Business Intelligence

A good Business Accounting System will help you accurately record your business transactions such as revenues and expenses, assets and liabilities. You do this to ensure that all your income is properly invoiced and collected and you maintain control over your expenses.

You also have a statutory responsbility to accurately calculate profits for tax purposes and keep track of withholdings from your employees to remit to the Government.

In the process of running your business and recording all these transactions, wouldn't it be nice to analyse your past activities to alert yourself of potential problems and identify opportunities to improve your business profitability?

A Business Intelligence ("BI") system will help you make sense of your business activities and transactions by:

• Presenting results into easily understood tables and graphs
• Calculating Key Performance Indicators ("KPIs") that highlight inefficiencies with inventory, customers, suppliers and other areas of your business
• Categorising your customers, products and services and comparing the results achieved by sales representatives over time and across similar categories to identify potential opportunities

A good BI tool will work with disparate business systems in your organisation and eliminate the need to rekey information into Spreadsheets.

The ultimate aim of BI is to make more informed business decisions.

More information: Axsapt

Stock Management Reviews

If your business sells products, then it's worthwhile reviewing your stock management systems to see if you can improve your efficiency and reduce your procurement and holding costs.

Areas to consider in your review include:

• sales forecasts
• lead times and quantity buy prices from each supplier
• similar products that can be substituted for out of stock products
• special storage needs (such as temperature control)
• customer preferences (for example: whether partial shipments are allowed)
• efficiency of the warehouse layout

What are the signs of an inefficient system? Lost sales due to stock outs, Cancelled orders due to missed delivery dates, Stock Shrinkage, Damaged and Expired Stock.

Modern stock management systems aim to minimize stock holdings without compromising customers' requirement for on-time stock delivery. They do this by basing the procurement process on current stock holdings, customer reservations, customer orders in the system and sales forecasts, with regard to the lead times from various suppliers and economic order quantities.

The Pick and Pack process can also be improved by printing picking slips based on customer required delivery dates and stock availability. When there are insufficient stock levels to satisfy all orders, a good system will allow you to reallocate orders from lower to higher priority customers.

More information: Axsapt

Can you Personalise your Accounting System?

There's nothing wrong with buying an off the shelf accounting, payroll or CRM system if it meets most of your current needs. If, however you feel your business will grow over the next few years, you should consider the configurability of your business system to avoid the high changeover cost.

There are varying levels of business systems out there from rigid entry level systems like Quickbooks and MYOB to fully customisable packages such as Sage CRM and Sage Accpac ERP.

Typically all small to mid size systems will be relatively quickly to implement provided you accept a best practice template, but as a business evolves, it's needs may result in inefficiencies in processing day to day activities.

For instance, you may need to record aspects of attributes of customers that just won't fit in any of the available fields within your CRM system. Some systems anticipate common expansion requirements by preallocating an number of "unused custom fields". The better systems allow you to define your own fields and map them to screens without much effort. Custom workflow can also be defined that controls when these variables appear and alerts others of required activities when concern conditions are met.

These sorts of systems are often more cost effective than performing manual external processes with spreadsheets for instance or rekeying duplicate information across disparate systems.

More information: Axsapt