Building Success on a Foundation of Finance

Accounting 101

by Jason Leber | Nov 30, 2018 | Accounting 101

Building Success on a Foundation of Finance

By Paul Johnson
CPA, CGMA, MBA

What is the secret of successful businesses? The answer is elusive, but you could argue that it’s a strong financial foundation. No business is immune to disruption or perfect at predicting what comes next. But as long as they have their finances in order they can survive the unexpected and keep growth trending upward.

The next question to answer is how do you build a financial foundation? It looks different at every company, but it should include these essential qualities and capabilities:

Fast and Efficient Financial Workflows

The amount of time it takes to close the books or produce reports has a huge impact on performance. When finance is slow and inefficient it forces decision makers to wait to act or to move forward without a clear financial perspective. When finance is fast, the situation is exactly opposite. These companies spend far less resources on the nuts and bolts of accounting. Instead, they work on utilizing accounting to drive revenue, cut costs, or sustain growth.

Rigorous and Transparent Internal Controls

Finance is both complicated and consequential. When companies lack internal controls to monitor and govern their financial processes, those processes inevitably produce issues. Internal controls let companies manage everything from data access to transaction approvals. Essentially, they give companies a way to standardize finance from the top down, ensuring it operates as effectively as possible.

Alert and Available Financial Staff

Modern accountants still spend huge amounts of time manually entering data and cross-checking figures. It’s a dull process that is prone to error. Worse, it wastes the time and talent of financial professionals who could be extremely valuable working on other projects. A strong financial foundation automates and innovates the heavy-lifting of accounting so that financial staff can focus on more productive things.

Intuitive and Integrated Accounting Software

Older accounting software offers limited capabilities and outdated interfaces. What little value it still has declines further every year. Modern accounting software, by contrast, makes it easy to organize and analyze data to produce in-depth financial insights. It’s also a lot easier to use thanks to the cloud, automation, and a series of user-friendly menus and tools. Technology and finance are now inextricably linked, and best-in-class accounting software is basically a prerequisite for a stable financial foundation.

Once these four pieces are in place finance is positioned to fire on all cylinders. At that point accounting is an asset and not just an administrative obligation.

Sage Intacct is a next-generation financial management solution that transforms accounting departments top to bottom. If you’re ready to upgrade and enhance finance for years to come, contact Altasphere Consulting for a consultation.

Revenue Management Made Simple

Resources

by Jason Leber | Sep 18, 2018 | Resources

Revenue Management Made Simple

By Paul Johnson
CPA, CGMA, MBA

How to Win the Revenue Management Game

Revenue management is a top challenge for many finance professionals—especially those working in software-as-a-service (SaaS) and professional services companies. The new revenue recognition criteria, known as ASC 606, adds even greater complexity. It’s no wonder that companies are seeking to automate their revenue management processes so they can be more efficient, get more compliant, and improve visibility.

a business team of four people sitting at a table to discuss revenue management. A female with short hair leads the discussion

Design better processes

Successfully streamlining revenue management requires a two-pronged strategy, starting with better processes designed from the top down. Since revenue management is an enterprise-wide affair, these processes should be based on input from senior executives across multiple disciplines and functions.

Here’s how:

Define the revenue recognition foundation, such as determining what a subscription is, what falls under “maintenance” or “support,” and what discounts you’ll permit.
Establish fair value pricing criteria using market-tested parameters and centralized data.
Involve auditors in these process designs and policy definitions.
Use standard contracts with defined terms.
Enable collaboration and information sharing across sales, service, and finance.

an older asian man working on his laptop

Invest in the right technology

Automating revenue management yields significant benefits, from faster period closes to greater accuracy and lower costs. To streamline and centralize the management of revenue accounting, businesses need technology that allows the finance team to:

Connect systems. The best accounting systems connect to critical business systems within the organization, such as CRM, services management, and subscription management to create a complete ecosystem for revenue management.
Automate processes. Revenue managers need the ability to codify the applicable rules through flexible templates and schedules that reflect their unique business requirements. The process must drive the automated calculation of both recognized and deferred revenue schedules and forecasts based on contract terms, subscription length, project milestones, and more—and integrate with the general ledger.
Analyze the business. The best revenue management systems deliver a solid picture of both current and deferred revenue by showing a real-time snapshot of future revenues, projected renewals, and total deferred revenue months or even years into the future. You should be able to dig deep to truly understand your business, with visibility into both financial and operating data, and have the flexibility to view the business through multiple lenses to make better strategic decisions.

Master revenue management with Sage Intacct and Atlasphere Consulting

Sage Intacct automates and improves the processes associated with complex revenue recognition. Sage Intacct is the cloud-based technology that allows your finance team to connect systems, automate processes, and analyze your business. Contact us at Atlasphere Consulting; we’re Sage Intacct experts who can develop a winning strategy for conquering the challenges of revenue management for your business.

Sales and Finance Unified – No More Compromises

Resources

by Jason Leber | Jun 5, 2018 | Resources

Sales and Finance Unified – No More Compromises

By Paul Johnson
CPA, CGMA, MBA

The Salesforce-Sage Intacct connection that bridges the gap between sales and finance is worth talking about now more than ever.

If it seems that what started off as a few extra work-arounds has devolved into a flurry of extra steps that bottleneck productivity, read on. There are fast-to-implement solutions available for you.

In light of the ASC 606 and IFRS mandates, it’s time to do away with outdated, and inefficient systems to streamline your processes, and get your teams working in a more connected way to work smarter, not harder.

The Salesforce/Sage Intacct integrations bring in automation to unify your sales and finance teams that can streamline your sales pipeline from start to finish.

QUOTE TO CASH

The road from quote to cash can be a long, and complex one. When Sage Intacct, a best-in-class cloud accounting solution links with Salesforce, a quote is converted to an order with just one click.

In SalesCloud, your teams can generate tasks, invoicing or even revenue recognition, and send information seamlessly into Sage Intacct for your finance teams’ immediate access, saving time and rekeying errors.

closeup of male hands working on sales and finance

DATA MANAGEMENT

When your company is working in disconnected systems, cascading errors and inconsistencies in your data can occur.

The integration between Salesforce and Sage Intacct in the cloud means all of your client’s data gets entered in once, for data accuracy and consistency throughout departments and systems.

REVENUE RECOGNITION

Having sales and finance software systems that seamlessly communicate frees up everyone to do what they do best.

Your sales team can easily input just an open and close date to clarify revenue recognition for finance with only the data that sales reps need to see to do their end of the job.
In real time, your accounting gets the data they need on their end to match expenses to revenue, to be allocated in line with the new ASC 606 and IFRS 15 guidelines.

group of two businessmen and a businesswoman working on sales and finance

COLLABORATION AND PROJECTS

The Sage Intacct/Salesforce connection streamlines communication and synchronizes activities for meaningful collaboration and powerful project management.

Integration bridges the front and back office through contextual data with orders and unique client questions or invoicing situations.
The finance team can access Salesforce Chatter from Sage Intacct to resolve client financial issues, and can keep a close eye on actuals versus estimates to stay within project budget margins.
Sales can answer client questions quickly and directly with access to company data from wherever they work.

Why compromise accuracy and productivity with outdated and disconnected systems? The integrations technology linking Salesforce and Sage Intacct means you don’t have to.

If you’re ready to unify your teams toward greater success, give us a ring. We are here to help!

Critical Signs That You’ve Outgrown Your Financial Software

Resources

by Jason Leber | May 1, 2018 | Resources

Critical Signs That You’ve Outgrown Your Financial Software

By Paul Johnson
CPA, CGMA, MBA

Your company’s growing fast – and slammed with work. That’s considered a good problem, but at some point, keeping up with growth may start to keep you up at night, and your workers in the weeds.

Be on the lookout for these signs that your financials are due for a stronger solution.

1. Your teams are treading water to stay on top of everyday tasks.

Traditional legacy accounting systems don’t typically handle rapid growth easily.

That means your teams will have to apply more manual effort to add new entities and currencies, perform complex global consolidations, or manage new products.

Rapid growth companies need modern solutions that can switch gears as fast as the company does.

2.Compliance is a growing hurdle with the new regulatory guidelines.

Some modern businesses – especially SaaS – are still working from on-premises systems created before the new ASC 606 and IFRS 15 guidelines.

The work-arounds and retrofits they need to keep up, only creates massive headaches for everyone involved. If these companies don’t buckle under the weight of building work-arounds, they certainly will under the weight of the mountains of ongoing manual entry work.

A sustainable solution to the surmounting re-allocation work is to adopt a software solution that supports the new guidelines to streamline those tasks.

team working on computer with financial data

3. Your company software hasn’t been updated.

Some expanding businesses that already have too much to do, fear a system upgrade would take more time away from critical accounting tasks.

But companies that move to a cloud-based system like Sage Intacct get automatic updates and maintenance behind the scenes. In fact, 83% of customers report they decreased time spent on software management tasks when they switched to Sage Intacct.

4. You can’t fully track your business performance

Rapid-growth businesses need real-time visibility into business metrics as they change, to develop the strongest business growth strategies.

With traditional legacy systems, you often have to wait weeks for data, that once its delivered, already aging.

Companies that forecast with the cloud can see the latest, most current insights into their KPIs for strong growth strategy.

team working on computer with financial data

5. Your key software systems don’t connect.

On-premises and legacy systems often don’t integrate well with other software solutions, because they are location-based.

If your business is growing and your systems don’t integrate, your shared data is at risk for inaccuracies, and your teams are probably doing a lot more manual entry to shift data to other departments.

Sage Intacct offers features to streamline financial management for today’s businesses:

It integrates seamlessly well with many other best-in-class solutions to boost data accuracy and reduce time spent on manual labor.
The Dashboards feature showcases customizable metrics on one screen, with 24/7 real-time updates.
The first of its kind, designed to support ASC 606 and IFRS 15 compliance.
Streamlines growth tasks with one-click consolidations, automatic currency conversions, and fast multi-entity setups, to start.

Feeling the weight of your workload under outdated financial systems? We can help with that! Contact us to see how moving to a more modern system can scale with your growth.