Moderator – Thank you.
So, Amy, in terms of integration, so what other systems, parts of your operations have
you integrated and stitched together?
How did it go?
The whole idea of a good information system is not just doing things in finance, but pushing
information and really affecting the top line of the business, as well as the bottom line.
Amy – One of the big drivers behind choosing a new accounting platform, in addition to
the transaction volume, was to get a solution that was integrated into our operating system.
We’re an e-commerce site, so all of the orders and all of the information on consumers,
restaurants, etc., were held within our operating system.
Previous to Intacct, we had Quickbooks sitting over here siloed and we were doing daily entries
to try to match up numbers.
When you go through an audit for the first couple times, particularly when you go with
a big 10 firm through an audit, their going to want to know down to the last dollar what
fell last month, what falls next month, don’t tell me that you don’t know the answer to
the two questions.
Well, we’ve got 5 credit card programs, we’ve got 2 sets of systems, they’re all
settling at different rates and different timing.
We knew we had to integrate the operating system and the financial system directly in
order to eliminate any question on where the money was on every moment of the day.
We were trying to get into a Sox compliant environment, trying to get ready for a whole
bunch of activities that required that.
So, that was the one integration point.
Another side was on the other side when you start looking and analyzing your data and
making your decisions support meaningful.
Our initial take was we would roll up our order history by day, because we had the operating
system with the detail, we thought customer service uses operating system, we don’t
have to get into the accounting records at that detail.
We quickly found out, and fortunately AccessTek responded very quickly, that we needed order-level
data in our accounting system to in order to do the business metrics on the other side.
So, we started setting up the dashboards and things like that so we could use the system
more readily for business reporting.
That doesn’t eliminate the need for either an Excel or an adaptive planning to handle
your FPNA, but it certainly gets you a whole lot of the way there, rather than stopping
short with separation.
Moderator – And Tanya, same question.
So what other systems and operations, or what other kinds of softwares have you implemented
or are looking at with the back end?
Tanya – I think that definitely one of the bigger steps, bigger achievements of this
whole transition, was that we’re able to connect various departments between themselves.
We really are running a whole number of different softwares and one of our companies is insurance
brokers, so they have their own software called GPS that keeps various information on their
clients in that software.
Our marketing department uses ____, so they have their database.
We have a number of other providers that we use and none of them really talk to each other.
So, what we found is that the new software has allowed us to get all that information
in there because it’s highly compatible with any kind of data and even just by simple
imports, we can get the data in and we can make the data available to all these various
departments that need it just through the dashboards.
It’s taken us less time to do that and it’s definitely providing a great benefit.
Moderator – Lindy, talk about how the cloud allows companies, or the cloud is a system
and a backbone allows different systems to start talking to each other, that wasn’t
previously available.
Lindy – The concept of the cloud is, and you guys in the audience are developing a
lot of technology, I mean out on the show floor I’ve seen a lot of vendors that are
doing stuff in the cloud.
They’re very specific applications.
The Intacct cloud accounting solution is a best-of-breed financial accounting solution.
So, by nature, it needs to be open enough and to have the tools to be able to interface
with lots of other systems.
So, that’s inherently, in that it’s the technical, it uses web services and APIs to
be able to do that, but it’s open but with the secure infrastructure from the cloud to
be able to pass data elegantly between multiple systems, to be able to share that data, to
get the visibility in the dashboards that our clients are looking for.
I think the key in both Tanya’s and Amy’s case, and I know them very well and their
setups, to use the concept in Intacct of a multi-dimensional architecture.
So, where traditionally accounting systems would just be a general ledger, would hold
just the general ledger data, Scott you may have this as well, with Intacct to utilize
this multi-dimensional tagging of data coming from the subsidiary modules, so from sales
data or purchasing data or project accounting data, you know anything, even coming from
the websites at GrubHub, we’re tagging transactions now with many different codes or tags and
then in the dashboard level were able to slice and dice the data to get the real-time visibility
into PNLs by customer, by employee, by product line, by service line, by project.
So, its enabled our clients to get that higher level of business reporting, literally, without
adding a ton of programming, without adding a lot of infrastructure, you’re not adding
file servers, you’re not buying a bunch of applications, it’s all inherent in the
solution.
Moderator – And Scott talk about where you are in terms of integration in terms of your
professional services and how you integrate perhaps with your CRM, what you might be doing
going forward with your CRM.
Scott – So I think that what was critical and why we chose Intacct was, one, for the
same reason it’s a best-of-breed solution.
But, the main driver was not necessarily the accounting system, it was going to my sales
team and they actually use sales force CRM that is what they choose to use.
If I were wanting to change that they would probably behead me, they would not let that
happen.
It’s something they’ve used for many many years, so it was really critical for me to
try to figure out how can I find a solution that integrates really well with my CRM solution.
And so, Intacct was that solution that has that working API that enables me to take the
order entries from sales force and put them straight into my accounting system so that
it’s seamless, doesn’t have any kind of data entry errors.
So, we’re working through the integration of that right now.
Our business has some unique challenges that make that and the way that we do our revenue
recognition, but were working with kind of sales force and our team and Intacct to make
that possible.
But, I think that was probably the most desirable factor, is that really Intacct can fit into
kind of this cloud hub that works with all of the best-of-breed solutions if its sales
force, or if it’s an operating system, it works with our time tracking system as well.
So, kind of holistically, given the technology, it enables me to get the data all centralized
so that we can make decisions very quickly and allow all of the different operating units,
if its sales or if its my client service team, to be able to use the tools that they enjoy,
that are effective for them, and enables them to kind of continue to use those tools, and
allows us to make decisions very quickly.