Implementation Tips

Guest Speaker: Implementations Gone Bad and Who’s to Blame? by Doris Cahill, Contributing author for the ZweigWhite Newsletter

Learn how to pick an accounting or business development IT package that will help save your firm time and money.

It’s a bummer, but when you’re implementing accounting systems, the results can be ugly. Real ugly. Like any other project, but probably somewhat unique to accounting, if things do go bad, it’s a long, costly road to recovery. Delayed invoicing, parallel entry that never ends, over budget data migration and numbers that seem to endlessly never add up!

Unfortunately, when this does happen the big question is “Who’s to blame?” The IT guy?.... The CFO?... The software company? Or the bookkeeper? Ah!!! The managing principal! Not a laughing matter at all.

An accounting implementation gone awry is serious, very serious. Beyond the costly disruption in operations and recovery from compromised migrated data, you may find yourself with software that you hate. In my experience, if your everyday user hates the software, you’re not integrated. That is, in other words, the project failed and it is likely you will see a return to offline parallel solutions or worse, your new solution relegated to the back office.

If you follow my writings, in many of them there is reference to how truly “disinterested” our accounting departments are in integration. At that time I graded A/E accounting integration with a C-, now maybe a C, tops C+, if you’re in construction D-. Small firms that are lean and mean would be the exception and a select number of larger firms. There still is a real trend to never “budget for” and/or “deal with” accounting IT. And when it comes to business development tools that work with accounting, we are talking infancy. What I mean is Excel worksheets are STILL extensive, limited financial access pervasive, and opportunity/business development tracking fully disconnected from accounting. It’s still so bad, that many times accounting is not even on the network! But, a very confident staff member, just text-paged their bonus pay stub! Sorry, only IT types will get that one. (Pay stubs, have social security numbers on them, for those in the security mode). Or, a confidential Excel spreadsheet, is now stuck in on a thumb drive and playing on your kid’s Nano.

This persistent and disheartening trend places any software solution a risk for success. And, who’s to blame if your implementation is not as planned?

Use the following four-point matrix before you decide on any accounting or business development IT package. If two of the four points are no, don’t do it, no matter what the software salesperson tells you.

1. Accounting: You must have accounting talent to implement any accounting system. What I mean is a CPA or degreed accountant or a general ledger accountant with 10-plus years of closing books for a CPA firm.

2. IT: Ownership by external or internal IT to make sure you can operate, that is log in, print, PDF, e-mail, and web access.

3. Management commitment: The total cost of the software is not just the software. Be sure to budget for an implementer, training, hardware, and internal resource. Conversions run anywhere from .5 to 1.5 of software costs. Also, management must own the project, not just the software company or implementer.

4. Data Entry: Conversions mean cleanup, setup and testing, that means resources and time.

Tips to remember when entering into an implementation:

* Parallel is a disaster— proper testing eliminates the need to parallel.

* Get a CPA or like kind professional to assess your software needs, they are “independent.”

* A salesperson in technology is NOT an accountant, but IS trained to sell.

* Solve the basic: Operate first cleanly.

* Plan to use the new features/business tools.

* Why get new software that’s 400 years old, budget to improve efficiencies and operations.

* Not all data needs to be migrated, it can be too costly and slow— “go live” to a crawl.

* Some data is garbage or in a preexisting poor state.

* Reporting: Even if you’re upgrading, expect you will lose reports. Access your reporting requirement.

So who’s to blame...? Allow me to create a scenario, and I bet any accounting software company will sound like your vendor.

We just bought X software, and it cost $25,000. Then we found out we needed a new server to run the software. When we wanted to put the new solution on the Internet, we found out we needed a second server plus a firewall and vpn. We did not know it only worked with MSExchange, so alas, we are now getting an e-mail server. That brings our cost up another $15,000 as we needed three servers. The salespeople said our data was a “push button” migration and I had to hire a temp to keypunch billing terms that ran $3,000. We can’t find our consultant? They’ve been reassigned and we now have a new guy, who’s not the data migrator, that’s someone else. So the person we talked to in the sales cycle is not the present consultant who’s not the migrator and we go live in a few days. The data is migrated and it’s not what we expected so that needs to be redone. We’re now $50K into the project, everyone still needs training and we have no reports!

It’s not the software companies, it’s us and the decisions we make to delay changes in IT in the accounting department, and not treating it like a project that can truly improve work effort.

Doris Cahill, CPA, is president and CEO of DMC Accounting + Technology, Ltd (Boston, MA), an accounting consultancy practice that provides assistance with implementation, training, and accounting for the AEC industry.

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