Cloud accounting software for technology companies

Continuum Commerce Adopts AccountsIQ's Cloud Accounting Software for Real Time Management Information

Continuum Commerce CEO, Eamonn O’Shea, states,

I would have no hesitation in recommending AccountsIQ to anyone that conducts business in multiple locations. It can significantly simplify your management reporting process, while at the same time significantly improving its output. The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) pricing means we have a full accounting and business analysis system for a fraction of what I would have expected to pay to implement an on-premise solution.

The Challenge

Continuum Commerce was founded in 2000 (formerly known as GCX – Global Currency Exchange) as an independent online payments solution provider.  Based in Ireland, Continuum also has operations in mainland Europe, the UK and the Asia-pacific region and has a management team that spends much of its time abroad. Remote board meetings and management updates were previously handled by sending spreadsheets created by re-keying information from their previous accounting package to participants by fax or e-mail. This information was therefore often out of date before the meeting had begun and decisions were being made based on inaccurate information.

Gerard O’Brien, the CFO of Continuum Commerce says,

We evaluated many alternatives and found AccountsIQ offered the most compelling solution. While it provided all the functionality we needed and is available over the web at any time, its reporting capability and especially its Digital Dashboard has proven to be the ‘killer app’ for GCX. There is a wealth of standard reports, and I was able to customise a couple of key reports that I use on a daily basis. The senior team can log on at any time to review our performance metrics. It has really streamlined our business planning and measurement.

The Solution

Continuum Commerce adopted AccountsIQ for all its financial requirements consisting of:

• AccountsIQ online accounting platform
• Full multi-currency processing throughout
• Integration with Continuum’s billing engine
• Customised management information dashboards with specific KPIs

Results

Gerard O’Brien told us that benefits to Continuum include that AccountsIQ represents incredible value for money with no upfront capital cost. They find that reporting is a key strength – with them rarely needing to export to Excel or re-key anything. The digital dashboard capability significantly improves the management information available to them and a key benefit is that AccountsIQ has extensive functionality which can scale with them as they grow their business. With AccountsIQ’s open API, it was easy to integrate Continuum’s billing engine directly to AccountsIQ which has streamlined their processes and brought considerable efficiency advantages.

StitcherAds use AccountsIQ to support ambitious growth plans

StitcherAds is a Facebook and Instagram marketing partner, building technology to help advertisers scale their marketing campaigns and use data-fuelled automation to drive sales online and in-store. With offices in the U.S., Ireland and the UK, StitcherAds maintains three separate legal entities in each of these locations.

When Fiona McKenna joined the business in July 2019 to lead the finance team, she quickly realised that their Quickbooks accounting system had major shortfalls in terms of accurate reporting, with significant challenges around foreign currencies and consolidation.

Fiona explains “The key requirements were: a simple system navigable by non-accountants, capable of rapid deployment, and Cloud-based with multi-user capabilities, consolidation, and ability to scale as the business grows.”

StitcherAds has ambitious growth plans and we need to be able to slot in new entities. I compared three systems and AccountsIQ proved the best solution to meet our needs now and in the future.”

Quick to implement with responsive reports

Fiona managed the implementation of AccountsIQ within the StitcherAds finance team, with support from AccountsIQ who advised how to setup the accounting system from scratch. The whole process took about four weeks. “I found the AccountsIQ team incredibly flexible in terms of helping us with the implementation. We got great value from the service,” said Fiona.

Excellent consolidation functionality

Consolidation was critical for StitcherAds which previously used spreadsheets to manage the accounts across three legal entities. This was cumbersome to maintain and invariably led to inaccuracies in reporting. AccountsIQ made consolidation simple.

The consolidation functionality in AccountsIQ is excellent,” says Fiona. “It’s a very good solution for our stage of development and our budget.”

Find out how AccountsIQ can help you with your accounting, consolidation and reporting needs, call us on +44 (0)203 598 7350 or Contact us.

Quick to learn with better business insights

AccountsIQ has an easy-to use interface, navigation and smart query tools that are intuitive to use, even for non-accountants.

You don’t need to be an accountant to use AccountsIQ. It’s quite intuitive, the reports are very good and very reliable,” says Fiona. “It’s nice and simple to use; I don’t have to do lots of tidy ups. This is quite unusual for a platform of this kind. No manual intervention is required.”

Fiona and her team also benefit from better insights and improved visibility into the organisation assisted by AccountsIQ’s Cloud-based business analysis features and pre-configured reports. “I can log in remotely and only have to look in two places to know exactly where we’re at. In terms of business information, it’s been an absolute godsend,” says Fiona.

Time-saving benefits

The move to AccountsIQ radically streamlined and simplified the accounting process across all of StitcherAds’ entities. This not only enabled more accurate reporting, but also saved a significant amount of time.

We have a much faster month-end close, shaving 15 days off typically. We’re now closing on day 10, when we used to close the books around the 25th. Previously this was unheard of in the business. Now that we have a simpler system to use, we now have more time to dedicate to more strategic work.”

A high standard of product for fast-growing startups and medium-sized businesses

StitcherAds demonstrates AccountsIQ’s suitability for smaller businesses with big growth plans. In particular, AccountsIQ is an affordable accounting solution that can grow with the business.

AccountsIQ is a high standard of product at the right budget for a medium-sized company. As a smaller business it’s tempting to go with a simpler solution such as QuickBooks or Xero, but these platforms don’t scale as well as AccountsIQ. With excellent tools for consolidation and custom reporting, AccountsIQ offers a more robust accounting solution that can quickly adapt to the changing needs of a fast growing business like ours, while still remaining very affordable.”

The TAS Group (now Altify) Moves Group-Wide Accounts Online to AccountsIQ

Executive Chairman of Altify, Donal Daly, explains,

We needed an accounting platform that allowed us to manage our global business with local and central access. AccountsIQ has been a huge improvement on our previous systems, giving our management team instant access to the latest information from all locations. AccountsIQ’s SaaS pricing model meant no upfront capital investment was required to put our group accounting systems in place.

Altify (previously known as the TAS group) was formed in 2006 following the merger of sales software company Select Selling with Siebel’s training arm to create sales effectiveness training and software solutions for large sales organisations internationally.

The Challenge

Altify had grown to a stage where it had subsidiaries in the US, Europe and the UK to deliver training and consulting services to a wide range of international customers, as well as a software development subsidiary in Ireland. Their existing systems were struggling to cope with increased volumes and the multi-jurisdiction aspect of the business provided challenges for the finance team in terms of monitoring its activities across different timezones and processing transactions in multiple currencies. They needed a platform that allowed them to manage the business across multiple geographies and currencies with access both locally and centrally.

Financial Controller, Dan Murphy, explains,

Our team evaluated a number of online solutions, and selected AccountsIQ, mainly because it handled all our complex multi-currency issues very well. We also wanted a solution we could later integrate with Salesforce to allow confirmed orders to be automatically transferred, and that integration was already in place.

The AccountsIQ team was able to convert all our historical data and was even able to facilitate us changing year ends after the first year, including re-aligning prior year values for comparative purposes.

The Solution

Altify decided an online accounting solution would complement its use of Salesforce and evaluated a number of solutions before choosing AccountsIQ. The solution included the full version of AccountsIQ with all its accounting modules and product-based sales invoicing and pricing. They also implemented the consolidation module to allow group-wide results to be produced including customer sales analysis.

Results

• World-wide access for subsidiary companies in US, Europe, UK & Ireland.
• Easy roll-out giving everyone an up-to-date view of company results at anytime.
• Handles multi-jurisdiction, multi-currency transactions with ease
• Visibility of group results and group sales analysis at the touch of a button
• Retained a full transaction history and facilitated altering the group year-end easily.