SAI Dashboard

SAI includes standard report templates for financial reports, sales, purchasing, and inventory and allows linking to a single Accpac database. In addition, only one Accpac user license is required for the SAI Report Manager to create and organize reports.  There are additional modules and features which can be added to increase the functionality of SAI.

SAI has an easy-to-follow tutorial within the help menu. A report designer should be aware of the Accpac database table structure, as well as the tables which link together to store related records, before attempting to create any ad-hoc reports. A report designer must also have strong Excel skills, which includes an understanding pivot tables, sorting, filtering and numerous other Excel functions and related tasks.

SAI also has the ability to create cubes which can be used within the report creation process. The cube creation requires a data knowledgeable skill set. Cubes can pull data from other sources however these sources must be ODBC compliant. Cubes also must be refreshed on a continuous basis as the data in the linked application may change.

How can SAI make your company better?

SAI allows you to deploy a full set of real-time business reports across your organization, eliminating the time (and staff cost!) you would spend capturing data and creating spreadsheets. The SAI dashboard gives management a high-level summary of key metrics allowing them to monitor performance, spot negative trends and proactively react to changing circumstances. The intuitive report writing functionality in SAI means you can write reports to track and analyze virtually any transaction data originating from Accpac 5.6, effectively transforming raw data into a foundation for your company’s competitive advantage.

Bottom line:

SAI should be deployed with each Accpac installation because of the number and variety of reports available to help you make smart business decisions. We still highly recommend that no matter what reporting tool being used (Sage Insight, Crystal Reports, DataSelf, Cognos, Brio and SAI), all report deployments should be based upon management’s stated reporting policies. These policies at a minimum should include where reports are stored, who has access to the different reports, the report naming convention, font sizes and colors, report title and parameter naming.

If you have any questions about SAI and how it might provide you with greater insight into your business, please don’t hesitate to call one of our consultants at 512-990-3994.

Business owners who acquire equipment for their business: machinery, computers, and some out-of-the-box software, usually prefer to deduct the cost in a single tax year, rather than a little at a time over a number of years. This deduction is known by its section in the tax code, a Section 179 deduction.

Under Section 179, businesses that spend less than $800,000 a year on qualified equipment may write-off up to $250,000 in 2009. The rules are designed for small companies, so the $250,000 deduction phases out when a business purchases more than $800,000 in one year. (Companies cannot write off more than their taxable income).

A business can save up to $26,000 on a $75,000 software or equipment purchase if it’s done before December 31, 2009 and it meets certain eligibility requirements. So not only would you save money through a tax credit, you would also reap business cost savings from new software that will improve your business performance! That’s an end-of-year savings worth considering.

For more information about Section 179, you should talk to your CPA or accounting advisor.

Sage CRM is not just about tracking leads and closing sales. To be sure, that’s a big part of its value. But CRM is more than just a pipeline and order management tool. There are a host of other functions that make it an outstanding catalyst for growth:

Ø     customer relation management

Ø     email marketing campaigns

Ø     technical knowledge-base for employees

Ø     and lot more.

One feature that’s particularly effective at helping a company is the Web Self-Service module from Sage CRM, the developer of the SageCRM product line. This module acts as an online portal in SageCRM where a company allows its customers to request work, view order status, make payments, check on project developments and much more.

A customer of Mindover Software, Andrews Anchors, an oilfield services’ company based in West Texas, recently learned the benefit of having the SageCRM online portal. After a successful implementation of SageCRM, Andrews Anchors was selected by a large oilfield production company to inspect the quality of the anchors at over 800 oil rigs, which is an OSHA required inspection. Andrews found out that it won the new account over a competitor in part because of the CRM online portal it developed with the help of Mindover Software.

What does this brief story illustrate? One thing that comes to mind is that a company that invests in the right technology will have a measurable advantage over the competition. It’s not enough to invest in technology alone, however. Technology must help a company do something better than, or at least as well as, the competition. In the case of Andrews Anchors, the Web Self-Service module from Sage CRM gave their customer what they wanted: ease of doing business, speed and real-time reporting.

Another take-away from this story is how you can actually use technology to grow a business while at the same time reducing transaction costs. That’s not an easy task to accomplish, to be sure. Web Self Service for SageCRM may be one of the few technologies that can make it happen. Imagine providing your customers a way to submit new order requests, make payments online and view order status, all without picking up the phone or sending an email. It would certainly make their lives easier, wouldn’t it? Equally as important, though, it would save you time normally spent searching for answers and then following up by phone or in an email. Time and productivity killers for office staff and / or customer service representatives!

One tenet of business is that customers always like convenience. The more convenience you provide, the more customers want to use you. Some customers will make friendly referrals to friends or contacts who frequently complain about poor customer service elsewhere. The net result? More sales!

So you see, it is possible to grow your business while lowering costs at the same time. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to achieve great results when using the online portal available in SageCRM. You can be a rocket scientist, and have customers that buy rocket parts but make doing business with you so painful they abandon you for the competition. The key is to make it as easy as possible to buy from your company so they keep coming back for more. Making smart investments will accomplish that goal, and one of the smartest CRM investments I’ve seen in a long time is the Web Self Service module for SageCRM.

We all expect an eCommerce solution to have certain basics – a webstore, payment processing, integration with the ERP system and automated order taker. But it is also a representation of the business on the web. A showcase for the world to see. A valuable marketing tool.

North49 Webtelligence now incorporates functionality to assist the business in marketing and sales efforts. Not only does it have full Google Analytics (old and new) integration to monitor activity on the site, it also allows the business to set up campaigns and promotions to monitor marketing results.

Let’s assume you would like to monitor the effectiveness of a certain radio ad campaign vs a similar campaign in a local news print. We have all heard or seen the ads with some special offer – “just enter promo code 123″ and you will receive a free widget/free shipping/amazing discount. The radio ad mentions promo code “123″ and the print ad asks you to enter code “ABC”.

Webtelligence web store treats this as a campaign with two promotions. It will track and record the promotion codes entered and feed this back to your ERP system with each order placed (in optional fields). A simple report in the Order Entry module will now tell you not only the volume of orders generated by each ad but also the total value and average value per order. In other words – marketing value per dollar spent. That’s the Holy Grail of marketing analytics!

For a link to Webtelligence, please click the link below:
www.north49.com/webtelligence

If you would like to see how Webtelligence could work for your company, please call Mindover Software at 512-990-3994.

I’ve been in the world of mid-tier accounting and CRM software for five years now and have always kept my eyes on the lower end of the market to know what’s out there. One product that particularly caught my attention is SageCRM, which isn’t really what you’d call a low-end software product. Actually, it’s decidedly mid-tier. It’s a full-blown customer relationship management software solution from Sage, developers of Peachtree, Accpac ERP, ACT! and SalesLogix.

What’s interesting about SageCRM is that it used to only integrate with more advanced accounting software products like MAS 90 and Sage Accpac ERP. Now, however, thanks to Gretrix, there is a link between SageCRM and QuickBooks. The Greytrix link now provides true bi-directional flow of data between the two products!

What does that mean for QuickBooks users? They can now utilize a robust, browser-based CRM system to enter orders and check customer status in QuickBooks either from the office or from a remote location such as a home, an airport or a customer location. From quote creation to invoicing, SageCRM will allow companies that use QuickBooks to be more nimble and responsive to customer needs.

This isn’t something to sneeze at either! With so much integration, SageCRM is poised to push productivity through the roof for some small companies. The reason I’m sharing this is because, as many business owners now recognize, accounting software alone is not enough for small businesses to thrive any more. They need an integrated system that can schedule sales calls, follow up on leads, create quotes, log key communications with customers and vendors, track marketing campaigns, see a customer’s account status, automate A/R collections and more.

To be successful today, you have to have a 360-degree view of business. Indeed, a business must be nimble enough to respond to changing customer tastes and needs. A business must also stay fresh on the minds of customers and prospects to be remembered. Bottom line – a business must operate with fewer resources yet somehow do more than ever before. That can only come with greater integration between key business software.

What Greytrix has done with its new link is allow millions of QuickBooks users to start running like a Fortune 500 company, without the corresponding price tag! SageCRM is not expensive for most small companies, especially compared to the productivity boost they will get by having so much more flexibility to conduct their business.

Thanks to Greytrix, QuickBooks and SageCRM are now unlikely partners in the battle to help small business run more efficiently, competitively and profitably.

The recent collapse of the MIS Group, the largest Sage channel partner in the US, came as quite a shock to many Sage business partners and followers. It seemed to fly in the face of recent convential wisdom, which is that bigger is better from not only a product margin perspective but also a resource usage one. Well, all of that may be changing.

New guidance was issued by Paul Johnson, EVP of Sales at Sage. Has anybody read the new policy? Does it make it any harder to undertake an acquisition of another Sage business partner?

I plan on reading the new policy as soon as I can get my hands on one.

Until next time.

David