Here’s Why Your Professional Service Business Needs Accounting Software

Do you or your firm track time and disbursements against clients or projects? Do you need progress billing and detailed reports to track WIP easily? Are you perhaps billing different consultants/project managers or other staff at different rates?

Often accountants, lawyers, management consultants, and engineers will attempt to manage these requirements using complex applications and spreadsheets.

These hurdles result in issues like delayed invoicing due to the time it takes for the team to collect the information needed to generate the invoice manually. Your struggle to have insights into the firm’s performance is painful, especially if your time is spent keying in data that you’ve had to chase down from a program with limited invoicing capabilities.

With Adagio Time & Billing for professional services, your staff time, workflow, approvals, billing, and receivables are streamlined and recorded to produce accurate and detailed financial statements.

Here’s a few advantages to accounting software:

Accurate billing

Your client relationships and integrity heavily rely on your firm's performance, and part of this performance manifests in how you invoice them. The need for accurate and detailed billing is essential when time is involved.

Adagio Time & Billing for professional services intuitively allocates the information going into the accounting system, resulting in more accurate reporting.

Payroll integration

Often, companies use numerous spreadsheets full of disconnected payroll data to create meaningful reports. Accounting software for professional services bridges the gap to improve your payroll processes, integrating with payroll providers to track time, wage differences, vacations, taxes accurately, and more, providing an exceptional payroll solution for your firm.

Adagio Time & Billing for professional services fills the gap to improve your accounting processes by integrating with payroll provider Paydirt.

Report Drill Down

Drilling down your reports to gain visibility about “who is doing what, for whom, for how long, at what cost and how much delay” will increase your overall firm's efficiency and provide valuable insights.

Adagio Time & Billing for professional services helps create invoices to identify the time related to each task.

Easy billing, your way

Billing by the minute, hour, project, or a retainer? Accounting software for professional services captures data in an automated and accurate format. Less human errors and less time doing data-entry enables better invoicing and better collection of receivables.

With Adagio Time & Billing for professional services categorize every bit of information, with as much or as little detail as you want to appear on your invoices.

Improved Performance

Don't have the time to micromanage time spent by employees?

Adagio T&B tracks employee time and allows for more controlled or more autonomous time entry by staff. You set the level of controls in place to suit your firm's needs: how many hours they worked, how many administrative hours, how much of it is billable, etc. Add in a tight audit trail and approval process, and the results are enhanced efficiency for your office.

Adagio Time & Billing for professional services allows for easier write up or write down before billing when reviewing your WIP.

Reduce Administrative Work

Many firms have poor use of professional hours. A common struggle is accumulating data, and re-keying from one program to another to allow for the level of customization that professional services required. The time spent is then transferred onto the client project. Automating and integrating reduces administrative work and allows time to be billed for more added value services – enabling your firm to generate better revenues.

Clearer Revenue Forecast

Accurate WIP requires the proper gathering of the time and disbursements consumed on client projects or services. Accounting software for professional services offers vital elements of managing your firm's WIP. Simply set the parameters you want to see in your WIP reports like staff, project, client, or other variances, and examine what is currently being worked on. Turn the resulting details into a forecast report and quickly produce YTD statements and more.

Conclusion

Accounting software benefits businesses of all kinds, particularly service-based firms that bill their clients on time and tasks performed. There is no fixed price like that of a retail shop, hence a robust system is mandatory.

Here is why Adagio is the perfect fit for your professional service business.

Adagio Time and Billing is designed with professional services firms in mind. It bundles best practices and operational know-how into a single elegant, and easy-to-use application.

• Create unlimited number of client profiles, files, work, disbursement codes, and staff profiles.
• Manage and maintain project, staff involved, work progress, and budget.
• Supports multiple rates, including cost rates, special hourly rates, cost-plus contracts, and lump sum fees.
• Billing that delivers as much or as little details as your clients want to see
• Tracks and accounts for WIP in real time.
• Staffs can track their time and disbursement with Pop-up Timekeeper.
• Client Inquiry drill-down to client information as you enter invoices.

Cloud Vs On-Premise Accounting. How to Choose?

Whether traditional or cloud-based, accounting solutions are vital to small and mid-sized businesses. From office rooms to the warehouse, desktop to cloud, accounting software empowers every organization's ability to perform expeditiously, while producing business insights beyond just debits and credits. Modern-day accounting solutions make this possible with a completely integrated modular system offering a user-friendly, in-depth, and easy to create reporting, complete with details of every transaction. Unrestricted transparency into the accounting details means meaningful corporate insights. 

More than ever, answering the question of on-premises accounting vs. cloud accounting is a challenge for business leaders, with each approach having its pros and cons. Based on current and future needs, organizations must decide which platform suits them best and how each will impact the organization in the long run.

Choosing Between On-Premise and Cloud Accounting.

Any organization wanting to decide between on-premise or cloud service should consider four factors: cost, security, scalability, and reliability. Analysis of these factors will enable you to focus on your present and future demands.

Cost:

On-Premises Accounting

From starting the plan of action to making the service active, there is typically a considerable upfront cost. This expenditure includes all the infrastructure and software needed, including the services portion to get up and running. Likewise, aging of equipment and license purchase-renewal on maintenance costs are annual or periodic. This typically results in an enormous upfront investment. 

Cloud

Upfront costs for services in the cloud are often limited to one-time provisioning fees and minor equipment such as laptops. Offering a subscription-based solution with maintenance or renewals costs factored in typically results in services at a reduced operational investment. In other words, a cloud-based service allows for the organization to decrease implementation time, thereby saving costs.

Security:

On-Premises Accounting

Data security is a significant area of concern for many businesses and financial leaders. Managing safety on your own can be an endless challenge for the organization. Though your service and hardware are in-house, your network is exposed virtually. A capable team with global knowledge on 'What is going on in data security? What are the best practices? What are the security breaches, and how are those attempted?' should be at your disposal 24/7. Ensuring the security of your environment means adding essential resources and expenses to your organization.

Cloud

Major cloud service providers come equipped with security experts to provide health data check-ups, network monitoring, vulnerability tests, and more with compliant systems to international standards. Data breaches and hacking are rare.

Scalability:

On-Premises Accounting

Businesses that are growing require the ability to expand quickly. On-premises hardware and software can become obsolete in months due to rapidly changing technology, or an ever-changing business scenario, making the frequent addition of users and hardware impractical. On-premise accounting is considered suitable for businesses with gradual expansion plans.

Cloud

The Cloud has the potential to scale your organization’s resource capacity up or down as needed. A 100-user implementation today is made into a 100,000-user site and vice versa in a quick time. This approach is feasible only in the Cloud, to accommodate businesses expanding and shrinking rapidly. The Cloud is an excellent choice to fit many organizations' scalability requirements.

Reliability:

On-Premises Accounting

Uninterrupted service is only possible if the organization is also prepared for worst-case scenarios. When hardware is prone to failure at any time, and auxiliary resources, including personnel, are on wait all the time, your on-premise solution's reliability is high.

Cloud Accounting:

Cloud-based providers have a service-level agreement to ensure a minimum level of service is maintained. This guarantees levels of reliability, availability, and responsiveness to systems and applications, while also specifying who is responsible for a service interruption.

Comparing On-Premise and Cloud Deployments.

Wrapping it up

An on-premises accounting suite is suitable for organizations that already have a well-established business process and infrastructure in place for which the Cloud just doesn’t make sense. Organizations looking at moving away from outdated infrastructure to obtain reduced software maintenance costs and offload the responsibility of their environment have the choice of switching to the Cloud. 

Designed especially for small and mid-sized enterprises, Adagio is an affordable, robust and scalable accounting software solution, available on-premises and in the Cloud.

Adagio On-Premise

Adagio On-Premise is the desktop version of the Adagio accounting software. It is an in-house package located on our customer's servers and co-managed by the user and their Adagio Certified Reseller. The organization operates and controls everything, including the storage, servers, networks, and other related systems.

Adagio Cloud

Adagio Cloud is a cloud-hosted Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. It enables users to leverage Adagio's core functionality without any need for extensive infrastructure, static workstations, or dedicated internal IT personnel. With Adagio Cloud, we provide and handle almost everything, including servers, storage, and networking.

Reaching Beyond the Limitations of an Entry-Level Accounting Software

Every business uses different tools to execute various business processes, and at one point, the very tool that supported your process will hinder your ability to perform at your best. It might miss or have limitations on crucial functions. Your accounting department is no exception, and your business will outgrow your entry-level software soon. And so, a software upgrade is inevitable. Software applications such as Adagio Accounting comes in with a host of features that simplify the process. It keeps your business growing and going.

Signs You Have Outgrown Your Accounting Software:

The two real reasons your accounting software outgrows your business are the organizational changes you make and the rate at which your business grows. As your business grows, there will be an increase in stock administration and transactions, and limitations in reporting and data integrity. These scenarios will result in business inefficiency and poor audit trails.

Other Signs You’ve Outgrown Your Accounting Software Include:

• Inefficiency to drill deep down into your data to have a better financial understanding of your business
• Limitations in reporting for multiple entities or departments separately
• If your software doesn’t possess the ability to create reports in one-click
• If there is the need to export data outside your system, risking your security, to generate better reports
• If your software takes a lot of time to run straight-forward and quick processes

As you explore the possibilities of going beyond your entry-level accounting software to meet your growing demands, make sure you understand the challenges within your current environment. Quantify your needs to help identify features and functionalities that your new accounting software should have to help with the decision-making process at this pivotal moment for your business to succeed.

Highlights of a Feature-Rich Accounting Software Include:

• Multiple ways to analyze data via performance, custom reports, charts, graphs, and more
• Countless Customizable features to suit your business’s unique needs
• Real-time data insights to make critical and time-sensitive business decisions faster
• Provides tools for graphical reporting and the ability to create presentation-quality financial statements
• Complete set of tools to manage and streamline accounting operations separately for every department in your business or your subsidiaries
• Multi-entity reporting functionality based on locations
• Automatic reporting of intercompany transactions
• Complete and versatile accounting solution with an easy-to-use interface for your business
• Simple consolidated reporting
• Automatic data integrity checks and backups on all your accounting data

Ready to move on from your antiquated accounting software?

The switch from conventional accounting software products to the more advanced and infinitely scalable software such as Adagio Accounting is a commendable alternative. Adagio empowers your organization to perform expeditiously while producing business insights beyond just debits and credits. Unrestricted transparency into accounting means meaningful corporate insight. Also backed by an experienced team, Adagio facilitates organizational growth, increased profitability, and reduced manual workarounds.

Tailored to fit small and mid-sized enterprises, Adagio is an affordable, robust and scalable accounting solution available both for on-premise and cloud.

How would it fit you? Perfectly. Try it on, now!