Category: Sage Intacct

The Evolving Role of Today’s CFO

11/30/2018

New technologies and growing expectations are changing the job of CFOs like never before. An article in Forbes put the matter like this: “Perhaps chief technology evangelizer, chief strategic engineer or chief operations partner should share the billing with the finance title. CFOs today are expected to fill all of these roles.”

To be more strategic and a champion of growth, CFOs need to embrace technology in all its forms. Deloitte research indicates seven technologies that “have growing interaction and relevance for how the work of finance gets done:”

Cloud computing
Process robotics
Visualization
Advanced analytics
Cognitive computing
In-memory computing
Blockchain

“Together, [these technologies] form a toolset finance can use to improve its own performance and serve the business more effectively, especially when they are used together,” according to Deloitte.

Elevating finance to the cloud
In particular, tech-savvy CFOs are looking to the cloud to expedite financial accounting tasks and get the insights they need to grow their business. Cloud-based financial management solutions such as Sage Intacct are essential to progressive CFOs for several reasons:

Greater operational efficiency. Sage Intacct replaces the “million spreadsheet march” with smart and streamlined automated financial processes, including order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and project accounting. Sage Intacct has the flexibility to automate workflows including PO approvals, automatic invoicing, and more—without a spreadsheet in sight.
In-depth insights, on demand. Sage Intacct provides comprehensive, real-time financial reporting and analysis, giving CFOs an up-to-the-minute picture of their entire organization. They can create any report, dashboard, or visualization they need with the precise metrics that matter to investors, lenders, executives, and department leaders.
More productivity, flexibility at less cost. Sage Intacct eliminate the hardware costs and IT burdens while delivering the advantages of modern financial software—with lower costs, more security, and increased productivity. In addition, Sage Intacct implementations can be adapted—including functionality, reports, and analyses—to stay in step with changing business requirements. In this way, CFOs sidestep the painful capital investments, and tap into the power of sophisticated, high-performance financial software that’s managed by experts in a world-class data center.

Kevin Craig, managing director at Concur Canada, summed up the benefits of cloud technology this way: “Ultimately, cloud-based solutions are the key to allowing CFOs to take on the evolving role they are expected to fill. With emerging technologies and increased automation helping to remove much of the mechanical burden placed on a CFO, these business leaders are free to concentrate on adding value in the form of creative innovation and strategic direction to continue moving their business forward.”

Grow your company and your role with Leaf Software Solutions
Technology in and of itself has little value without the right partner. That’s why you can trust the professionals at Leaf Software Solutions to select and implement a business technology solution for your organization—one that helps you meet current needs and provides a platform for growth.

Contact us today and let us know how we can help.

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Transparent Nonprofits

7/30/2018

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8 Ways Nonprofits Can Be Financially Transparent

Businessman Simon Mainwaring once said, “The keys to brand success are self-definition, transparency, authenticity and accountability.” Transparency and accountability, in particular, are essential to a nonprofit achieving mission success.

In fact, these two principles are foundational to the rating system used by Charity Navigator, the nation's largest and most-utilized evaluator of charities. Charity Navigator offers these two definitions:

Accountability is an obligation or willingness by a charity to explain its actions to its stakeholders.

Transparency is an obligation or willingness by a charity to publish and make available critical data about the organization.

How to show accountability and transparency
The willingness to be accountable and transparent about your nonprofit — especially finances — creates an environment of trust that encourages donations. Financial transparency and accountability are also essential for legal compliance.

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The National Council of Nonprofits lists several ways your nonprofit can - and in some cases, must - demonstrate financial transparency:

If requested, provide copies of the three most recently filed annual information returns (IRS Form 990) and your organization’s application for tax-exemption. These can be posted on your website.
Be honest in your solicitation materials and in communications with donors about how their gifts will be or have been used.
Adopt a conflict of interest policy with a disclosure statement that your Board and staff must create an executive compensation policy that ensures the Board is aware of, and approves, the salary and benefits of your Executive Director or CEO.
Have the Board of Directors review important financial reports as well as review the IRS Form 990 before filing.
Adhere to sound financial management policies, including internal controls. This ensures accountability.
Adopt an expense reimbursement policy that requires prior approval and limits expenditures to a reasonable limit.
Publish information about your nonprofit’s tax-exempt status, who’s on your Board of Directors, and appropriate financial information on the website.
Simplify financial transparency with cloud software.

Nonprofits face significant challenges as a result of thin staffing, tight budgets, primitive financial management tools (e.g., spreadsheets), and far-flung management teams. Financial transparency may seem almost impossible.

Fortunately, there’s cloud-based fund accounting software from Sage Intacct. Now you can create greater levels of transparency across every dimension of your organization and get real-time visibility into your organization’s financial health. Key stakeholders like the Board of Directors have instant, actionable insight to make smart decisions about your nonprofit’s future.

Let Leaf Software Solutions guide you to greater financial transparency and accountability. By focusing on your business needs first, so we can design a solution that scales as your nonprofit grows. Call us at 317-814-8000, or email us to get started today.

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Another Award!

7/10/2018

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Leaf earns Bob Scott's Top 100 VARS 2018 recognition
By David Caldwell, Sage Intacct Practice Lead -

Once again, Leaf Software Solutions has gained recognition as a leading ERP solutions firm. Leaf earned the 38th position in the much-respected “Bob Scott’s Top 100 VARs 2018.” This is a list of VARs across the United States who sell and support financial software. Ranking and selection were based on revenue, employees and financial software type. Companies represented on the list were broad in reported revenue and with a particular focus on the middle market. The financial software product lines included were Microsoft Dynamics 365 products, Sage Intacct, Netsuite, and Accumatica. Furthermore, the predominance of VARS in the list represented cloud-based business software, which supports the expected industry trend where many have or are moving away from “on-premise” systems.

Leaf Software Solutions has a long-standing presence in the Greater Indianapolis area and has spent the last 31 years accelerating commercial growth for its clients. Leaf brings a unique blend of talented business and technology resources to every project. Leaf offers a full suite of financial software options, including a robust development workforce and strategy. Leaf is recognized, by the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, as one of the Best Places to Work in Indiana, and has received this award for seven consecutive years.

Bob Scott has been informing the mid-market financial software sector through print and Internet-based publications for over 24 years and has served as technology editor of Accounting Today and as executive editor of The Progressive Accountant.

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Reporting & Dashboards

5/24/2018

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Sage Intacct Reporting and Dashboards

Gain Visibility and Insight with Sage Intacct Cloud Financial Software

As your business grows, your finance team feels the pressure to expand the breadth, accuracy, and granularity of your financial and management reporting. Executives, investors, shareholders, auditors, and others want to know more than what’s happened—they want to know why. And you want to get this information quickly so your organization can correct problems or respond to opportunities before the moment is lost.

That’s why you need best-in-class cloud financial management solution from Sage Intacct. Its reporting and dashboard features ensure you get the deep operational and business-performance insights that tell you why—and the real-time view that enables you to act today.

See every dimension of your business

With Sage Intacct, you can more easily create reports, graphs, dashboards, and visualizations that analyze performance by business driver. When you use dimensions to tag transactions and store financial or operational data along with its business context, you’ll fundamentally improve your reporting—and get fast answers to your business questions.

Sage Intacct includes 10 built-in dimensions for capturing and reporting on business context, including department, item, and employee. You can also create additional custom dimensions to track other business drivers.

Get the rich reports you need—the way you want them

Create reports that go deeper by drawing on your combined financial and operational data. What’s more, you can drill down to source transactions for immediate, granular details or easily view consolidated reports without waiting for period-end. With Sage Intacct, you can do it all without exporting data to a spreadsheet, writing custom scripts, or waiting on someone to customize reports.

Take advantage of more than 150 pre-built accounting and financial reports—or build and customize your own reports right from within Sage Intacct. With flexible scheduling and delivery options, like email and cloud, you can get reports when you need them, where you need them.

Make it easy for stakeholders to get the insights they need

Display real-time reports, metrics, and insights tuned to the needs and perspectives of all stakeholders—in finance, sales, operations, and the boardroom—wherever and whenever they need them. Dashboards provide at-a-glance views of what matters most: cash balances, project profitability, deferred revenues, revenue per square foot—practically any ratio or metric you need.

Plus, data visualization features let you easily flag important trends, display critical comparisons, highlight missed or hit targets, and more. Skip the hassle of exporting data to a spreadsheet or presentation program and emailing it; instead, just build a dashboard once, then let Sage Intacct update it for you in real time.

Elevate your success with Leaf Software Solutions

Sage Intacct unlocks valuable insights that help you plan smarter and lead with confidence. And Leaf Software Solutions offers a proven yet flexible framework for successfully implementing business cloud applications like Sage Intacct, so you can focus on your business and not on technology.

Ready to set your sights on success? Contact us today!

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Tech-Savvy CFO

4/20/2018

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5 Ways to Be a Tech-Savvy CFO

The role of the CFO is changing fast. Customers, the board, your finance team, your stakeholders within the firm, and—most of all—technology is driving this change. Of course, change is rarely easy, even if it’s entirely worthwhile. In this case, technology is both the source of your challenge and the solution you need.

Today, it takes a tech-savvy CFO—someone who understands and embraces the promise and power of technology—to navigate this exciting but sometimes uncertain future. A tech-savvy CFO seeks to modernize and transform the company’s business systems (and IT infrastructure) to boost staff productivity and give the company flexibility for the future. Even if you are in the process of becoming tech savvy, in today’s landscape, an effective CFO must have knowledge of how technology will positively impact your company.

Here are five ways the tech-savvy CFO uses technology to get ahead and stay ahead.

1. Embrace automation. Technology powers the new tools and processes you need to transform your organization, while keeping pace with rapid growth. As you put that technology to work, you will see the results in your company’s performance. For example, you can add financial controls that ensure compliance and auditability. Automation enables rock-solid accounting and bullet-proof record-keeping—allowing your company to move faster, without fear.

2. Gain visibility. Where can you accelerate your business? How can you eliminate risk? Are you seeing your data in real-time? The sooner you know, the faster you can act on the really big opportunities in front of your business. To truly understand the nature of your business, you need to leverage a single source of truth. Your teams become empowered to dig deeper, and you can move faster toward bigger growth.

3. Look to the cloud. It’s time to invigorate your organization with the cost efficiencies and freedom of the cloud. After all, the safe bet of on-premises systems has become a bust. Slow innovation delivery and nightmare implementation cycles have shown there is just no future in the old way of doing things. Today’s cloud solutions, such as Sage Intacct’s best-in-class financial management software, deliver greater productivity, lower TCO, and better security.

4. Empower the next level of growth with agility. Top-performing organizations must constantly evaluate operations to make the right strategic investments. You need the flexibility to address the shifts in your business as they occur. The decisions you make today will become the competitive advantages of tomorrow.

5. Collaborate with confidence across your entire company. Departmental silos suppress collaboration and productivity. And that challenge compounds as your business grows. Why stay constrained by the old ways of isolated decision-making and missed information, when you can achieve your best results by working together? The tech-savvy CFO uses technology to streamline processes and leverage the power of the team.

Transform your technology with Leaf Software Solutions
Tech-savvy CFOs know and understand the power of harnessing technology to quickly grow their business. They also know that the details of implementing a transformative solution are best left to the experts. Leaf Software Solutions combines more than 30 years of software application development with the latest technology to create a custom solution that can accelerate your company’s growth.

You can’t afford to be left behind. Contact us today to start your journey to becoming the tech-savvy CFO your company’s future demands.

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