Signal 88 Security Signals Its Move to the Cloud and Graduates Nearly 70 Franchises from QuickBooks onto Intacct

Intacct, a leader in cloud financial management and accounting applications, today announced that Signal 88 Security is switching from QuickBooks to Intacct amid rapid franchise growth.

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Jan. 4, 2011 – Intacct, a leader in cloud financial management and accounting applications, today announced that Signal 88 Security is switching from QuickBooks to Intacct amid rapid franchise growth. Intacct will provide Signal 88 with the ability to gain better visibility into finances at both the corporate and individual franchise levels, as well as a streamlined process for invoicing that is expected to improve company profitability.

Founded in 2003, Signal 88 Security combines experienced staff with state-of-the-art technology to provide customized security services to the business community. The company currently has nearly 70 franchises in 25 states, and expects that total to top 100 franchises in 2011. This explosive growth has created the need for a more robust financial management and accounting system designed to cost-effectively manage large numbers of independently operated businesses while maintaining corporate control and visibility.
Signal 88 had been using QuickBooks® within its corporate finance department, but recognized early on that QuickBooks was never designed to be used as a single system across nearly 100 franchises and at corporate headquarters. The need for a unified financial system, coupled with an invoice approval process that didn’t scale, led Signal 88’s finance team to move to a new and more powerful solution. After reviewing the top systems on the market, Intacct was ultimately selected over NetSuite for its flexible workflow capabilities and unparalleled multi-entity functionality.

“As we outgrew the capabilities of QuickBooks, we looked at building our own in-house financial application and then focused on evaluating both Intacct and NetSuite,” said Laura Vodvarka, vice president of administration at Signal 88. “In the end, we felt Intacct was a better fit. Intacct
Signal 88 Graduates Nearly 70 Franchises from QuickBooks to Intacct had a much nicer user interface and far better capabilities around managing our large number of business entities.”

One of the main areas Intacct will help Signal 88 is with improved accounts receivable processing. Before Intacct, Signal 88’s corporate finance manager would prepare invoices in Excel and email the spreadsheets to each franchise owner for review. Once approved, invoice data would be entered by the manager into QuickBooks and then invoices were mailed to customers. The whole process was time-consuming and costly, with a finance manager spending as much as 50 percent of her time every month preparing and sending invoices. In addition, Signal 88’s chief financial officer was also spending up to a quarter of his time answering billing questions from franchise owners.

With Intacct, Signal 88 can automate and streamline customer invoicing. Now, the corporate finance manager simply creates an invoice in the system and then each franchise owner logs in from any Internet-connected computer to view and approve invoices for his or her customers. Once invoices are approved by both the franchise owner and by corporate finance, the Intacct system automatically and electronically invoices the customer. Intacct also enables each franchise owner to track their own income and expenses, so he or she can quickly and easily assess the profitability and key performance indicators of their business at any time.

“We knew we needed to create more efficiency for franchises around invoicing,” said Vodvarka. “By switching to Intacct, we are expecting to greatly decrease the amount of time our corporate finance team spends sending AR reports and managing questions from our franchisees. This will help increase profitability by enabling us to get invoices out the door faster and allowing us to focus our time on growth and compliance versus basic bookkeeping tasks.”

Intacct also offers Signal 88 greatly improved reporting and business intelligence functionality. Intacct’s advanced reporting capabilities will provide Signal 88 with a consolidated, real-time view of data at both the corporate and individual franchise levels – without the need to contact each franchise owner and ask them to provide data or reports. Intacct will also enable Signal 88’s management team to easily analyze financial and operational data along different dimensions to get a better grasp of their overall business and ensure decisions are made with all available data.

“Intacct will greatly improve our visibility into franchise operations profitability at the corporate and franchise levels,” noted Vodvarka. “With Intacct, the return on investment will be apparent in quicker decisions, improved franchisee satisfaction and significant time savings for our staff. We see Intacct as the perfect financial platform to deliver immediate benefits, while also providing the flexibility and scalability to handle our continued growth.”

For more information on how Intacct helps companies with “Life after QuickBooks,” please visit http://www.intacct.com/solutions/quickbooks_users.php.

About Intacct
Intacct is a market and technology leader in web-based financial management and accounting applications for businesses and CPA firms. Bringing cloud computing to finance and accounting, Intacct’s award-winning applications are the preferred financial applications for AICPA business solutions. Intacct applications are used by thousands of businesses from startups to public companies and are designed to improve company performance and make finance more productive. The Intacct system includes accounting, contract management, revenue recognition, inventory, purchasing, vendor management, financial consolidation and financial reporting applications, all delivered over the Internet via cloud computing.

Intacct is headquartered in San Jose, California. For more information, please visit www.intacct.com or call 877-437-7765.

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Intacct and the Intacct logo are trademarks of Intacct Corporation. All other company and product names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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