If you’ve been reading the Wall Street Journal recently, there’s been a lot of commotion over a topic familiar to finance professionals: Microsoft Excel. What seemed to be a straightforward article about organizations veering away from the personal spreadsheet software quickly devolved into chaos, with tirades from finance professionals around the world in response to the article. Read more
The home services business is a highly competitive one that relies on quality service, rapid response, and customer satisfaction. In this, it is imperative that everyone is on the same page throughout the entire customer buying process—from the first time they look for a review on Yelp/Angie’s List/Home Advisor to the first interaction they make with your customer service representative to the final repair or improvement project that your service technician completes.
As we discussed in a recent blog, there is a lot of confidence among home services businesses, but little to back it up—come companies are seeing decreased revenues, some companies can’t find talent, and some companies are having trouble moving homeowners from lead to customer. In that blog, we discussed a few ways to empower your entire team with technology, and today, we would like to look at how to drive higher levels of satisfaction by making your service teams’ jobs easier.
Your lead called in, spoke with a caring, knowledgeable sales/customer service representative, and has decided to move forward with your organization. Now comes the completion of the job. All of the legwork was done to set up the service technician for success, right?
If so, the technician can get in quickly, get the job done to the specs of the customer, and you can look forward to this customer telling his or her friends about you and calling you next time they need a home service.
However, without the right planning, briefing, or flow of information, there are many things that can go wrong. Poor scheduling could result in the technician being late. Poor planning could result in your technician not having the tools or materials for the job. Poor communication could result in unexpected slip-ups. Below, we discuss a few snags that could result in your service technicians being “hung out to dry,” and your customers feeling short-changed.
Your technician just got off a job. Now they have to drive 40 miles across town—and they have to do it in an hour and a half. Failing to plan is planning to fail, and improper scheduling could result in your service technician being late, getting stressed out by a long hassle-filled commute, and ultimately not arriving at a customer’s home ready to help.
How can you address this? You can try to tackle the problem by drawing on a map, writing down schedules in a book, and trying to balance all of your dispatches in a spreadsheet, or you could leverage easy-to-use, drag-and-drop dispatching technology. Through this technology, you can give your customers status updates and your technicians ample time to prepare and get to a location. This results in less stress for both customer and technician, and higher satisfaction of both.
When a technician arrives to a call promptly and ready to solve that particular customer’s problem, it sets the stage for a memorable service experience and creates an ideal selling environment. Learn more about creating a memorable experience for customers here.
“Doug Jones needs [repair].” So, what does your technician need to know about this person, about the repair, and about the home? Providing top levels of service means you’ve accounted for anything that could go wrong before it does.
By leveraging the right technology, you can brief your service technician on important customer and job details before they arrive at the job site. No rummaging through papers, no hiccups in invoicing. Just a simple, streamlined process that lets your technicians get in, get out, and get on to the next job.
Even if your technician is a dog person, it’s unlikely they want to be carrying tools to the door when, out of nowhere, a large dog comes bounding at them. Simply put, no one likes surprises that much.
Luckily, technology has even made this interaction easier. Now, customer service representatives can send customers reminders about the time, and even let customers track when the technician is pulling up with technician tracking. One such example of this is ServiceTitan, which automates a lot of the final steps before a technician arrives, sending a notification when your tech is on his or her way, giving the customer ample time to put the dogs away.
The last touchpoint could be the make-or-break one. An inconvenient payment process or an unanticipated charge could turn a five-star review into a one-star one. Make the process easier on your technicians and customers by leveraging technology to provide transparent pricing, simple invoicing, and in-field payment capture to clients. Take this further by providing simple financing options with rapid decisions.
Customer service is the name of the game, and with so many different touchpoints, one slip-up could result in poor reviews, fewer word-of-mouth recommendations, and lower business. By focusing on the last mile of the customer interaction—the service itself—you can improve technician and customer satisfaction. With easy to use scheduling and dispatching, advanced features like option builder and rapid financing, and customer-focused tools like technician tracking and reminder texts, you can reduce the risk of slip-ups and allow everyone to rest easier knowing the job will be done on time, on budget, and exactly as the customer expected.
This is why many of the fastest-growing service companies are turning to ServiceTitan. ServiceTitan is designed to help home services professionals do more, grow faster, and provide better service. Learn more about the platform here.
While the software was originally designed to integrate with QuickBooks, implementing ServiceTitan has been such a boon for companies, that many have found QuickBooks to be unable to handle their needs as they grow. This is why an increasing number of growing home services companies are turning to Sage Intacct to handle their back-office needs. From cash flow to contract revenue, general ledger to project accounting, AP to AR, Sage Intacct is becoming a game changer for businesses in need of automation, productivity, and support for growth.
Learn more about ServiceTitan by taking a product tour, and learn about our relationship with the company by reading our blog, Why Trade Services Companies Turn Toward the Cloud.
Following major hurricanes and other adverse weather events throughout the southeast, home services organizations are feeling more confident than ever in their ability to grow revenues, support customers, and convert leads to sales. However, recent research has found that many of these companies may have misplaced confidence in their futures, with many expecting tempered revenues or lead conversion challenges. We would like to look at recent research among these professionals and offer tips on improving in 2018 and beyond. Read more
Whether HVAC, Plumbing, Electrical, Garage Door, or one of the many other home services industries, companies that offer repairs, maintenance, and improvements face high levels of competition, and one bad review could spell disaster. For those organizations, customer service is a top priority, and they need to put as much focus on providing high-quality service. This is why they not only need a complete view of the customer, they need to have a complete view of their service technicians, customer service representatives, and more.
Home services organizations—from those with a few techs to those with dozens or even hundreds—have the same concerns. From knowing the who, what, where, why and when to taking steps to increase bookings, measure success, and improve efficiency, the challenges are often similar. However, how the companies tackle these challenges is what separates the successful ones from the average ones. Enter ServiceTitan.
ServiceTitan was founded to help companies grow revenues, increase customer service, and integrate with leading finance and back-office applications to save time and money.
Simply put, ServiceTitan empowers your home services organization to:
If you’re looking to improve your conversions, build rapport with customers, and track the effectiveness of your customer service people, call booking is a can’t-miss feature that ServiceTitan has designed for its home services customers. ServiceTitan makes this easy by:
Keep your customers up to date and well-informed. ServiceTitan allows you to create an unforgettable customer experience by doing the little things customers love:
ServiceTitan’s dispatching software can help you ensure there is minimal downtime for technicians, increase satisfaction by putting the right person on the job, and improve route efficiency by allowing CSRs to map out routes and schedules easily, accurately, and efficiently.
Marketing your home services business is a challenge, but ServiceTitan makes it easy, taking care of tracking, measurement, and reporting so that you can focus on providing top quality service.
If you’re working major jobs, your customers may not always have $5,000 or more on hand. This is why ServiceTitan integrates with financing companies to provide near-immediate approvals with minimal paperwork. ServiceTitan connects customer to financer and makes the financing process simple,
All of this has combined to provide ServiceTitan Customers amazing growth and high ratings. With more than 1,000 customers in the home services community, ServiceTitan is growing at a torrid pace—and so are their customers: The average increase in revenue for ServiceTitan customers is 25%.
ServiceTitan is designed to help home services professionals do more, grow faster, and provide better service. While the software was originally designed to integrate with QuickBooks, implementing ServiceTitan has been such a boon for companies, that many have found QuickBooks to be unable to handle their needs as they grow.
This is why an increasing number of growing home services companies are turning to Sage Intacct to handle their back-office needs. From cash flow to contract revenue, general ledger to project accounting, AP to AR, Sage Intacct is becoming a game changer for businesses in need of automation, productivity, and support for growth.
Learn more about ServiceTitan by taking a product tour, and learn about our relationship with the company by reading our blog, Why Trade Services Companies Turn Toward the Cloud.
Finance leaders at nonprofit health and human services organizations are plagued with constant internal and external challenges. Whether in the form of managing cash flow, finding donors, or dealing with regulatory and other external challenges facing both nonprofits and healthcare organizations, these challenges can inhibit growth and put organizations at risk. Read more
Remember the “no-internet policy?” It wasn’t so long ago that companies were keeping their employees from exploring the world wide web on company machines. But as all-things-internet have become ubiquitous, including mobile devices and, yes, cloud computing in the workplace, hopping online to get things done—to perform essential professional tasks, let alone browse favorite website—is commonplace. No wonder Gartner reports that by 2020, a corporate “no-cloud” policy will become as rare as a “no-internet” policy is today. Read more
Being successful as a nonprofit means that everything needs to fall into place when and where it needs to fall into place. Knowing this, there are many different considerations and moving parts that you can control in order to gain additional visibility, save time, and improve outcomes.
While we discussed some of these factors, including the shift to outcome metrics and things to understand before selecting or changing from a calendar year to a fiscal one, today, we would like to turn our attention to another important consideration: How to choose a basis of accounting.
A recent AICPA article explored the basics on selecting a basis, and how to decide on whether a cash basis, accrual basis, modified cash basis, or tax basis is the proper way to look at the numbers, comparing these options and offering tips on how to select the one that makes the most sense to your nonprofit.
Whether cash, accrual, modified, or tax year, each basis of accounting listed below poses opportunities and challenges in measurement, disclosure, and reporting.
If a nonprofit organization uses the cash method of preparing its accounting records and statements, it recognizes income and expenses when they occur. In other words, the nonprofit would record income when it received the funds and not when it is actually earned. It would also record expenses at the time it paid the bill rather than when it incurred the expense.
This is a common approach for smaller nonprofits, as it mirrors a personal “checkbook accounting,” entering debits or credits as they are completed. For example, under a cash basis, if you receive a $10,000 pledge today, you do not record the $10,000 until the money is in the bank.
Pros and cons of the cash basis are as follows:
Using the accrual method of accounting, a nonprofit recognizes income when they earn it, rather than when they receive it. It would also recognize expenses when they were incurred instead of when the organization paid the bill. For example, using the accrual method a nonprofit would recognize a pledge as income. That would hold true even if it had not yet received all the money, or even any amount of the donation pledged.
Under the accrual method, nonprofits would record revenue and expenses when the transaction takes place, regardless of whether the cash has changed hands. For example, a $10,000 pledge would be recorded immediately and would create a receivables account for outstanding cash.
Funds accounting is a form of accrual accounting that is specific to nonprofits. As a nonprofit grows, its funding sources can become more diversified. It may receive multiple grants, a government contract, personal donations of cash and goods and donations of time. With the funds basis of accrual accounting, each income stream is given its own accounting code. For example, your Department of Education grant would have its own code. Beyond that, you would be able to assign codes within a category so that you could break up DOE funds between general revenue, service revenue and administrative.
Modified cash basis statements combine elements of cash basis and accrual accounting. Certain transactions are reported on an accrual basis and others on a cash basis (for example, liabilities may be presented, but fixed assets may not).
The modified cash basis establishes a position part way between the cash and accrual methods. The modified basis has the following features:
While rare in the nonprofit world, there may be some cases for a tax basis for accounting. The tax method of accounting would ensure the financial statements match the organization’s Form 990.
AICPA author Marc Kotsonas, CPA, Officer- Mahoney Ulbrich Christiansen Russ shared the following six factors in choosing a basis of accounting.
At rinehimerbaker, we are committed to helping you succeed. This is why we have written a series of helpful articles on running the finances at a nonprofit organization. We invite you to learn more by reading our articles on Outcome measures, improving reporting, and increasing efficiency. Learn even more by reading these two nonprofit success stories from our friends at Sage Intacct, and contact us for more details.
Day in and day out, specialty trade contractors are in steeped in providing exceptional service. Customers have high demands—sometimes urgent—and there’s always a willing competitor around every corner, ready to swoop in and over-deliver. So the more time business owners and admin staff can focus on providing value-added service, the better.
That’s why simplifying back office activities through cloud-based financial management and accounting process automation is part of a winning strategy for growing trade services companies. Here, we’ll take a closer look at the reasons why.
Time is of the essence, especially for companies with seasonal field service operations. From managing an already loaded calendar to accommodating emergency service calls, focusing on anything but the customer can be a challenge. And thanks to modern technology, more of the business management is happening out in the field, where every employee is on the go.
This helps explain why tech adoption among trade services companies emphasizes cloud-based, mobile-ready solutions. For example:
All-of-the-above cloud-based software systems provide business owners with game-changing data. Fleet telematics data can be used to route drivers and deliveries more efficiently; employee expense data can help business owners allocate budgets more effectively; historical or even real-time financial performance reports can uncover opportunities to improve vendor relationships and contract pricing. It’s easy to see the bottom-line impact of the right information coming in at the right time in a user-friendly way.
When data from disparate systems is connected, managers get an even richer view into operations. Take the field management platform Service Titan, for instance, a cloud-based technology vendor providing comprehensive solutions to home services business. Their tools are multi-faceted, as they touch different areas of a business, from technician scheduling to marketing to customer service. The data generated from these processes is powerful on its own—and Service Titan arms customers with robust business intelligence tools. But consider how much more powerful the insights become when they can be “sliced and diced” alongside data from other business systems, like Sage Intacct’s financial management and accounting software.
With this front office (Service Titan) and back office (Sage Intaact) integration, a specialty trade contractor is given one single view of customer and financial information across their entire business. They also experiences these benefits of automation:
As the first Sage Intacct VAR partner to complete integration between Sage Intacct and Service Titan, rinehimerbaker can help you maximize the data coming from your cloud-based field service management and financial management software. Contact us to find out more.
Contrary to popular belief, the nine most terrifying words in the English language are not always “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” For small business finance and accounting professionals, there is another phrase that strikes even more fear, anger and disdain: “QuickBooks has stopped working and must be shut down.”
So how do you go about trying to tackle the problem? You run a clean reinstall. You download the diagnostic tool. You run a second clean reinstall. You attempt to run it without antivirus. You rename the .tlg file. You update it, you repair it, you download every tool in the book, and you still see those nine terrifying words: “QuickBooks has stopped working and must be shut down.”
It’s infuriating. It’s painful. It happens over and over and over. Those nine terrifying words are etched in your memory. Yet it’s all too common. You search the knowledge base for answers, and you see that you’re not alone. A quick Google search for the exact phrase “QuickBooks has Stopped Working” yields 959 results on the Intuit Community alone, and over 16,000 results across the web.
So when is QuickBooks most likely to crash? As a company that has helped many companies outgrowing QuickBooks to make the move, we have heard many complaints about the platform.
However, it’s not only the crashes that present a problem. QuickBooks might run slowly in multi-user mode. It might run slowly if your audit trail gets too long. It might run slowly when your data file gets too big.
There are many reasons for this. Some of the most commonly referenced ones on the Intuit Community:
For a software that’s been around as long as QuickBooks has, there’s certainly a lot that can go wrong.
QuickBooks users around the world face the same struggles—especially as it pertains to the software crashing. Unfortunately, there are two reasons that you will continue to face problems.
QuickBooks was built as a desktop application, which is why most of the reasons above revolve around computer and file-based issues. This is something that isn’t going to change. Anything from a change in operating system to the use of an anti-virus software can derail the entire QuickBooks desktop experience, causing crashes and other poor experiences.
It was initially thought that QuickBooks would address this when it introduced QuickBooks Online, but customers quickly found that it didn’t hold up to customer expectations. QuickBooks wasn’t built to be an online application, so when Intuit tried to rebuild QuickBooks for the web, it ended up putting up a web application that is lacking, according to G2Crowd reviews.
QuickBooks’ other fatal flaw—at least as it pertains to growing businesses, is that you’re asking it to do too much. Just as QuickBooks was designed to be a desktop software (i.e. run on a personal computer), QuickBooks was designed to make life easier for the small business owner. Again, we’ve said it on our blog before—QuickBooks is great for small businesses. It’s the larger businesses that push the software to (and past) its limitations.
While not always why the software crashes, a large file size is one of the main reasons that the software runs slowly. Also, as the file size grows, so does the risk and impact of the file being corrupted.
Barring an unfortunate turn of events, the latter of these two isn’t going to change—once you’ve outgrown QuickBooks, there’s no looking back.
When your business was just starting up, adopting QuickBooks was almost a rite of passage. It was a welcome sign of your company’s growth and the accounting system met your needs for a time. But your business has kept growing, and now you’re seeing the limitations of the system you once depended on. QuickBooks simply doesn’t offer all the capabilities you need today—or tomorrow. The time has come, once again, for a change.
We invite you to learn more about additional warning signs, pain points, and opportunities for improvement from downloading our guide for companies outgrowing QuickBooks, which you can preview below.
Your company may have twenty employees—or have a twenty-person finance and accounting department. Either way, your team likely grapples with processes or systems that no longer serve you. Business growth leads to any number of challenges, but aren’t they just opportunities to improve and work smarter? Read more
