AT A GLANCE
Company
Integrated Accounting Advisors
Customer type
Accounting firm
Spoke with
Robert Keller
About Integrated Accounting Advisors
Integrated Accounting Advisors is an accounting and CFO advisory firm serving 52 monthly clients. Its largest clients are in construction, manufacturing and government contracting, businesses that need cost by division, cost by product line and overhead allocation. The firm also serves clients in services and healthcare.
Robert Keller handles most of the firm’s monthly closeouts, including many of its most complex clients. When the firm trialed G-Accon as a lower-cost alternative to LiveFlow, Robert was the one who set up every account and rebuilt the reports.
The challenge
For about a month, the firm ran both tools side by side and closed some clients’ books in each. Robert saw the differences up close, starting with how reports behave on refresh.
In G-Accon, any custom rows or formulas placed below or beside a report could be wiped out each time the data refreshed, because the whole table was pulled again.
“If you had something at the bottom, like your metrics at the bottom of the report or to the side, when you refreshed it pulled in the cells to the right and the bottom and deleted them.”
His workaround was to hide long ranges of rows to keep notes away from the data. Changing a report’s dates was harder too: it meant opening the report settings, or building a separate sheet of start and end dates for each report to read from.
“With G-Accon, you had to actually go in like you’re trying to build a new report and edit the entire thing.”
Why LiveFlow
In LiveFlow, Robert updates dates from the management reports panel. Periods can also end mid-month, such as September 1 to September 10, which G-Accon’s calendar-month periods did not allow.
“We can do more with the reports and setups in LiveFlow compared to G-Accon, which is more strict in how it operated.”
Robert is fair about where G-Accon stood out. It can email reports on a schedule and send alerts when a figure crosses a threshold, such as a client’s bank balance dropping to zero. For day-to-day report building and maintenance, though, he found LiveFlow simpler.
“LiveFlow, I think, was easier to use.”
Results
Because the firm never fully disconnected from LiveFlow during the trial, switching back was simple: archive the G-Accon workbooks, disconnect G-Accon and carry on.
“We never really fully disconnected from LiveFlow. We basically just disconnected G-Accon and ran it as normal once we switched back.”
Asked what he would change about LiveFlow, Robert had nothing to add. Asked why the difference in price is worth it, his answer was the day-to-day experience.
“Right now it’s strictly user experience that would be why I’d be willing to pay more, because it’s easier to use.”
Ready to streamline your reporting?
Book a demo to see how LiveFlow gives your firm flexible, live QuickBooks reporting in Google Sheets and Excel.
