Feb 28, 2012

3:00 PM – 4:00 PM EST

CRO Accounting: Connecting Operations & Finance with One Source of the Truth

Are clinical studies draining your cash?

Pass through expenses not paid by the sponsor or not captured erode your study profits – essentially financing your sponsor’s study.

• Do you know which pass-through expenses have been paid?
• Which expenses have yet to be paid?
• Can you monitor aged AR?
• Are you paying your vendor before your sponsor pays you?
• Can study/project managers answer their questions about budget, billing, and milestones?

In this webinar you will learn how to:

• Connecting Operations and Finance with one source of the financial truth
• Give study/project managers key financial information so they can be more effective. You can get operations and finance on the same page.
• Eliminate duplicate spreadsheets and often triple entry of the same information.
• Streamline the processing of Investigator Payments.
• Most CRO’s will admit that 2 to 3% of pass through costs do not get rebilled, that can be avoided
• Many CRO’s have a 120 day cycle from expense incurred to collection from the sponsor, are you financing your sponsors study? 
• Eliminate manual bill/re-bill match-up – Intuitive work environment
• Eliminate error and lost re-bills – keep reconciliation current and within the correct period
• Reduce billing time – visibility of open, released and pending invoice.
• Use role based dashboards to give your people the information they need

• Accounts Payable Will have no need for Excel and paper copies to support their manual billing and re-bill match-up.  Can use electronic documents work flow approval to release manual billing and rebill match-up tables, eliminating spreadsheets and paper copies.
• CFO can bill more quickly to free up more capital and increase profits.
• CEO now has the ability to monitor unbilled pass-through expenses in order to realize more billing opportunity and ultimately more cash flow. Can be a stronger partner with their sponsors providing budget visibility and forecasting.

REGISTER HERE 

CMOCRO.com is a web-based, partnering search tool that quickly helps you find potential Contract Research (CRO) or Manufacturing Organizations (CMO) to meet your business needs.  Our focus is solely on pharmaceutical research service and manufacturing providers around the world. You can easily search and compare companies by services provided, technical capabilities, facility regulatory status, locations and more. The information provided will allow you to evaluate and answer “Who will be your next partner?”

contact us at contact@cmocro.com

Clinical Accounting: Workflow Automation & Alerts

Join us to discuss best practices within the Clinical Industry to
lower your operating costs.

See how “Event Triggers” can automate things like:

• Reconciliation of Percent Complete
• Milestone Billing
• Pass-through expenses
• Investigator Billing
• Document Management

Aberdeen Group (2010) reported that it costs the average business $18.27 to process a single invoice. With automation, this cost can be reduced to $4.84. Imagine the savings not to mention the number of days it takes to process the invoice 14.2 days on average – well cut that down to 3.7 days to process an invoice.

Attend this FREE one hour webinar and learn how to improve your business processes while providing better visibility into each study. We will show how to automate every day operational tasks such as time reporting or patient visits to trigger events like billing and study updates.

In this webinar you will learn how to:

• Eliminate manual bill/re-bill match-up – in an Intuitive work environment Increase capital by billing more quickly and reducing the amount of unbilled revenue waiting to be invoiced.
• Eliminate errors – keep reconciliations current and within the correct period
• Reduce billing time – visibility of open, released and pending invoices
• Use role based dashboards to give your people the information they need

Register Here

I have talked with hundreds of CRO’s, CTL’s, non-profit research and GCP Labs, all are struggling to integrate four business systems.

1. Finance
2. CTMS and/or LIMS
3. Business Development and Quoting
4. Document Management and Quality Control

Finance- “The” Hub

The hub in my opinion is finance and to run a “project centric” business effectively we need a project oriented accounting system with a billing engine that allows for contract billing.  It is finances job to control but not impede the quality of information presented to business development, operations, and management. 

• Finance must be able to set cost levels used by development to bid and quote.  However, that information must be easy for development to access and incorporate in quotes.
• Finance must have the ability to control the accounts, projects and tasks but cannot impede the work of operations once a project is won.
• Finance produces the invoices but must have a system that allows easy access for study/project managers to approve invoices, expenses, and time that go into those invoices.  

Why operations should not wag the dog

Many business owners will rightly state that operations’ is where the work is performed so that is where the investment needs to be made first, leading many businesses towards a very serious and strategic mistake that will haunt them forever!  Remember the old saying.  ”Don’t let the tail wag the dog!”  Operations will interview vendors for solutions to streamline and automate “their” department’s business processes but minimize the rest of the organization especially the financial arm.  Organizations need to start thinking as an enterprise, taking a look at the complex activities that happen within the organization as a whole.  I have counted over 100 different CTMS systems and dozens of LIMS systems, all competing for operation’s business.  These systems are all over the place in features and delivery method.  Some are web based, some are cloud based, some are on premise, some are subscription, and some are even semi-custom developed for each customer!  All of them draw the line between operations and finance differently.  Any separate system implemented by operations leads to silos of information rather than one integrated enterprise system.  Separate systems lead to multiple versions of the “truth” and many versions of spreadsheets trying to bridge the gap.

The best run companies realize that information should be controlled and validated by finance.   I argue that finance is the “central hub” to your information flow that reduces the number of permutations and insures all the departments communicate as efficiently as possible.   Listed below are the key components to an efficient business system:

• Core accounting, Ledger, Payables, Receivables, inventory, and purchasing
• Project Management – which includes, budgeting, scheduling, resource planning, revenue forecasting, and quoting
• Contract Billing – an engine that can bill based on count, milestone, percent complete, handle grants, change orders, pass through expenses, investigator billing, and samples.
• Time and Expense Management
• Requisitions, Fixed Assets, HR and Payroll are options but personally I think Payroll and HR can be outsourced more efficiently for most companies.
• Web Reporting and Scorecards for operations and management

It is possible to get all these business processes in the core finance system where finance can insure integrity of the information and still satisfy the information needs of all parties.  Now, how do we tie down the other pieces of the system?

SharePoint- the solution for document management

Let’s start with an easy one, Document Management and Quality Control.  I have one word here and it is SharePoint.  A must have for your finance system is integration with Sharepoint.  Features like a one button selection to create a Sharepoint site for each new project or study created are just one benefit of SharePoint.  Important documents like the contracts, SOP’s, important calendar dates, internal blog posts, change orders, and invoices store in Sharepoint are available for all users to easily self serve.  Sharepoint can even handle signatures, version control, access rights, notifications, work flow and approvals, which are all key features for clinical research.  The average QA, compliance or finance person can use the out of the box features but you can also purchase Sharepoint apps to do Master Schedule, Part 11 compliance, CTMS, and a growing list of applications for business in general and our industry.  The document management system must be able to pull information from accounting.  Accounting controls the integrity of the data so there is no need to create two separate systems.  SharePoint can eliminate duplicate entry and add these features on top of the accounting.  If you can satisfy your reporting, Master Schedule, or CTMS needs with SharePoint then you have reduced the number of variables and keep your system tight and clean.  I will talk about CTMS integration with non Sharepoint systems later.

To tie it all together

To review the four “must haves” if we let finance be the hub and stack Sharepoint on top of it with the features I have recommended, we only have a few loose ends.  Sales and quoting with the possibility of a CTMS, LIMS or other specialized system.  Let’s talk about those systems.  Now the requirement for any new system coming into your business is that it integrates with finance.  In a CTMS system that means adding sites and participants to studies and creating check requests for investigators or subcontractors.  A modern CTMS system will be able to use web services to talk to a modern accounting system.  Since you are requiring the CTMS system to integrate with your finance system you have weeded out 100’s of small or old technology based CTMS systems.  You now have just dozens to evaluate and there are plenty to choose from to satisfy operations and finance.  LIMS is another system that needs to communicate billing milestones with a Master Schedule and to accounting.  A word of caution here on volume.  If you are processing twenty samples or tests per month, integration is probably not worth it.  Create a form and procedure, either manually or use Sharepoint to automate it.  If you process more than twenty tests a day, it is well worth integrating with accounting.

Sales – the source of new projects

Finally, let’s talk about Business Development.  In general, the days of fat contracts and big back logs are over.  Businesses can still be profitable and growth is expected but development needs to be managed to insure success in today’s competitive global market.

Management wants to see the opportunity pipeline so they can predict revenue and forecast resource demands.  Management also wants to know that a sales person is doing the right activities that will produce new business.  Sales people want information and the ability to produce accurate competitive quotes.  You may have noticed that I included quoting and proposal generation in the accounting system features.  Many businesses use a big grid in Excel or try to build a quoting system in CRM, this is not the best place and here is why.  An Excel based quoting system is working from dated information, prone to errors and does not setup projects, billing rules and rates once a project is won.   Building your own quoting system in a CRM system that is integrated to accounting solves the connectivity issues but this can be a costly development project!  Why re-invent the wheel when it has already been done?  

Here are the key features of a good CRM system

Marketing – I am not talking about glossy ads in industry magazines.  I am talking about setting up a campaign to track the cost and performance of every business generating activity you decide to perform.  A newsletter is a campaign that will have costs, touch all your clients and prospects and if well written will generate leads and business.  A trade show will be a campaign, customer retention policy will be a campaign, a planned schedule of calling, e-mails and letters to prospects is a campaign with costs and results.  All these campaigns together are your marketing program.

• Activity Management – sales people are the sum of the activities they perform and the sales they produce.  A good CRM system will make performing those activities easier and faster for the sales person and make measuring their performance by a manager clear cut.
• Opportunity Management – each business is slightly different but they all have a sales process.  A good CRM system will formalize that process so you can predict revenue.  Ask any sales manager and they know from experience some rules of thumb; like we win 35% of the proposals we do for new prospects, we win 80% of all proposals we do for existing customers, if we present a proposal most take 90 days to make a decision.  These rules of thumb can be imbedded into a CRM system so you can estimate your new revenue by a sales person 30 days or six months out.
• Integrated with accounting – sales information and studies need to be displayed through CRM so sales people can have visibility into past and current sales activity.
• Integration with Sharepoint – a CRM system that works with Sharepoint enables the sales person to view contracts, change orders and deliverables to customers.  Sharepoint also can route quotes produced by the sales person for approval.  Keeping older versions and approved quotes on file for future reference.

Finally, the sales person needs access, they need access from the web, contacts need to sync with their cell phone, it needs to be integrated with Outlook for e-mail and work with Word and Excel.  

Conclusion

As a business owner for over 24 years, I have made most of the mistakes that can be made and lived to fight another day.  If you follow the order and guidelines set forth in this article, you will lead your company to a successful selection of the four common pieces of an enterprise business system.   If you would like to discuss your particular enterprise system challenges, I am always happy to help share experiences and plan strategy. 

Contact Michael Milligan at 614-899-9900 ext. 119.  mmilligan@accu.com

To learn more about AccuNet, please visit our websites:

www.peoplereadycro.com

www.accu.com

Date: June 16, 2010 at 2:00 PM EST

REGISTER HERE 

The AccuNet Investigator Billing module automates and streamlines the billing process of patient visits, site protocols, and sponsor re-bills. AccuNet has designed and built this solution to fully integrate with Microsoft Dynamics SL Project Accounting system as well as with various CTMS systems.

Investigator Billing bridges the disconnect between CTMS systems and a CRO’s accounting department by providing the following functions: 

• Track high level study financial information, including grant deposit balances, aging AR, unbilled summary, and sites stages.
• Quickly drill down into studies by site and subject to view stages, visits earned, and fees paid/unpaid.
• Forecast and manage grant money expenditure and request.
• Spend more time managing the study rather than looking up study protocol, tracking down unapproved vouchers, and searching for sponsor requested financial data.
• Automate and integrate billing and workflows with Dynamics SL.
• Integrates with CTMS.
• View role based dashboards for the study manager, CEO, and CFO.
• Attend this webinar to learn about this CRO specific solution to help automate and streamline your investigator billings.

Investigator Billing for Study Financials Webinar – REGISTER HERE

Request the recording details here.

YOU KNOW YOU’VE OUTGROWN QUICKBOOKS WHEN…

• It takes you days instead of minutes to reconcile accruals and pass-through costs
• you are using Excel Spreadsheets to track and manage grant balances, investigator billing and payments and pass-through costs
• you enter financial detail in more than one place and more than one time
• you print and mail checks
• your document store is in a three ring binder
• you don’t integrate with your CTMS or LIMS systems
• your invoice approval process involves printing and walking documents to the Study Manager

FROM QUICKBOOKS TO MICROSOFT DYNAMICS SL

The reality is that once you’ve started seeing performance and feature shortcomings in QuickBooks, this is a sure signal that your company is on the verge of outgrowing QuickBooks. One of the best migration upward paths offered for Clinical Research Organizations to QuickBooks users is to step up to Microsoft Dynamics SL with Microsoft’s easy QuickBooks migration plan. There are numerous benefits to migrating from QuickBooks to Microsoft Dynamics SL. Presented below are just a few of those benefits. 

1. Advanced study/project accounting
2. Streamlined accounting processes
3. Study costing
4. Time & expense management against a study/project
5. Advanced Forecasting
6. Reduced book-closing time
7. Decreased auditing time
8. Scalable with company growth

Watch this on-demand video to learn more about the tell-tale signs of outgrowing QuickBooks and the options for CRO Study Financials.  Request the recording details here.

Coldwell tracked a plunge in revenue from 2008 to 2009 for the CRO industry’s top players, but believes this year will end with a five percent jump followed by a 10 percent surge in 2011.

Read more: http://www.fiercebiotech.com/story/cro-industry-poised-recovery-followed-shakeout/2010-04-14#ixzz0lpoqCBnW

ARE YOU READY FOR GROWTH THIS YEAR?

Will your current financial practices with investigator billings, pass-through expenses, and general study financial management allow you to realize that 5 Percent in profits this year?

Here are some other ways we’ve helped CROs:

NORTH WALES, Pennsylvania —February 2, 2010 — Clinlogix has chosen AccuNet to bring the power and efficiency of Microsoft Dynamics SL to its business and IT systems. The new technology will handle key business processes for Clinlogix including;

• Study Profitability Tracking
• Pass-Through Costs to Billing
• Time & Expense Capturing, including Remote Entry
• Resource Allocation and Utilization Tracking
• Accurate Grant Details
• Stabilized Study Timelines and Budgets
• Multi-Currency for Overseas Projects and Clients

Based in Pennsylvania, Clinlogix chose AccuNet because of their detailed knowledge and experience within the Clinical Research & Life Science Industry.   

“Our move to Microsoft Dynamics SL is part of our strategy to create, provide and drive significant value for both our Company and to our Clients,” said Jean Marie Markham, CEO of Clinlogix. “The programs and features are familiar to our people, flexible and scalable enough to meet all of our needs.  AccuNet’s expertise with Microsoft Dynamics and CRO industry knowledge made them the right choice to help make this project a success.”

“Clinlogix goal was to refine their operational efficiencies.”  Microsoft Dynamics will help to automate and streamline their current processes, making information easier to obtain, more accurate, and real time, while minimizing the costs of additional staff,” said James Neal, Vice President at AccuNet.

AccuNet is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner headquartered in Columbus, OH.  As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, we offer the highest level of competence and expertise with Microsoft technologies. 

“Microsoft invests heavily in our partners to ensure they have all the latest information and resources at their fingertips to develop the world’s best solutions for our shared customers,” said Michael Park, corporate vice president for U.S. Microsoft Dynamics at Microsoft Corp.  AccuNet has demonstrated know-how helping Clinlogix and its other customers generate business value with Microsoft Dynamics products.”

Microsoft Dynamics is a line of financial, customer relationship and supply chain management software that helps businesses work more effectively. Delivered through a network of channel partners providing specialized services, these integrated, adaptable business management solutions work like and with familiar Microsoft software to streamline processes across an entire business.

About AccuNet

AccuNet helps our clients improve the visibility and accuracy of reporting on each project.  By using Microsoft Dynamics technologies, we help to increase the organizations cash flow by reducing the manual and duplicate work effort used to manage the billing and receivables of the organization.  The challenges in accounting, reconciliation and reporting around Clinical Accounting are growing.  Many Clinical Finance professionals struggle with manual and non-integrated systems to manage the cash flow and reconciliation process. 

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Other product or service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.

For more information, press only:

Jennifer LuPiba – 614.899.9900 x 111 | jlupiba@accu.com | 929 Eastwind Drive, Suite 221, Westerville, Ohio 43081.

• For more information about AccuNet
• Visit www.PeopleReadyCRO.com.

• For more information about Clinlogix

• Visit www.clinlogix.com.

• For more information about all Microsoft Dynamics products:
• Visit http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/intro/default.mspx.
• For more information about Microsoft case studies:
• Visit http://members.microsoft.com/customerevidence/search/findevidence.aspx.
• For more information about the People-Ready Business:
• Visit http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/default.mspx.

We have helped organizations automate the approval process and document managment for Clinical Accounting. 

How are you managing your approvals and documents?