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On Boarding Your New Software

Executive Summary: Once you recognize that your current financial software needs replacing or updating this article helps you assess your business financial reporting needs and takes you through the steps from pain point recognition through training and implementation. We tell you everything you need to know about onboarding new software, including identifying pain points, targeting needed features, acquiring software, planning the transition to new software, training and implementation. Because we are QuickBooks Solution Providers, and the small to midsized market is dominated by Intuit, our implementation project plan focuses on a successful QuickBooks Enterprise Software Implementation, but the thought processes can be used with Sage and Microsoft products as well We just happen to prefer Intuit.

As your business grows you will find that your accounting and financial reporting needs also grow. One of the most challenging tasks you could face in your professional career is selecting an accounting package that fits your needs, is responsive to your business needs and one that you will not outgrow within a couple of years. If you are the CEO, you can delegate some of the tasks but you need to understand and control the process. The product must be just right: It shouldnt contain more features than you need (which adds to its cost and makes it more complicated and difficult to use), it should incorporate features that streamline the operation of your business and it should be easy enough to customize to your unique business needs so you dont have to take on more manual accounting operations to compensate for the softwares limitations. The product you select should be one that will be able to expand as your business grows. Finally, you should feel confident during the many years the software serves you that its publisher will be able to provide upgrades and bug fixes as needed. While price is important, understanding pricing involves understanding how the software functions, i.e. where does the underlying data reside, a single database or expandable by module or add-ons.

This document provides you with all the steps to consider from software choice through verification of converted data. After you begin the search, youll discover its not enough to examine a packages specifications and understand its myriad of features; in fact, thats just a small part of the investigation. To be able to recognize the right product, you first must have both a comprehensive and intimate understanding of your organizations business operations, the various processes it uses and how they translate into business solutionsthe industry term for how the software handles tasks such as payroll, banking, inventory, invoicing and accounts receivable. For some businesses, that includes tracking and managing employees work hours, product-production cycles, sales commissions, Internet use as a marketing tool and the companys various metrics as a way to evaluate its performance, to name just a few. These steps guide you through the actual implementation of software and considerations that need to be proactively addressed. As you can appreciate, the search is not an afternoon assignment. It can sometimes take months of research and evaluation if you happen to be at the Enterprise Level. 1 But there is a bright side to this effort: If you do the job diligently, youll discover youre developing a panoramic picture of your organization that is far more comprehensive and detailed than you imagined. In the process you will see how your various business processes interface, or dont interface, with one another. Those insights will provide you with the opportunity to redesign processes that, in the long run, will make your business stronger.

Youre probably thinking, But I thought todays accounting software was so smart that it could adapt to run any kind of business. Theres some truth to that statement, but thats not the whole story. Even todays $99 accounting software is smarter and, given its capabilities, far less expensive than the most sophisticated packages of a generation ago, whose one and only job was to keep the companys books. But price notwithstanding, users expect todays accounting software to do more than just bookkeeping. Loaded into the latest packages are hundreds, if not thousands, of sophisticated solutions capable of fully running a multitude of business processes. Since each software product has its own unique set of solutions, in addition to basic bookkeeping which remains common to all accounting softwareits not hard to understand why the search for the right product, one that matches solutions to your needs, is so complicated. Another reason why the selection process is so important: Fully installing a new accounting system is expensive and requires many hours of managements and accounting/IT staffs time. If you later learn the product is not up to the job, you may have to repeat the whole process. So you want to get it right the first time. You may have an idea of how much you want to spend. You know you dont want to spend $250, but you dont want to spend $20,000 either. Two hundred & fifty wont get you much, but $20,000 seems astronomical. Ballpark it for now.