Huston We Have a Problem

A Team

"James here and I'm onsite deploying an upgrade and having problems with connection issues with SQL. **static** Over"

Mission Control

"This is Huston – assistance package has been sent. **static**

Establishing communication link **electronic sounds**
Commencing Nathan interface **static**
Huston is go for interface. Over"

"James, in regards to that error, it seems that we may have come across it before.
I have remoted in and applied the patch. Nathan. Over."

"Thanks Nathan, Scott and Axsapt Mission Control. Disaster averted! James. Over."

"James, you may now commence landing sequence. May God guide you gently to Earth. Scott. Over."

Coming down to Earth

"Mission Control. We have landed successfully… James. Over"

"On behalf of a grateful nation, Congratulations all on a job well done. Mission Control. Over and Out"

AOK... Mission Accomplished

When you are having problems with your business software, you can rely on the Axsapt "A-Team" to help you come back to Earth quickly.

The above mission is typical of how the A-Team works together to solve issues. The important message to take away is that rather than ask for a specific Axsapt Technician; it's best to log your call with our Customer Liaison with enough details, to help our team prepare to solve your issue before we call you back.

Did you know that problems put through a step by step process are often solved quickest?

So please be patient if we ask you questions that may not seem particularly relevant. Often we'll ask for screen shots to save you having to read out cryptic error messages.

Please only send us the very first screen shot of the error as it's the most relevant in helping us to diagnose the problem.

Do you need help you with your next mission?

Log a support call with Axsapt.

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.

Automatic Purchase Orders from Customer Sales Orders

As Business Consultants, we talk to hundreds of business owners each year and although it's not commonly requested, we often identify they could save time and reduce errors by automating tedious business processes.

A typical response is: "I didn't know that could be done!".

We put this down to the "not knowing what you don't know" syndrome. Business Managers and Owners often can't see the forest from the trees and just assume the way they are doing things now is OK and there's probably not much they can do about that.

Usually when our Business Consultants do a walk-through of a business they identify a few key improvements that can be implemented simply; with tangible benefits. These include:

• Higher sales,
• Less errors,
• Reduced costs of operating,
• Happier customers, and
• Happier staff.

To help you understand what's possible, let's explore just one area that can be automated with Axsapt's Back to Back add-on that ticks all of the above benefits. The process of delivering Goods to your Customers involves the following:

• Convert the winning sales quote into a sales order/confirmation (with or without a deposit)
• If there is insufficient stock or raw materials on hand raise one or more purchase order to suppliers considering customers' required delivery date, transport times, outsourcing requirements, etc.
• Where further manufacturing is outsourced, raise additional purchase or job orders to those external suppliers with sufficient instructions.
• Receive the product into stock or arrange for it to be dropped shipped to the customer
• Raise a sales invoice to the customer

Even the process of choosing the most cost effective supplier (based on reliability, time to deliver, minimum order quantities and best purchase price, etc) is tedious and it's easy to make the wrong decision which costs your business money.

For a complimentary discussion about what's possible, please contact Axsapt. Our passion is automating tedious processes bogging down businesses. The benefits to your business are increased accuracy, reduction in processing costs and superior customer service. 

And don't forget your staff will love you as they won't have to do "brain-dead" tedious tasks that makes the day drag on and on.. 

More Information: Axsapt

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

Keeping your finger on the pulse of your business

When running a small to medium sized business, it's a good idea to:

• have just enough stock on hand to deliver customer orders on time
• ensure sales to customers generate sufficient profits to cover all running costs and a reasonal rate of return for your investment
• monitor your cash flow, ensuring customers pay their bills on time, and you don't pay your bills earlier than necessary. You should also be aware of any unusual expenses so they can be investigated

To grow your business, you'll need to:

• identify and focus your marketing on products and services that generate the most return
• increase your capacity to handle the growth of your business without stressing out your team
• take advantage of efficiencies of scale, such as higher volume purchase discounts, reduced administration and distribution expenses

You can start to do this by hiring a good management accountant with the skills to extract this sort of information from your accounting system and present it to you in a meaningful way.

Or you could substantially automate this process by investing in a Business Intelligence Centre, that will extract key performance indicators from your accounting system and present it in a series of easy to understand dashboards and management reports.

More information: Axsapt

Document Management

Why would anyone bother with document management? Quite common in the Legal Industry where multiple documents are associated with each matter and it is important to quickly retrieve information based on key word searches.

Document Management is also growing in popularity where there is a need to quickly retrieve source documents such as proof of purchase and delivery of goods. From an environmental point of view, it makes sense to quickly recycle documents rather than storing them for years in filing cabinets and archival storage.

Many business software systems these days have some inbuilt document management capability. Unfortunately from what we've seen, they tend to fall short on the usability and don't seem to flow seamlessly with the process flow of the host application.

When looking for an appropriate Document Management System, it is important to consider the following factors:

• Multi-level security of the stored documents
• Ease of use including rapid retrieval of documents in the most appropriate and logical flow
• Secure destruction of deleted documents
• Compatibility of working with all common document types

The best document management systems are able to be configured to work so closely with existing business software that it would appear to be part and parcel of the host system. For example, when drilling down on a list of customer sales invoices, you can retrieve the customer's purchase order and your freight consignment note.

More information: Axsapt

Taking Stock of Your Accounts

Most accounting systems can handle general business needs without too much fuss. As long as your business sells straightforward products using a simple pricing model, then it's probably OK to stick with a run of the mill accounting system.

But what if your products have:

• multiple units of measure
• serial and lot tracking with expiry dates
• different costs at each location
• more than one stock keeping bin location in each warehouse
• barcodes for each packaging unit
• the need to track costs by FIFO, Weighted Average Cost and Standard Costs
• more than one dimension such as Colour, Size, Season, Width and Depth and the pricing varies for each of these attributes
  
• Volume Pricing or Discounts by date range for both Sales and Purchases
• Complex cost calculations that include foreign and local freight charges, agent handling fees, duty, warehousing fees, insurance all allocated on the basis of weight, value or cubic volume
  

If you're using a run of the mill accounting system and your business has complex stock requirements, you're probably using spreadsheets and word processing and many error prone manual procedures just to get your invoices out the door.

More information: Axsapt