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Implementing Clients & Profits

I joined my firm January 2, 2002. The company had purchased Clients & Profits last year but did not fully implement it. We are looking to "go live" wihin the next few months. Does anyone have suggestions, recommendations or lessons learned on doing this? Did anyone hire a consultant to help with the implementation? If so, any recommendations on a consultant?

Pat Riegler
BBDS-Communications

We hired Donna Lynn Johnson of the firm Crystal Brook, outside Atlanta. Very thorough.

Craig Barnes
Thembcgroup

I'd go to C & P for the training. It gave us a great starting point for our successful conversion and we got to enjoy San Diego for a couple of days! Well worth the investment

Shannon Ellis
Business Manager
Tackett Barbaria Design Group

We purchased Clients and Profits 9 months ago and are just beginning to fully implement it. Last week we had Cindy Westen (a C&P consultant) come out to our business to train us. I thought I had a good grasp of the program... but boy was I wrong! She enlightened us on a lot of issues. It was the best money we ever spent!

Alyssa Pell
The Synapse Group

We ran C&P along side our previous system for three months. This worked very well, giving the opportunity to get used to C&P and fine tune the setup a bit before relying on it totally.

Cynthia Hobbs
Business Manager
Marketing By Design

If possible go to CA and take their class on how the program works. This will give you a better understanding of how you need to set up the program and make it work for you. Read the instruction manual a couple of times and do the on-line tutorial. It will be much easier to set up than you think once you do these three things.

Carol Stano
Controller
Drone & Mueller and Associates

We hired Rebecca Cox and Cindy Weston for training. We've also used Danni Sandroni Smith from Sunset Consulting Services. All three were very helpful and knew the program well.

You can find all three on the C&P website.

Laura Kennedy
Financial Manager Maier Advertising, Inc.

To the advice offered by others, I would add this: Make sure that your current systems are in balance. Depending on what system you are currently on, your predecessors might not have had (or bothered) to balance AR & AP detail to the GL & do other reconciliations. Make sure that your bank rec is done -- carryover adjustments need to be posted on your old system before transferring. Make sure you know what your unbilled time & expenses are and how you can extract a full list of them for converting. All the issues that as finance people we know should be done but have far to frequently seen dropped (by others, of course -- never by us). :-)

Of course any of the consultants recommended can help you with these issues, but the more of this you have cleaned up before you start the process the less expense you will have with the consultants and, more importantly, the smoother the entire process will be. Having been a consultant (not with C&P) I can testify that most of us would far rather get in, have the job go smoothly & correctly, and get out, than spend days or weeks cleaning up existing issues that the client should have fixed long before we walked in the door.

Brent A. Byrd
Chief Financial Officer
Point Zero, Inc.