The Year end is quickly approaching. Do you have a plan for the rest of your departmental budget? Don’t get caught out like so many others do. Unused budget dollars are ideal candidates for budget-makers looking to make cuts.
Read More >I have been a part of many ERP implementations during my 12 year career. Although every customer’s business is different, many of the issues they face are the same. However, the solution to these issues is not always the same.
Read More >As the sophistication of mobile phones takes leaps and bounds, the mobile workforce is becoming more and more reliant on these devices. Where there was previously a laptop, now there may just be a single iPhone. While the raw power and features evolve, one thing that will not be changing for a long time is how big the device’s screen can be. This limitation can change how you see SageCRM on a mobile device. You might get a near desktop experience, but you’re zooming in, zooming out, scroll, scroll, scroll...
Read More >BAASS Business Solutions was happy to have the following article distributed to us by Russell Cullingworth, MBA.
"Strategic Accountability Reporting is the indispensable 3rd leg (control) in the annual Planning, Budgeting and Control Cycle. Without this 3rd leg, the process cannot stand and will inevitably fall into a pile of dusty, unused planning binders.
With the Strategic Plan as the point of reference, annual operating plans are required to set short-term objectives (the Operating Plan) that will move the organization toward longer term strategic goals. The operating plan should be well defined and measurable and typically have a one-year time frame. A clearly defined operating plan can readily be translated into detailed step-by-step Action Plans that need to take place in order to meet each objective. Adding dollars to each step of the action plan results in an activity-based Budget – a financial expression of what actions (and spending) needs to happen in order to reach the operating goals and thereby the strategic goals.
These steps are fairly well known and reasonably exercised in many organizations – but often this is where the process breaks down. Some organizations may continue to track variances, but if these are not related DIRECTLY back to action and operating plans, the process breaks down. What tends to happen is that organizations allocate their budget by Department, and more often than not, departments are organized according to line reporting, and not aligned with the strategic and operating plans. It follows then that the remaining systems – General Ledgers, Variances and Financial Reports continue to represent line reporting DEPARTMENTS and not the more desirable strategic and operating objectives.
The STAR Framework© aligns the Budget, General Ledger, Variance Notes and Financial Reports with the Strategic and Operating plans – managers explaining variances are required to relate those variances back to the impact on planned activities – for if the activities are not taking place, then the operating plan is not happening and the organization may be drifting off its strategy. The financial variances become a reliable early warning system for strategic drift. There is NO OTHER reliable method to measure this in real time. Without this integrated Planning, Budgeting and Control cycle, organizations are likely to wake up a year or two down the road and realize that they are nowhere near where they planned to be. The STAR Framework is visually represented as follows:
About Russell Cullingworth
Russell was trained in finance in South Africa, completing articles with Price Waterhouse in 1991. He immigrated to Canada in 1996 and completed the Executive MBA Program at Simon Fraser University in 1999. Russell’s career experience includes Controller at CGA-Canada and Director, Finance and Facilities at Canuck Place Children’s Hospice and over five years consulting on Accounting Systems Implementations with clients such as PHS Community Services Society, Vancity and HSBC. Russell is currently owner/manager of the Centre of Excellence for Young Adults Vancouver Inc. and part shareholder of CharityGiftBag.org. He also consults to organizations on the STAR Framework and financial systems implementation.
For more information about Russell, please contact our office.
Does your business use paper, of course it does, but does it use too much of it? Have you ever wished you could reduce the amount of paper that flows through your office, piles up on your desk, or gets lost at the water cooler?
Read More >I read an interesting blog article by Austin Merrit of Software advice with the above title. It is an interesting article and makes many valid points but I have a slightly different take.
1) What is the definition of Horizontal Software?
Most software publishers if not all now provide extended solutions/modules for specific industries. So the core system may not have been designed for a specific industry but the extended solutions are. Plus Computer Solutions is a Sage 300 (formerly Accpac) reseller and Sage and BAASS Businesss Solutions have vertical solutions for the distribution, service, manufacturing, retail, Not for profit, etc industries. The core Sage 300 modules might be consider at horizontal solution as they were initially not developed for one specific industry but for many different industries. This has created a great deal of functionality in the application that allows the application to be useful in many different environments. In fact the core modules have been developed to such an extent that they are usually far more functional than the core of a vertical software solution. We usually find that our General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable and Business Intelligence modules are far more comprehensive than any vertical software solution.
2) Is Stand alone software the same as Horizontal software?
In my opinion Stand alone software is simply a piece of software that does not integrate to any other application. Stand alone software is often designed specifically for a vertical industry. I would say as a reseller we see clients and prospects using vertical invoicing, customer management, estimating and quoting, time and billing systems that were designed for there industries but do not integrate easily to back office systems more often than a stand alone horizontal system.
3) Software Vendors are verticalizing there solutions.
Many of the major players he mentions are but many are not. In reality they are simply marketing to industries where there solutions have a strong presence. In some cases the solution may be strong in that vertical industry but often we find that it is just a perception issue and the product often does not meet the mustard test when compared to a non vertical solution.
In summary I personally do not think horizontal solutions are dead nor do I think they will ever die. They will just be enhanced and modified to meet the needs of vertical industries or extensive marketing to industries they are well suited to will be increased. In that sense the name horizontal solutions may disappear but some of the best vertical solutions are and will be built on the foundation of a horizontal solution. Alternatively I do think that stand alone solutions are dying a slow death and we will eventually find more and more software developers will build solutions on common platforms so that integration will become less of an issue.
Data integrity checks in Sage 300 (formerly Accpac) are critical. It's easy to get the impression on how we, at BAASS Business Solutions, feel on the matter considering the number of times we bring it up. Data integrity checks can stop disasters before they start.
One of the down sides of data integrity checks, or a DIC as I like to call them, is that they can take a long time to run. Some larger databases can take hours, which is fine because you can continue working or walk away since it is going to just pop up with a nice report when it's done.
But oops, my workstation was set to print directly to the printer. The DIC is done, but instead of a nice report on my screen, Sage 300 is asking what printer to print to. I'm not going to print a 100 page report just to review it once and I don't want to run the DIC again. Is there something I can do? Yes!
The DIC creates a text version of this report and saves it to the Sage 300 shared data directory. To access this file, simply locate your Sage 300 shared data directory by going to Help -> System Information. Using Windows File Explorer, navigate to this path, then the COMPANY folder, followed by the folder where the name matches the database ID where you ran the DIC. Contained within, there should be a file called ERRORS.LOG. This file will be a full copy of the report you'd have received when the DIC was complete.
Not only does this save you grief if you missed the DIC report from Sage 300, but I actually prefer to read the report this way. Considering a great deal of the report is "0 Error(s) found", having it in text format allows you to quickly scroll through it.
Sometimes one doesn't have to exit an Excel spreadsheet to get the necessary data. All Sage 300 (formerly Accpac) tables can be accessed and analysed directly from within Excel. Yes, yes - Excel! I'm talking here about MS Query that can be called upon from the Data menu of Excel. Provided you know the ODBC connections to your company's data and credentials to access it you're good to go and query the data you need, all fields of any table, with the availability of selections and filters. Of course knowing SQL language can be handy and can save hours of work, as in the below example.
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