Data Quality is vital to the success of any business, especially companies in the professional service sector. Whether you are serving a law firm, accounting practice, or marketing company, the importance of tracking specific details at the invoice level often becomes time intensive and expensive.  Discover how using QuickBooks Online Custom Fields will increase your profitability by streamlining your workflow while improving the accuracy of your data.  You’ll also learn how to uncover additional advisory opportunities utilizing custom reporting based on your custom fields.

DISCOVERING DATA POINTS

Sometimes the most challenging task for a business owner is understanding what data points they should be tracking. This is where, as their trusted adviser, we have an opportunity to make one of the greatest impacts to their business.

Knowing how to uncover the crucial data points for any business requires three tasks:

1. Interview the company stakeholders to understand the business:
   • • Mission & Vision
     • Pain Points
2. Evaluate the complete sales cycle
   • • Take note of the different roles assigned to employees
     • Reviewing the current flow of information
3. Review the current accounting workflow

Whether this is a new client or company that you have been working with for some time, scheduling a time to conduct a thorough interview of the important stakeholders will allow you to better understand the mission and the vision of the company.  While this step may seem trivial, it is a crucial starting point especially when a company has multiple stakeholders who may have different visions of the future.  By understanding the desired future of the business, we will be able to better evaluate their progress to date.

Understanding the desired outcome also prepares us for our next task, uncovering the pain points impacting the company.  At surface level, most pain points will be simplified down to two categories; time and money.  During the interview process it is important to help the stakeholder dive below the surface to truly uncover the cause of the pain while allowing them to discover potential solutions at the same time.

Even with the small amount of information we gathered from the interview process, it would be easy for us to offer suggestions on how to evaluate the performance of the business without ever looking at the company financials or spending time to understand their sales cycle.

During the interview stage, we learned about the desired goals and the perceived pain points of the stakeholders, but now we need to validate that information.  To accomplish this, we must also understand the sales cycle of the business and how it relates to the daily operations of the company.

Starting from the acquisition of new leads, and through to the completion and payment of the transaction, it is important to note the different internal roles assigned to employees as well as the flow of information throughout the cycle. Pay attention to what information is collected at each touch point and where that information is stored.

Now that we have a complete picture of the business operations and how it connects with the stakeholder’s vision for the company, we can start our final task, the review of the accounting information.

By evaluating the structure of their accounting, it allows us to review their existing reporting and how they use:

• • • • Sub-accounts
      • Classes
      • Locations
      • Projects

This information will help us better understand what data points they are already tracking and evaluate it against the information we learned from our review of the sales cycle and stakeholder interview.