Tandem HR

Challenges:

• Growing services company wanted flexible, reliable financial management solution to streamline complex accounting for 16 business entities
• Wanted to automate time consuming manual processes, gain remote access, improve data accuracy, and eliminate the need to export and consolidate data in Excel
• Needed richer, multi-dimensional reporting for greater insight into labor costs, client profitability, and third-party vendors

Previous Solution:

• QuickBooks and Sage 

Results with Sage Intacct:

• Saved 500 person-hours annually by eliminating Excel workarounds, reporting, and revenue recognition
• Freed finance team to more deeply analyze and understand financial results, and work on new strategic initiatives
• Gained ability to easily track, manage, and report on profitability and other financial trends across multiple entities
• Well-informed decision making helped optimize client service levels, staff utilization, and vendor relationships

Tandem HR is a 14-year-old human resources (HR) solution company that assists business owners with full-service HR outsourcing. In addition, it operates an employee benefits brokerage and recently acquired an employee productivity and assistance provider.

Market dynamics are increasing demand for Tandem HR’s services, and the company is seeing 35 percent ongoing growth. This outstanding business growth and the organization’s complex structure drove Tandem HR to focus on improving its financial management processes. The company’s business units operate as 16 different entities, and support over 500 small and mid-sized businesses.

Previously, Tandem HR’s finance team was using a hodgepodge of 13 instances of QuickBooks and three versions of Sage Peachtree, spending 20-30 hours each month on manual reconciliation work. When it came time to close the monthly books, the team created Excel spreadsheets for each entity and then combined them together in a master spreadsheet, which had 56 tabs and ran about three alphabets wide. This was a frustrating, error-prone process that became more challenging as Tandem HR’s business grew. The company also hired an intern at a cost of $20,000/year, every year, just to comb through its chart of accounts and resolve differences across entities.

Ongoing project accounting was another challenge, since QuickBooks didn’t support custom fields for reporting by individual employee and wasn’t designed to handle the large amount of data the company was tracking. Tandem HR also wanted to integrate its financial processes across other business applications, improve data accuracy, and enable remote access.

“When we needed to assess things like client profitability, we had to manually recreate expense data to calculate labor costs per employee across different entities,” said Tanya Yakhnis, Tandem HR’s controller. “We also have a lot of intercompany transactions, and were struggling with proper invoicing and expensing because all of our business units had their finances on different systems. We had to get very, very good at workarounds, and it felt like everyone on our team had an advanced degree in Excel.”

Tandem HR brought on leading consulting firm Armanino to help evaluate its options for a new financial management solution. “Armanino’s advisers were instrumental in presenting us with the best software choices to meet our needs, and helped us through due diligence and cost-benefit analysis,” commented Sam Kashy, director of business development at Tandem HR.

After narrowing it down to Sage Intacct and Microsoft Dynamics GP (Great Plains), Armanino helped the company carefully review both and eventually select Sage Intacct. Kashy noted: “Sage Intacct was the right choice for several reasons—it is great at managing multiple entities seamlessly, is much easier to adapt to our needs than other solutions, and it was the first step in moving our company’s entire application ecosystem to the cloud.”

Graduating to Sage Intacct Saves 500 Person-Hours Each Year

In just one month, Tandem HR implemented Sage Intacct and rolled it out to 90 users across the company. “With Sage Intacct, our finance team now has much more time to analyze data, as opposed to worrying about data entry and processing spreadsheets,” shared Kashy. “We can look at trends, manage compliance and auditing, and focus on strategic changes, such as our current initiative to move to a rolling 12-month forecast.”

With Sage Intacct, the company has gone from spending nearly four days a month combining and reconciling financials in Excel, to automated processes that allow its finance team to focus on reviewing and understanding the results. Sage Intacct has also transformed Tandem HR’s project accounting practices, allowing much more flexibility so that users can run reports against specific clients, employees, service lines, or any other dimension they need.

Cloud-Powered Integration of Best-in-Class Solutions

Sage Intacct integrates easily with Tandem HR’s primary operations software, HRPyramid, as well as with Nexonia for time and expense tracking, MasterTax for processing taxes, and Sage ACT! for customer relationship management. Sage Intacct’s integration with Nexonia ensures that all employee time and expense data is automatically fed into Sage Intacct for labor cost tracking and reporting, which saves the company nearly a day and a half each month.

“Sage Intacct’s web services are simple for even a non-technical person like me to use, and the system accepts all kinds of files and templates, so we don’t have to worry about our data sitting in silos,” said Yakhnis.

Flexible Reporting Powers Multi-Dimensional Financial Visibility and Decision-Making

Sage Intacct’s easy-to-customize reports and dashboards help Tandem HR’s CEO monitor the company’s profitability from anywhere. All the executives now have an intuitive view of the business right from their mobile devices, and can understand important trends with year-over-year comparisons and the ability to drill down into the underlying details when needed.

Tandem HR uses every field in Sage Intacct’s multi-dimensional general ledger to categorize data in several different ways for reporting—by client, client type, client industry, service line, employee, and more. As a result, profitability information is readily accessible, and the company’s leadership can make valuable decisions about how to service clients. Leveraging Sage Intacct Project Accounting, Tandem HR executives can easily track specific employees and understand the amount of time they spend on each service project in order to improve project profitability and identify when the company may need to adjust fee levels during contract renewals.

Tandem HR also uses Sage Intacct to create several nonfinancial reports, such as vendor reports that help optimize spending across different benefit carriers, enrollers, or third-party employee assistance counselors. In addition, the company uses staff utilization reports to better manage resources by understanding which employees are overloaded, and which might have additional billable hours available.

“Sage Intacct has proven invaluable in giving us a single version of the truth, as opposed to financial data stuck in spreadsheets and different accounting software packages,” commented Kashy. “I recommend Sage Intacct for any business that’s looking for an intuitive, easy-to-use and affordable solution to manage any kind of financial reporting and accounting, no matter how complex.”