CPA.com, the tech arm of the American Institute of CPAs, has entered a strategic partnership with Jirav, making the company’s platform its preferred business planning software for small and large companies.

While CPA.com has been looking for a planning and forecasting solution for firms of smaller sizes for some time, the need for these functions accelerated during 2020 due to the wide-reaching impact of COVID-19.

Jirav makes a financial planning and analysis solution that brings forecasting, budgeting, reporting and dashboarding together in one place. Part of its goal is to allow accounting firms to add higher-value strategic advisory services.

“We haven’t seen anything this robust at a reasonable price point, until Jirav,” Michael Cerami, vice president of strategic alliances and business development for CPA.com, said. “You have to go to the enterprise solutions, and that priced most firms out of the model. This is the right solution at a price point that makes sense for firms.”

Some key features of Jirav include:

• Users can create dashboards combining financial, workforce and operational data into customizable key performance indicators. Dashboards can be customized for each stakeholder and then shared with an unlimited number of read-only users.

• Users can create three-way financial reporting packages for both historical and forecasted periods. Updating rolling forecasts and departmental budgets takes just minutes, according to Jirav.

• Driver-based financial modeling pulls together disparate data sources to aid strategic planning. The Jirav platform allows users to model the cash impact of new hires and capital expenditures on the balance sheet and statement of cash flows, not just the income statement.

The idea of a planning and forecasting tool like Jirav’s has been discussed for years in CPA.com’s client accounting services workshops. Now, according to CPA.com CEO Erik Asgeirsson, that tool is a reality, and will be embedded in future CAS workshops.

“[With Jirav] you have some of that complexity of the enterprise solutions, but the onboarding is much easier to set up, and the business model will work for the outsourced accounting space,” Asgeirsson said. “We’re going to have to break firms out of Excel. Accountants might spend 40 hours doing a master Excel file for a client; with [Jirav], now that’s down to four hours.”

CPA.com is interested in moving accountants away from depending on Microsoft Excel, and Jirav is one way to do that.

“Most people who use Excel have done a budget in there, and we all know the problems with the platform — it’s hard to collaborate with, it has a steep learning curve, it’s error-prone,” said Martin Zych, CEO and co-founder of Jirav. “We bring in all this transactional information from different sources. We’ve done all the hard work of joining this all together, and we’ve designed it so you can visualize anything in five steps or less.”

“We’ve been working on this for years, and we’re very, very excited about this partnership,” Asgeirsson added. “This would be big without the pandemic and what businesses are going through, but with that, it’s even more relevant. We’ve been eager to get this out, because this is where the puck is going.”