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.