Investing in Your SIAP Practice Through Automation - DataBlend

DataBlend presented at the Sage Intacct Accountants Program (SIAP) partner call this week. During the discussion, Andrew McDonnell and Erik Neilssen talked about the difficulties that SIAPs encounter, the ways in which DataBlend can assist them, and shared a few examples of how it has been used recently.

Outsourced Accounting (CAS/SIAP) Challenges

DataBlend spends a lot of time with SIAPs; we were a Gold Sponsor at The Sage Partner Summit, and we're sponsoring the SIAP Chicago meet-up next week. What we hear is:

• Practitioners want to improve the capacity of their existing team through efficiency and productivity gains.
• More frequently, they provide the most data possible to their clients to leverage the great reporting and visualization tools in Sage Intacct.
• And in the middle of a talent war from a lack of accountants and staggering inflation, there's pressure to improve internal margins, despite the fact that outsourcing teams are typically one the best-performing lines of business for a practice.

As an outsourced accounting professional, you may encounter the following challenges:

• Your clients are expanding, as is your book of business. This expansion means a proliferation of ​systems, sometimes with individual clients having multiple CRMs and payroll systems. 
• You won the business by committing to be an expert in all these systems and getting into Sage Intacct, sometimes daily.
• Your clients don't want a bookkeeper. They want a business partner providing guidance, and advisory, not just the monthly close.
• Very challenging to be that trusted advisor if your team spends 20% of engagement exporting, manipulating, and importing data into Sage Intacct. ​

How does DataBlend help SIAPs?

To achieve greater efficiency, better data, and higher profit margins, the solution lies in enhancing automation through data integration.

If it seems too simplistic, it's understandable to be skeptical. Requesting access to your clients' systems and IT resources may not align with the benefits of outsourced accounting. Additionally, if the integration process is costly and complex, it could negatively impact profitability.

And even though DataBlend can do direct, scheduled integrations with dozens of systems with SIAP, we suggest starting with the basics:

1. Take the existing clients you are already working with. 
2. With no formatting, drop it into a secured shared folder. Using SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol), the files are moved to DataBlend, transformed into the correct format, 
3. Then sent directly via API to your Sage Intacct console.

DataBlend will read the file name and place the file with the right client in the correct data set (CRM vs. payroll). We structure our console so that your team has a single interface to manage multiple clients (image below).

And this is more than a mapping tool. Data Quality reports alert you if data is missing, rich data transformations, including pivots, joins, withs, concatenations, and unpivots.

DataBlend can eliminate at least 80% of the manual work associated with getting into Sage Intacct. 

DataBlend in the real world

Working with DataBlend has been nothing but a pleasure for me and our team. Even when we run into difficult situations, they are willing to brainstorm, to find the best and most efficient solution. They are attentive, knowledgeable, honest, and take pride in what they do. ~ Sharai M Lavoie, CEO / Managing Member, Lavoie CPA

In the real world DataBlend customers who are doing outsourced accounting. Here are three reasons why they bought it:

1. SIAP that provides outsourced accounting to a multi-location QSR franchisee. The SIAP estimated that someone from their team spent nearly 45 minutes uploading POS for this client. 
2. SIAP that has craft brewery clients using Ekos, which doesn't integrate with Sage Intacct. Their clients resisted moving from legacy accounting platforms to Sage Intacct because integration wasn't possible.
3. SIAP firm that recently signed with DataBlend integrated three clients. Using metrics from those clients, they built integration plans and efficiencies into future SOWs. 

Discover how DataBlend can assist SIAPs by checking out the presentation Andrew McDonnell gave during the June SIAP Partner Call, available for viewing below.

Are you ready to boost your productivity?

Explore our CAS/SIAP landing page to witness a demonstration, experiment with our ROI calculator, and acquire the Value Framework Template - all to supercharge your productivity!