Accounting solutions provider announced the release of its new practice management platform, PracticeOS, made specifically to help accounting professionals with their work-to-cash cycles.
"Launching PracticeOS at our 3rd annual user conference, in front of 160+ customers, CPA professionals, and partners, made this moment even more impactful," said Justin Adams, CEO at Aiwyn. "We're providing a critical platform that will close the gap between the outsized demand firms face and the decline of CPAs entering the workforce. The efficiencies gained by implementing PracticeOS make it possible for firms to drive productivity at scale."
The payment and collections capacities lets users see their entire AR in one view, where they can make online payments, set up recurring payments, save payment methods, and pay multiple invoices at once - even across multiple business entities. They can also automatically create and send statements that include all unpaid AR with a one-click option for clients. The payments portal will set off a custom sequence to send client invoices and payment reminders. Finally, there are options for custom collections messaging which allows firms to tailor messages based on the aging status of an invoice.
The platform also offers engagement letter automation capabilities. Users can make an unlimited number of unique engagement letter templates; these letters can also be drafted in bulk without the need for mail merge. They can set up automated reminders to sign the engagement letter, as well as track the status of every engagement in a single view. Clients can also access engagement letters through the Client Portal, which also provides document sharing, e-signatures, and convenient payment options. The software also integrates with users' existing practice management and CRM systems, allowing it to access client and firm data.
There are also billing and AR management capabilities. Users can proactively draft bills by pulling in all relevant information (e.g. engagement letters, fee structures, past invoices) into one place. It also allows users to track billing changes and manage approval workflows between stakeholders through streamlined processes and real-time collaboration. Users can also create work-in-progress bills, progress bills, or combined "Advanced" bills, as well as automatically calculate adjustments by modifying the bill amount.
A vendor agnostic integration engine
The new release brings "all the modules people love" in Aiwyn together with some new capacities into a single united platform, according to Ellen Choi, co-founder and chief innovation officer with Aiwyn. Described by her as an "integration engine," its modular design, allowing for more solutions in the future, builds on Aiwyn longstanding focus on building connections between disparate systems versus concentrating on any one ecosystem.
To this end, PracticeOS was built to be vendor agnostic. Certain other practice management systems tend to lock customers into their environment, where solutions are designed to work specifically with their own software and no one else's. While there might be a wide variety of modules to choose from, they're all within the realm of a single vendor. In contrast, PracticeOS has been designed from the start with integrations in mind, enabling them to use different best-of-breed solutions together through a unified platform.
Choi noted that while this kind of openness is not as common in the accounting solutions space, it is the prevalent approach in the tech industry as a whole, and investors are increasingly demanding that vendors adopt this approach too.
"If you look outside the accounting profession, [the single ecosystem approach] doesn't work, it's absurd actually, but because our profession has been underserved on technology for so long, it's not seen as a possibility. From my perspective, you see the PE money coming in, and [people are] catching up to their expectations, their perspectives, from other parts of the technology landscape. Our customers are driving us that way too, it's increasingly understood that there's no such thing as one single ideal tech stack," she said.
She noted that this development is a reflection of changes to the broader technology infrastructure landscape. With the rising dominance of cloud computing and the attendant application programming interfaces, this modular approach becomes much easier, saying there's enough firms in the cloud now that this approach can work particularly well.
The new release, Choi said, also represents a doubling down of its focus on the accounting profession and their firms. While they had always been involved in the accounting profession, their involvement with it has only increased with time. The more products they delivered to firms and the more they helped implement and support them, the more these firms asked for more, leading to new products like PracticeOS developed specifically for these professionals.
"So we're very committed to doubling down on making sure our entire team is working towards serving the accounting profession," she said.