Moss Adams Improves Client Data Integration with Deltek Maconomy

Deltek recently spoke with Bryan Paetsch, Associate Director for Moss Adams, a professional services firm offering accounting, tax, consulting, and advisory services globally. Moss Adams implemented Deltek Maconomy to save time and improve processes.

What is your role at Moss Adams and how large is the firm?

I'm based out of the Seattle office as the associate director for shared services. My role is US focused for accounting, payables, and client billing but system administration is handled for both the US and India. Firm-wide we have 4,400 employees and I have 65 people on my team.

When did Moss Adams start using Deltek Maconomy and what challenges were you looking to solve?

We started using Deltek Maconomy in January 2020 and currently use it across the entire firm. We were looking to improve efficiency and automate processes and Maconomy fit our needs. Plus, we were growing rapidly and needed a scalable solution.

One of the biggest problems with our previous solution was that none of our products were integrated. For example, as an accounting firm, we have to be very selective with whom we do business and how we store client information. Often our client data was spread across different applications. At times, we found client data in one place and not another, so it was a time consuming manual process to onboard a prospective client, get them in the system and ready for time and expense and billing.

In this day and age, integration is absolutely critical to having a successful business. We made integration part of our implementation with Maconomy. Before using Maconomy we were using a competing product, and some data elements needed to be entered in 7 times at different entry points. It was so inefficient. With Maconomy you only enter the data once. That data just moves on to the next field automatically and it doesn't have to be reentered and there's no wait time for it to move on. This new process has been very successful and beneficial for the firm and has freed up resources to work on more impactful projects

Keeping in mind that you are typically engaging in transactions with different firms, are you able to implement Deltek Maconomy during the acquisition process?

Last year, Moss Adams acquired new clients and personnel from five different consulting firms and we successfully onboarded and integrated those clients and personnel onto Maconomy on day one. The financial system administrators have got it down and they can make it happen in short order. We have the team on-site for the new personnel that are joining us, and we train them on things like time and expense. They are off and running on the first day.

Are there any other Deltek Maconomy features you are using to help your firm be successful?

The biggest impact Maconomy has had on my team is through client billing. Before Maconomy, it was a multi-step manual process to generate, edit, and send invoices.

With our old system, for every invoice that was generated, a Microsoft Word document was created in the system, but then we almost always had to go back in and edit that Word document for accuracy and formatting. In addition, it wouldn't automatically deliver an invoice to a client by e-mail, so we had to print the Word document as a PDF, craft the e-mail to the client and then send it. With Maconomy, we now have a streamlined process where when the invoice is ready and set up for e-mail, it just runs, and nothing is printed until the invoice is ready and perfect.

When we launched Maconomy in 2020, the timing couldn’t have been better. When the COVID shutdown happened, everyone went home. Had we still been using the old system where billing had to be printed, we would have needed to have people in the office every day, dispersed on different floors. Because we had Maconomy in place, we just went home, and we were able to do our jobs with no disruption. Somehow the stars aligned for us, and we got really lucky.

In addition, Maconomy gave us the ability to roll forward project tasks. For example, when I’m done with a task, but I know I'm going to do it next year, I can roll it forward and create my engagement for next year right there in the system and my engagement for next year is ready.

What's the future look like for Moss Adams? What new projects are you tackling?

When I started a big part of our business was tax and assurance and consulting was small. Now consulting is a large line of business for us, and our mission is to be a client-centric advisory firm. Our consulting line of businesses is growing and it's probably growing the fastest of all services.

To that end, we are working with Deltek so that we can use Maconomy for online billing and get away from using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. We’ve already launched it with a pilot group of client service professionals that are involved in billing clients. By leveraging Maconomy, they look at the work that's been done, they make decisions on how much they should bill, and then it comes to our group to make sure that we handle the billing properly. We are looking forward to implementing that feature firm-wide. It’s on our roadmap for this year and I am hoping we will be able to use it full force in the next year.