Moderator – So, let’s start with why, in terms of finance organizations, so what
do your people, investors, management, expect from your finance organization and how has
this changed over time at your company.
Scott, do you want to start?
Scott – Yeah, I think that the people that really need the financial information in our
business are, we really have three major interest groups that are focused on our content and
that would be, one, just the owner.
He needs information very quickly.
We’re growing at a very tremendous rate, we’ve doubled every year that we’ve been
in business, and so we actually do budgeting on a weekly cycle.
So, information and the expediency of that information is critical to the way we run
our business.
In the same token, we need to know, we’re a consulting-based business, we’re a service-based
business, and the way that we service our clients, it’s imperative that our account
team and our sales representatives really know how the particular accounts are performing
at any given moment in time.
Using a tool and using software has enabled us to really get that information into the
front lines as quickly as we possibly can and make sure we’re tweaking and adjusting
our service deliverables to make sure the accounts are profitable, at the same time
making sure we’re retaining those relationships.
Moderator – Lindy, do you want to just talk a little bit about what your investors, you’re
the owner, what kind of information do you need to run your business?
Lindy – As the founder and CEO I’m looking for the financial information on a real-time
basis.
I need that visibility into the data to make decisions quickly about new clients we want
to go after to projects that are more profitable than others.
So, I’m really looking at that on a daily basis.
We use dashboards in our solutions to log in over the web, to see these dashboards,
to see the data real-time into that visibility.
From our client’s perspective, what we see is our clients, meaning the CFOs, the controllers,
and the business owners, we’re moving them from writing a history book to writing a playbook.
So, that’s really important because typically us accounting folks, I’m a CPA, and typically
we would be after-the-fact.
We would be reporting data weeks and months after it happened and more of a historical
Sperspective.
We move into this action mode now.
We’re writing playbooks for our clients so they can move quickly, they can be agile
in the market, and especially here at TechWeek, all this technology, all this great stuff,
we need to move at the speed of light.
We need to help our clients move very rapidly as well.
Moderator – Thank you.
Tanya, talk about what finance systems you had prior to moving to the cloud and what
was the infrastructure like?
Tanya – Well, because we have multiple entities, all in all it used to be about 15, so we operated
from about 15 to 20 Quickbooks files, that would require setting up users, making sure
we have enough space on the drives on the servers, making sure those users could log
in, setting up all these systems.
Our IT department time that went into managing those systems was growing rapidly and also
having to then pull all that information from 15 Quickbook files, compile it together in
Excel spreadsheets, make sure the data stays reliable while you’re doing that, and then
somehow make it presentable to the executive team.
It took a lot of time.
We basically turned into a colander and all we did was apply bandages to the holes.
It was just unmanageable.
So we were looking for a solution that would allow us to compile that information fast,
make sure that by the time it gets to the executive team it’s still reliable and it’s
ready whenever they are ready to look at it.
We’re not sending out 65 emails every month notifying them this is that Excel spreadsheet,
that’s this, that’s that.
Whenever they are ready, now they can log in to a dashboard, like Lindy said, and the
accounting software allows us to have that information at their convenience, and that’s
a lot.
It requires even less IT support, next to none.
So, that’s really a huge benefit to a company like ours.
Now we can actually afford to analyze the information, instead of spending time on preparing
the information.