Mike Braun Takes Paperless Accounting into the Cloud

What are the economic and business drivers causing CPAs to consider “paperless” solutions today?

The business drivers for firms adopting cloud computing and Intacct are their desire to improve productivity, increase profitability and provide better, higher value services to their clients. As to why now, it is only in the last few years that cloud accounting has become a viable solution – this required broadband Internet access to become ubiquitous, firms and clients to get used to the idea of transacting on the Internet and the applications themselves to mature to the point they are as good as or better than the old on-premises software alternatives. Both firm and client can now work on the same, shared, up to the minute financial information. And, not only is there no paper, there is also no software or hardware to deploy or maintain and you only pay for what you actually use.

How much ROI can firms expect?

Cloud-based accounting applications like Intacct dramatically improve the economic model for client accounting services. Firms report a 50% improvement in financial performance for their client accounting services practice. Here’s the breakdown: 100% increase in proactive consulting hours; 3% to 5% increase in overall billings by offering more, higher value “trusted advisor services;” 10% capacity increase for accounting staff; time savings of 50 hours per bookkeeper per quarter; and a near total elimination of in-house IT expenses.

As part of the Trusted Business Advisor Program from CPA2Biz, what’s the next big thing for Intacct?

One of the most exciting things is working to bring together our accounting applications with unique content from the AICPA and CPA2Biz — like vertical industry templates, benchmarks, business guidance, financial best practices, trusted business advisor checklists and much more. The idea is to unlock the wealth of information created by the AICPA and CPA2Biz and make it easily available right from within the financial applications.