Software Review: Sybiz Vision SQL Server Edition

After almost three years re-engineering Sybiz's popular Vision accounting system, the wait was finally over at last week's Sybiz International Conference at Glenelg in South Australia.

Business Partners from all round Australia, New Zealand and Ireland attended a training course which included hands on implementation of the new Sybiz Vision on their personal laptops. The course concluded with a certification exam to prepare the way for the important migration and training process for Sybiz customers.

What stands out in this release?

First and foremost Vision 13, as it will be known; is a complete rewrite of the original Sybiz Vision product originally released in 1993 as a Microsoft Foxpro database application.

In non-technical terms, this means the database is more robust and less affected by network and power interference. Secondly, there is no longer a Microsoft Foxpro size limitation of 2 gigabyte which currently forces many Sybiz customers to regularly compress transactions.

New Vision Look and Feel with Customisable Grids

The look and feel of the new Vision is along the lines of the new Visipay Payroll system first released 2 years ago, with the current style Microsoft Ribbon toolbar menus. The user can personalise their version by selecting one of the many "skins" available and adding or removing fields (including user defined fields) on the grids.

A powerful inbuilt report writer from Dev/X called Xtra Reports replaces SAP's Crystal Reports used by earlier Vision releases. Also included is an easy to use Analytics Engine that uses Pivot tables to splice and dice information.

The new Vision does away with the complex monthly rollover process as it adopts a true date-based approach. Interestingly, although you can specify custom reporting periods to run reports, such as Calendar Year and Financial Year, the Profit and Loss Report is still restricted to reporting in periods rather than date ranges, e.g. weeks.

Setting Up General Ledger Segments

The General Ledger can now handle up to 5 segments, up from 2 and now includes Projects and Sales Analysis Codes. A useful feature is being able to add new and change existing segments, the order of the segments and also the deliminator between segments all in real time without any downtime.

The Debtors Ledger retains the old Sales Analysis but adds true Sales Representative Commission tracking and potential calculation as a percentage of Profit or Turnover based on user defined targets. With the first release there are no standard reports that cater for this new commission tracking system.

The Creditors Ledger also includes Sales Analysis and special prices of products which is a very useful feature for procurement management.

Debtor and Creditor records have Territories and Industries categorisation which is a welcome enhancement over the old 2 digit Sort Code and Group Description. Also Trading Terms are much more configurable; for instance you can have the ability to create a custom trading term of X number of days following invoice date or commencing from the month end.

Configurable Trading Terms

Most transactions can be saved before being processed permanently and the Cash Book has the ability to setup Templates to speed data entry.

The bank reconciliation has similar functionality to the current release but still lacks the capability to import and match deposits and payments.

This release excludes Purchase Requisitions, Foreign Currency, Job Costing, Advanced Job Invoicing, Kits and Bill of Materials, Serial and Lot-tracked inventory items, Service Management, Point of Sale and Customer Relationship Management. Apart from Purchase Requisitions, these modules are scheduled for release over the next 2 years.

Currently, there are no 3rd party applications such as Noble Matrix, Import Costing, SPNet, CSAssets, Stock Manager, but all major 3rd party developers were present at the conference and are expected to port their applications to the new Vision over the next year.

The conversion from earlier Sybiz Vision systems is comprehensive for the General Ledger but limited to summary Customer and Creditor Journals for each outstanding invoice.

A stocktake is done on conversion based on the current quantity on hand and value for each product for each location. Customer and Supplier Outstanding Orders are ignored and need to be re-entered.

Due to corruptions that may be present in older Vision databases; the conversion process is likely to be relatively complex and Sybiz Software will be involved in converting and testing each migration in 2013.

Sybiz have advised they are planning to improve the conversion to include Customer and Supplier Orders and also view only access to Customer and Creditor history.

At this stage, a good candidate for conversion to the new Vision would be an organisation that has no need for foreign currency transactions but has complex general ledger and project reporting needs.

Please contact Axsapt if you would like further information or would like to participate in the early migration scheme.

What KPIs Drive Your Business?

In challenging times it's essential to manage your business operations to thrive. Probably the easiest way to do this is to focus on expanding more profitable aspects of your business whilst containing costs. You can do this by making it easy for your team to focus on your game plan by exposing your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

What KPIs do you use to manage your business? Every business is different, but as an example, the following is Axsapt's Dashboard.



Axsapt's Dashboard displayed on an LCD screen in our office

Displayed on a large LCD screen in our office, the Axsapt Dashboard shows a Leaderboard of revenue generated by all Team Members with Targets required to stay profitable. As we are a service based organisation, our help desk issues and performance are tracked so we can focus on improving the time it takes to help customers solve issues. Also measured are future appointments as they help improve customer satisfaction and revenue.

There are a selection of possible measurements that rate the financial fitness of any business and other non-financial KPIs, whilst not as well known, are even more valuable in predicting future cash flow and profitability.

The knee jerk reaction when times are tough is to slash variable costs (wages, marketing, staff amenities etc) and increase short term profits. Financial-based Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are useful for highlighting the following:

• Cash position (ability to meet wages, rent and other fixed costs)
• Sales
• Gross Margin
• Expenses
• Net Profits
• Unpaid customer invoices exceeding trading terms
• The net value (assets less liabilities) of the business 

Financial KPIs are typically compared to budgets or equivalent periods in the past with the intention of establishing a trend line to highlight potential problems.

Although useful, there is a limit to the overall usefulness of Financial KPIs in managing your business. There are 2 fundamental weaknesses of financial reports:

1. unless you are an accountant, financial metrics are difficult to understand, and 
2. financials provide you with limited guidance in how you can tweak your business to make it better.

Financials are ok at alerting you to potential problems that you can address before it's too late. For example customer outstandings exceeding trading terms pinpoints customers struggling financially. It's important to deal with problems like credit control, but it's even more important to focus on increasing opportunities and improving activities that improve customer satisfaction.

KPIs that track Sales, Outstanding Debtors, Stock on Hand are “lagging” indicators. "Predictive KPIs"* on the other hand are “theories” that predict performance. They work because they focus you and your team on the reason why your business exists in the first place.

What KPIs should you choose to help your business?

It’s difficult to generalise, but the following are fairly common KPIs in helping to catch problems before they can cripple your business:

• Velocity, or how long from the time an order is received to the time you deliver your product or service
• Number of new products taken on each year and on sold to existing and new Customers
• Customer Satisfaction (measured by surveys, product returns, sales activity etc)
• Staff Satisfaction (measured by surveys, staff reviews etc)

Our tip is to focus on no more than 3 KPIs and automate and display them on a big LCD screen in your office for all to see.

More information: Axsapt

*Source: The concept of Predictive Key Predictive Indicators and focusing on opportunities is sourced from the books:  "Implementing Value Pricing" and Mind over Matter, both by Ronald J. Baker