... Earth and jelly beans! This got me to thinking about the term "bean counters" which is often used as a slang, and sometime derogatory, term for accounting and finance professionals. At Intacct, we often talk about using cloud financial applications to help finance teams move from being transaction oriented (some could say... bean counters) to more of a strategic advisor.

But where did the term "bean counter" come from? Well, after an exhaustive -- OK, very quick -- search on Google, I came across a couple sites that attempted to answer that question.

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Helping Nonprofits Reduce Costs and Improve Financial Visibility

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Cloud financial applications have become increasingly popular with nonprofit organizations. 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.

Cloud computing-based financial applications have two central benefits that are particularly attractive to nonprofits. First, the entire organization can access the financial system from anywhere, at any time of day or night. Second, cloud-based applications are vastly more cost effective than trying to operate and manage their own financial management and fund accounting software.

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Pricing Cloud Accounting Services

So, the evolution has arrived, and more and more accountants are moving to the cloud.  It is the topic of discussion at conferences, blogs, periodicals and amongst your peers.  But, how would you price a cloud engagement with your client accounting services clients?  This among other IT Issues is a puzzle to many accounting firm owners to figure out.  So, in this article, I am going to attempt to give you some insight to help you with applying this to your own firm and provide a better understanding of the pricing model to employ in this new frontier of cloud accounting.

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Gain the Power to See Your Business in New Ways

When you talk to Intacct customers as much as I do, you start to pick up on several recurring themes. One of things I hear all the time from our customers is how Intacct’s reporting and dashboard capabilities truly help them see their business in ways that weren’t possible with their previous financial system. They consider this new found financial and business visibility as a key to transforming their finance organization from simply logging the numbers to becoming a strategic business resource.

With Intacct these companies can unlock the power of their business data to gain faster time to insight and improve performance across all of their business units. For small and medium sized businesses, having this level of business intelligence used to be out of reach, requiring an expensive stand-alone tool or complicated and unwieldy Excel spreadsheets that didn’t tie back into the financial system.

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The Need for Flexible Financial Applications

Not all companies are created the same. Your business is unique. Shouldn’t your financial applications be flexible enough to adapt to your unique business needs? You shouldn't have to bend over backwards to adjust to your financial system.

As I noted in my post last week on the three Intacct customers that recently completed IPOs, having a flexible financial system is critical to success. When you’re making the change to a new accounting and financial management system, the last thing you want to do is box yourself in with rigid functions and inflexible processes that might require another system switch as your business changes down the road.

This is an area Intacct takes very seriously. We’ve designed our applications to provide exceptional flexibility and easily adapt to your business needs as you grow and evolve. For example:

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