A Strong Partnership
Baratz & Associates’ recent acquisition of Acute Accounting Solutions creates a strategic partnership and strengthens the firm’s ability to provide clients with an expanded suite of financial services.
Since 1982, Baratz & Associates has served the region as a leading regional accounting and consulting firm, offering its clients a wide range of services to set them on a path for financial success.
Recently, Baratz expanded its client offerings with the acquisition of Acute Accounting Solutions, LLC a respected provider of outsourced financial services ranging from bookkeeping to fractional CFO support. As a certified Sage Intacct partner through the SIAP program, Acute’s founder Isolde Benyo and her six-person team bring a wealth of industry expertise and tech-savvy knowledge to the practice’s client advisory services department.
For the past eight years, Acute Accounting Solutions has aided various clients organizations with reliable transaction processing, financial technology optimization and scalable CFO guidance. Having now joined forces with Baratz & Associates, the firm is better suited to provide clients with a powerful and seamlessly integrated experience.
“Acute Accounting Solutions has a strong reputation for high-quality outsourced financial services, and their culture and client-first approach align perfectly with ours. Together, we can offer clients an even broader suite of services—from day-to-day bookkeeping to strategic CFO support and full-service tax planning,” says Raymond Giunta, managing partner of Baratz & Associates.
For Benyo, the partnership made perfect sense because over the years the two firms had often combined their levels of expertise to help mutual clients achieve their financial goals.
“They had referred a few clients to us and we’d refer clients to them, so we had a strong working relationship already. I knew all the partners and a lot of the team members, having worked with them on different clients. This was just a natural progression that made sense,” she says.
Now fully merged into Baratz & Associates, Benyo has become the partner in charge of client advisory services, allowing the practice to offer a full breadth of accounting services, including bookkeeping, controllership and CFO-assisted services.
“I think we do really good work and provide a lot of insight to business owners. This allows us to provide more resources and reach a wider audience,” Benyo says. “When we work with clients, we like to really get into the business and help them understand the numbers in a deep and impactful way so they can make [sound] business decisions.”
This added layer of customer service further positions Baratz as a leader in the field, while also giving Benyo and her team new opportunities to upskill and become more proficient.
“It gives my team the opportunity to work with a greater variety of clients and the opportunity to work with larger clients, while also continuing to hone our accounting skills. Besides working closely with CEOs, we also bring a lot of technology [expertise] to the table. … We know how to build a tech stack to gets you into the cloud and strengthen your internal controls,” Benyo says. “We can now offer clients that added value to help them really think about their business in a different way.”
While Baratz & Associates continues to develop and fine tune these new capabilities in the short term, the long-term potential—especially in the rapidly growing client advisory services market—will serve the practice well into the future.
“Being able to leverage technology and the growth of AI is going to be paramount. We are ahead of the curve compared to a lot of organizations, but if we continue to use it wisely we can make ourselves even more efficient,” says Benyo.
Ultimately, while being able to better serve clients on a larger scale is exciting, what is even more appealing to Benyo is being able to build upon the shared philosophy of the newly formed partners.
“I bring relationships with clients who I have been working with for 20 years now, and the most important part to me is it’s not about a transaction or a tax return, it’s about building a relationship,” she says. “That belief was already imbedded into Baratz’s organization and I just bring more of it.”
Baratz & Associates
Marlton
(856) 985-5688
