Vendor Spotlight: InsightSoftware

In today's rapidly changing business environment, accounting and financial reporting demands are on the rise. Professionals in the field grapple with challenges like integrating real-time data, streamlining analytics and managing performance effectively. To address these complex tasks, tools and solutions that can simplify and unify processes are essential. InsightSoftware offers a suite of products focusing on these areas, aiming to provide comprehensive solutions to the diverse needs of the financial community.

InsightSoftware's product range encompasses over 80 tools tailored to meet various business necessities, from accounting and finance to operations and supply chain management. A central feature of their offerings is the InsightSoftware Platform, designed as a consolidating hub for their tools to offer users an integrated experience. Recently, the company has been adapting its tools to new legislative challenges, such as the upcoming BEPS 2.0 Pillar Two functionality, which presents fresh data reporting requirements for multinational businesses.

Vice president of finance Josh Schauer discussed the landscape of accounting technology, the future direction of InsightSoftware's platform, and how automation can alleviate the challenges faced by modern finance teams.

How would you best describe what your company does? 

Schauer: InsightSoftware is a leading provider of reporting, analytics and performance management solutions. In areas of financial planning, controllership, capital management and embedded analytics, InsightSoftware enables organizations to connect to and make sense of their data in real time so they can proactively drive greater financial intelligence and make timely decisions. Over 32,000 organizations worldwide rely on our best-in-class solutions to provide increased productivity, visibility, accuracy and compliance.

What is in your product line, and what is your flagship product? 

Schauer: With our range of 80+ products, InsightSoftware solutions support business needs in the areas of accounting, finance, operations, supply chain, tax, budgeting, planning, HR and disclosure management. We're disrupting the way finance teams operate - removing manual processes and spreadsheets in budgeting, planning, close management, and reporting. While many of our products are considered "flagship", notable is the InsightSoftware Platform. It brings together our applications in a single location, empowering customers with more speed, flexibility and control when solving business problems. This allows organizations to choose the capabilities they need for effective reporting, controllership, and budgeting and planning, while improving productivity, user experience and reducing implementation risk. Through a unified design and user experience across products, business users enjoy single sign-on servicing, a role-based accelerated onboarding experience and context-sensitive help and support for in-product learning. By enabling the management of all users, security and licenses in one central location, administrators can access a comprehensive overview of all applications, easily add users, products and permissions, and track licenses. For InsightSoftware partners, they save time and resources by managing all customer accounts effortlessly on the platform.

What was the last big initiative or project your company completed?

Schauer: One of our most recent initiatives was the evolution to support BEPS 2.0 Pillar Two functionality. We also launched and a standalone option available for companies seeking Pillar Two support within other existing tax solutions. Pillar Two takes effect in early 2024, imposing new data reporting requirements and additional global tax compliance challenges for every multinational business with turnover greater than 750 million euros. This legislation increases the pressure surrounding already over-stretched tax teams that will now have to collect more data from multiple sources and across departments. In response, the all-in-one tax solution from InsightSoftware enables organizations to confidently meet Pillar Two requirements, improving financial planning with consistent, correct tax payments and reliable tax forecasting. Based on input and collaboration from customers — multinational and Fortune 500 companies — Longview Tax has evolved into a flexible, cloud-based corporate software that improves tax function across the enterprise. Notably, IHG Hotels & Resorts was among this group of customers and recently won best in-house tax team at the Tolley's Taxation Awards 2023, the U.K. tax industry's annual award ceremony. Such advancements exemplify how we are constantly updating our products to provide improved experiences for challenges accountants and financial professionals may encounter.

What is the most exciting new thing you're working on? 

Schauer: We are focused on expanding many of our products, as well as the InsightSoftware Platform. Allowing access to additional InsightSoftware products in one location that support accounting professional needs, delivering solutions to support robust and adaptable processes. Good things happen when you're well connected, and understanding how best to connect systems together and streamline a company's data for better decision-making improves business outcomes, processes, and team productivity. The InsightSoftware Platform does just that — it connects our applications to enable customers to solve multiple business problems faster and with less risk. We call it The Connect Effect. Our customers' product experience will remain consistent and familiar, while increasing productivity for administrators and offering a lower total cost of ownership for the business due to the benefits of connected solutions. By continuing to advance the InsightSoftware platform, we are further streamlining access to InsightSoftware solutions, delivering the same levels of data integrity and performance our customers are accustomed to, while increasing efficiency and improving the overall user experience.

What differentiates your company from others similar to it? What makes you different? Unique, even? 

Schauer: InsightSoftware continues to grow rapidly as a leading global provider of reporting, analytics and performance management solutions for accounting and financial professionals. Our biggest differentiator is our ability to expand through our M&A strategy, bringing together multiple solutions to serve our customers across the globe. While global M&A activity may be down, InsightSoftware has been bucking that trend, making 24 acquisitions in the last five years, and consolidating organizational data to round out one of the broadest reporting, analytics and performance management solution sets available. 

Even in today's uncertain economy, we aim to acquire companies that are a good strategic fit that also align with InsightSoftware product strategies and allow us to expand our product capabilities to best service and respond to the challenges of the financial professionals who use our products every day.

What is the biggest tech challenge facing accountants today? 

Schauer: A recent InsightSoftware report found that more than two-thirds of IT and finance professionals waste a whole day each week on operational reporting. As the demand for accurate reporting and financial predicting increases amid a volatile economy, accountants need more support in reporting to ensure they are providing accurate findings that help guide critical business decisions.

Today, this reporting is a heavy burden on finance teams who are being asked for more results with limited, outdated resources. For example, at many organizations, accountants are still using Excel — despite the mounting time requirements of manual data exports and the unnecessary risks presented when moving ERP data to an Excel spreadsheet. 

Accountants need to eliminate as many manual processes as possible in order to save time and resources for finance teams. Removing manual processes and spreadsheets in budgeting, planning, close management and reporting is the first step. This allows finance to spend less time collecting and processing data and more time analyzing it. This will also reduce reliance on key individuals because the right software can enforce process rigor and even make it easier to onboard new and less-experienced staff. 

If you could telepathically transmit one (non-marketing or sales) sentence into the head of every accountant in the world, what would that sentence be?

Schauer: Accountants must learn how to do more with less, removing manual processes and using that time to instead analyze valuable company data to make better decisions — building a more resilient finance function that can improve business outcomes.

InsightSoftware at a Glance:

Location: Raleigh, North Carolina
Number of staff: 2,500
Number of offices: 30
Website: https://insightsoftware.com/ 
Accounting firms it works with: Grant Thornton, Deloitte, BDO
Accountants served: 165
Number of products: 80+ products, as of today
Number of acquisitions: 24
Global users: 500,000
Partners: 1,300

This is part of our regular Vendor Spotlight series, where we highlight technology vendors that are fueling the accounting profession's digital transformation.