AT A GLANCE
Company
Integrated Accounting Advisors
Customer type
Accounting firm
Spoke with
Tim Harrison
About Integrated Accounting Advisors
Integrated Accounting Advisors is an accounting and CFO advisory firm serving 50+ 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.
Tim Harrison is the firm’s President and leads its CFO division. His approach starts with the client, not the compliance checklist: what does the management team need to run the business well? Many clients run on industry systems that are strong operationally but weak at accounting, so every client gets a QuickBooks Online file the firm can report from.
The challenge
LiveFlow powers the firm’s work papers, consolidations and client dashboards. When G-Accon offered a lower price for bringing QuickBooks data into Google Sheets, Tim had his team rebuild the firm’s files in it to compare. Almost every day the team found something it could not do.
The biggest gap was flexibility. G-Accon follows QuickBooks’ own account structure, so reports have to look the way QuickBooks lays them out.
“It piggybacks off of QuickBooks’ underlying structure. Meaning if something’s in cost of goods sold, I can’t move it to another spot.”
That matters for Tim’s clients. He wants lines of credit in the financing section of the cash flow statement, and he regularly builds reports for project managers who understand numbers but have no accounting background.
Why LiveFlow
With LiveFlow, Tim maps accounts wherever they make sense for the reader, without touching the client’s chart of accounts. One client can have several mappings at once: a high-level summary for the bank, an investor package, gross profit tracking or contribution margin tracking.
“One of the huge things I like about LiveFlow is I can put accounts anywhere on the financials. This gives me the ability to leave their books alone and create my own mapping.”
He also relies on details that keep his workbooks stable: custom rows in the middle of a report, notes and formulas right at the edge of a report, and defined name ranges for index-match formulas. In G-Accon, he says, none of those worked as cleanly.
“The clients don’t care what software I use. They care about what the software allows me to do.”
How to choose between them
Tim sees a simple dividing line between the two tools.
“Bookkeeper versus CFO would probably be how I’d look at it.”
For a firm that only needs to automate pulling standard financials, G-Accon can be enough. For advisory work that needs custom groupings, combinations and consolidations across related or unrelated companies, he chose LiveFlow.
“If somebody’s truly needing advisory and structuring accounts and customizing, that’s where LiveFlow is a way more versatile and flexible tool than G-Accon.”
Support was the other difference. Tim remembers messaging LiveFlow on a Saturday during his first rollout and getting a reply from a senior member of the team, compared with email-only support on the other side.
Results
The firm moved back to LiveFlow and kept its consolidation work running there. Its largest client receives a daily dashboard built from LiveFlow data.
LiveFlow is also the data layer behind the firm’s AI workflows. Its trial balance and general ledger work papers refresh in Google Sheets and feed straight into the AI tools that help with month-end close.
“We’ve got LiveFlow work papers built: a trial balance and a general ledger that we just hit refresh in Google Sheets, download to Excel, drop in our AI engine and let it chew on it.”
Structured, consistent data is the point. The better structured the data going in, the lower the risk of an AI tool guessing wrong.
Looking ahead
In 2027 the firm is focused on custom reports, dynamic dashboards and AI-assisted close work, moving further from delivering financials and further into helping clients understand them.
“Just giving a client a set of financials is like driving a car looking out the back windshield.”
Ready to streamline your reporting?
Book a demo to see how LiveFlow gives your firm flexible, live QuickBooks reporting in Google Sheets and Excel.
