'Chunkified' Cloud Accounting and the Future of Your Practice

Doug Sleeter Chunkified

Doug Sleeter, president of The Sleeter Group, makes some excellent points about the future of Cloud Accounting, the breathtaking pace of new add-ons that enhance QuickBooks and other accounting applications, the potential (soon?) obsolescence of the old strictly ‘billable hours’ business model, and whether you and your firm have what it takes to be ‘Lego Masters,’  those artists who excel at building beautiful and complex Lego art by selecting pieces from thousands of shapes, sizes, colors and textures, and assembling them using the right connections – a great analogy for how accountants  will succeed with clients in the new ‘chunkified’ world of cloud-based  accounting.

Sleeter gave his original schpeel at his November Las Vegas conference where Cloud9 Real Time presented, and we suspected and have since confirmed that, yes Mary, “chunkification” really is a new word… and we like it.

Zero Entry Bookkeeping & Accounting

The main premise of Sleeter’s talk was that clients don’t just desire to be served, but rather they want and need to be lead masterfully into the new paradigm. And what is this brave new world for accounting clients?

Sleeter says that these are some of the primary attributes –

‘Chunkification’?

Over the past three decades the accounting software market has been dominated by large, all-in-one accounting products such as QuickBooks, Sage Peachtree, Microsoft Dynamics, etc. The new crop of products and technologies however, nearly all of which are cloud-based applications, are “chunkifying” those large systems into specific business processes to provide more specific functionality and verticalization.

‘Zero Entry’ really?

The key to zero entry is that it moves us away from data entry, says Sleeter, and towards connecting business processes with the accounting system via software connections and data flows. We realize the goal of zero data entry by connecting customer-entered data, vendor-entered data, employee-entered data and automated recurring entries that free the “bookkeeper” from entering data.

By combining the concepts of chunkification and zero entry, we will see a dramatic change for the role of the bookkeeper. Although the bookkeeper role won’t completely disappear, the role will change from being the expert on how to enter transactions efficiently to how to manage transactions and other “data flows” from several cloud-based “chunks” of the system.

‘Collaborative Accounting Services’

Accounts and bookkeepers must focus on how to collaborate with and serve clients in ways that were simply impossible just a few years ago.

To sum it up –

In this fast approaching brave new world, cloud accounting provides the perfect platform for both accountants and clients to work collaboratively on the same data at the same time from anywhere in the world. By centralizing the client’s data in the cloud, surrounded by robust security measures (both physical and network security), accountants can provide their clients with the same features and capabilities they used to get from their premise-based systems, but in addition can work collaboratively with clients and manage their business information.

The Payoff for You and Your Clients

The process of getting from today’s world to this new, cloud-based, collaborative world may be disruptive to your practice and to your existing clients, in the end the payoffs will be huge.

The key payoff is that by focusing less on teaching clients to enter data, and more on helping them implement zero data-entry systems, everyone becomes more efficient. Your clients can focus more on growing and managing their businesses, and you can move up the value chain and provide high-value business consulting services like business analytics, real-time dashboards and management consulting.

Remember, the new accounting paradigm is coming and its the early birds who get the greatest reward.