Deltek has launched a new partner program for Deltek Costpoint, with which it hopes to attract accountants and bookkeepers servicing small government contractors. It believes that Costpoint services these small businesses better than the two popular small business accounting solutions. It lets them grow faster and without compliance hindrances if they start by using Costpoint rather than the more generic accounting solutions.
Deltek Pro Bookkeepers aims to support bookkeepers as they look after the different requirements faced by government contractors. Where Xero and QuickBooks will fulfil the basic needs of small GovCon businesses, as they grow, they will find industry-specific solutions such as Costpoint more efficient and faster than in other industries
Pete Mann, SVP of Corporate Development & Product Alliances at Deltek, commented: “When a smaller firm is ready to graduate from QuickBooks® or similar generic accounting systems to a purpose-built ERP solution like Deltek, the firm may need support running their back-office functions.
“With Deltek Pro Bookkeepers, Deltek is helping small businesses connect the advisors that know our solutions the best, so customers will get experienced support from experts in their industry who are also experts in their ERP and accounting solutions.
“Firms will not only accelerate the time to value with their Deltek solution, but also meet their business goals faster. Deltek Pro Bookkeepers will be a game changer for small businesses using Costpoint.”
What is a Deltek Pro Bookkeeper
These partners offer several services that can help small businesses leverage the power of Costpoint and remove much of the financial administration burden small businesses face. They can help customers with data entry for journals, time and expenses, payroll, and finance processes such as accounts payable, accounts receivable and bank reconciliation. Finally, they can support month and period-end processes and reporting.
There are currently three Deltek Pro Bookkeepers: Premier Consulting & Integration (PCI), Redstone Government Consulting and CRI. Deltek is looking to welcome more to the program in the coming months. What the announcement does not share and does not appear easily visible on their site is what benefits the partners gain from joining the program.
However, for those small GovCon firms looking for a more suitable ERP solution, the existence of these partners is worthy of note. Lynn Ryan, Chief Operating Officer, Broadway Ventures, LLC, commented: “[While] working diligently with our [Deltek Pro Bookkeeper] to convert our accounting system from the QuickBooks platform to Deltek Costpoint in the middle of our fiscal year…the personal touch the Redstone team provided was beyond expectations and really sealed our relationship as a TEAM!”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
Deltek has identified that it is winning business from current Xero and QuickBooks customers as their compliance and project requirements become more complex. Is the new partner program specifically targeted at migrating those GovCon businesses to its products? Is this different from other partner programs? Possibly, it appears more of a hybrid between outsourcing and a traditional VAR program.
However, Deltek also intends to extend the Pro partnerships to other applications. If it wants to attract more partners, it will also need to share the requirements of joining and the benefits of doing so. It will also be interesting to see how this new style of partner program evolves and which applications it applies to.
