ACCOUNTING TODAY-- Everything would seem to be “as-a-service” these days: infrastructure, platform, software, government, healthcare, storage and more. There is now even the term “anything as a service” or XaaS, which encompasses this entire movement. So, I apologize in advance to adding to the jargon with this discussion of Business-Process-as-a-service (BPaaS) and Managed Accounting Services (MAS).
To explain what I mean by Managed Accounting Services, I should give a little background. As an auditor for PwC, I saw firsthand how large enterprises used outsourcing for some of their back-office processes. In the early days of outsourcing services abroad—or offshoring—companies were really just looking to lower their labor costs by moving pieces of their non-core or contextual processes to cheaper labor markets. This is where outsourcing (often used as a synonym for offshoring, through outsourcing can still be domestic) started to get a bad reputation. We can all think of customer service experiences where language, culture or geography has made explaining a complex issue difficult and kept a problem from being resolved. In addition to concerns about the level of service and quality, there are also ethical and political concerns about lost jobs and wage erosion in the originating country, as well as working conditions in the destination country. I will stay well clear of these topics.
We’ve seen a trend to increase the value and level of service of outsourcing by moving processes back to the originating country, a trend sometimes called near-shoring or re-shoring. The larger providers of business process outsourcing (BPO) would normally dedicate a group of workers to one particular customer, so if a large enterprise wanted to take advantage of finance and accounting outsourcing (FAO), we’d see a portion of the outsourcing provider’s offices dedicated to that customer. A handful of clerks might handle the accounts payable, accounts receivable and general ledger activities for that particular customer.
The advent of cloud-based and SaaS technologies have changed the game, providing sophisticated tools to companies of all sizes. SaaS allows for economies of scale and efficiencies for both the software provider and the customer. Multi-tenancy, resource pooling, and elasticity allow providers to manage one code base and make the most efficient use of computing power. The same attributes allow customers to offload server maintenance and IT resources to the provider, and they allow a customer’s business to scale without needing to worry about how the software will handle that growth.
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A parallel to the move from on-premises legacy software (customer-managed) to SaaS (vendor-managed) can be seen in the move from in-house business processes to Managed Accounting Services. When you turn on your computer and log into your SaaS accounting, CRM, or HR software, you expect it just to work. You don’t worry about how it’s managed, where the servers are, what the disaster recovery plan is. The vendor handles that. With Managed Accounting Services, the same is true: Vendors are paid. Customers are billed. Cash transactions are reconciled. Employee expenses are captured and reimbursed. Accounts are analyzed. Reports are delivered.
With SaaS, the CFO no longer has to expend time and effort dealing with software installs, servers and performance. With MAS, the CFO no longer has to worry about managing the transactions or even the people that manage the transactions.
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In addition, MAS goes beyond the older BPO/FAO model in one key way: specialization. Instead of just taking the back office of one company and moving it into the purview of an outsourcing provider, a MAS provider has specialized and dedicated resources for each functional area (AR, AP, GL, cash management, etc.) across all customers. Similarly to how SaaS providers can lower their costs and build efficiencies and economies of scale by sharing code and server resources across all customers, MAS provides “economies of skill” by shifting resources elastically across the provider’s whole customer base. As with SaaS, this provides cost savings for the provider that can then be handed down to the customer, allowing small to midsize companies to take advantage of technology and services not available ten or even five years ago.
But profits, numbers of clients and investment in software aren't what earn AcctTwo the top partner honor from Sage Intacct every year. Rather, it’s the “softer” or less quantifiable achievements that push AcctTwo to the top, founder and CEO Marcus Wagner said, like “the degree to which [the firm] contribute[s] knowledge to the overall partner ecosystem.”
CFOs should be strategic advisors to their companies. They should be analyzing data, helping make key business decisions and securing the capital necessary to grow the business. They shouldn’t be managing software, servers, clerks or transactions. They should be subscribing to software and outcomes—predictably priced and predictably delivered outcomes.
Marcus Wagner, CEO at the AcctTwo Houston, Texas offices.
“At every stage of growth, we hire for two stages forward,” Wagner said.“We over-invest in the present to be ready for the future.”
- Marcus Wagner, CEO & Founder
Marcus Wagner is the Founder and CEO of AcctTwo, a consulting firm
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