Once you select a company and login to Accpac, click on the Help in the top of the system.

You will see that Help has numerous options. Click on the Get Free Training on New Features. You must have access to the Internet to view the free video.

This will open a web page within Sage University. You will need to click the register button and then Check Out. If you have never registered with Sage University you will need to set up an account. Once you do this, you can watch the video at your leisure as many times as you would like.

If you spend some time accessing the Help features, I’m sure that you will see how you can get more information from your Sage Accpac installation.

If you have any questions about Sage Accpac and how it can provide you with a greater insight into your business, please don’t hesitate to call one of our consultants at 512-990-3994 or go online to http://www.mindovercorp.com.

After opening the Bank Reconciliation screen you will see the number of tabs has been decreased as well as a new button set by the Bank Entries Not Posted amount. There is also a zoom button beside the Book Balance which will show you how the Book Balance is calculated.

If the button is Active (not grayed out), you can click the button and it will allow you to Post Bank Entries entered into the reconciliation module but not yet posted.

Clicking on the Reconciliation tab shows you all of the bank transactions, withdrawals and deposits with the ability to select which transactions you want to work with plus how you want to sort them. You have the ability to drill down to any transaction. To reconcile an item all you need to do is double click the “Reconciled” column and an X will be placed on the item reconciled. You still have the ability to import the bank transactions provided you can obtain the statement from your bank in the OFX format.

With this streamlined bank reconciliation screen we believe we will see more of our clients using the bank reconciliation process within Sage Accpac.

If you have any questions about the Bank Reconciliation process or any other feature of Sage Accpac 5.6, please don’t hesitate to call one of our consultants at 512-990-3994.

Once you select a company and login to Accpac, click on the Help in the top of the system.

You will notice that Help has numerous options. Since we want to know which modules are active, we need to click on “System Information”. Several of the other help topics will be covered in later postings.

The System Information screen provides us with a wealth of information regarding the Accpac installation. As you can see from the image below, we know which version of System Manager is running and where the programs are installed, as well as the Shared Data Directory. Each software application installed within the Program Directory is listed in the Applications block.

The modules which are Active for the company you are currently accessing in Accpac have a red check-mark beside the application. For example, we can see that US Payroll 5.5 and 5.6 are installed, with the 5.5 module having Product Update 2 installed. However, 5.6 Payroll is active for the company. Further, we can see that the current Payroll Tax Table update UT56E is installed but hasn’t been made active for this company yet.

If you spend some time accessing the Help features, I’m sure that you will see how you can get more information from your Sage Accpac installation.

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.

Technical Sidebar: When upgrading from previous versions, take care to run the additional program to migrate the data from the “uni” tables into the Sage Accpac database.

As you can see below, this one screen contains a tremendous amount of information. Of all of the tabs available, probably the most valuable one is the Credit Status tab because you quickly get an understanding of a customer’s future cash flow value and whether you need to utilize the AR Collections module available in SageCRM to press for payment. Sage Accpac ERP truly is a seamless system that gives you a 360º view of your business if used properly. Are you using Sage Accpac to your full advantage?

The credit status tab gives instant access to potential credit issues with a customer. It even includes “Pending” transactions from order entry and invoices not yet posted in AR. You can run aging summaries as of any date by selecting how you want to age the account and providing the “as of” and cut-off dates.

Another nice feature of Customer Inquiry is its ability to be customized by you. Yes, we mean you! Example: if you don’t use optional fields or contract pricing in your business, you can remove those tabs from your screen to simplify the layout, in essence removing any non-essential items. This enables you to modify the look and feel of the screen to your heart’s content without you having to be a geeky programmer! How cool is that?

You also have drill down capability on any of the transactions in Customer Inquiry. Orders, shipments, invoices, credit notes, debit notes, receipts, adjustments – all can be viewed in more detail with a simple click of a drill down icon. If you need to follow up with your customers or answer their questions about invoices owed or paid, all of the information can be accessed from this wonderfully useful module inside Sage Accpac 5.6. What a time saver!

It just goes to show you how hard Sage works to pack value into Sage Accpac ERP and increase the return on your technology investments.

If you have any questions about Customer Inquiry or any functionality in Sage Accpac 5.6 or previous versions, please don’t hesitate to call one of our consultants at 512-990-3994.

Working together we make one heck of a team!

Sage just released Sage Accpac 5.6, so my focus in the next few blogs will be to explore the new features of the 5.6 release along with a discussion about how these features can be deployed to help our clients work smarter and faster.

A new application you should be aware of and which will be integrated free-of-charge with Accpac 5.6 is Sage Accpac Intelligence (SAI). SAI is a business intelligence tool which allows you to build data cubes from your Accpac data and then build reports from the data. The reports are accessed in Excel, but can also be deployed as a dashboard item within SageCRM. Here is a screen shot of the Dashboard report which now ships with Accpac 5.6.

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.

During the last three projects, which involved complex installations of accounting software, CRM software and other business software add-ons, each of our consultants worked enormous amounts of hours, yet were very mindful of the project budgets. They even accepted last minute changes to project scope while constantly striving to meet client expectations. At one point, our consultants learned how to implement and support some new products just before a go-live date so that one client’s needs were met without losing time on the project schedule. Oh, and did I mention that our consultants somehow managed to keep their home lives stable?!

During each of these projects, and more than once, we heard comments from our client along these lines:

“We really appreciate all of the work you and your team did for us, even staying till 1am and coming back at 8am the next morning! It’s obvious you are our partner and not a vendor. It seems you care more about our business than some of our employees do.”

When a consultant from Mindover Software charges an hour against a project, the customer is receiving years of practical experience, extremely deep product knowledge and a commitment to excellence. Our consultants don’t rest on their laurels, either. They are constantly trying to get better by testing the applications they support, even playing with new ones to see which ones might help their customers the most. To them, it’s all about the best results for their customers.

This is the Passion I was referring to in the first paragraph.

“Businesses are seeking rapid implementation and return on their technology investments so they can benefit from operational improvements as quickly as possible,” said Jeff Gregorec, Sage CRM Solutions vice president of sales and strategic alliances.

SageCRM operates on premise or as a hosted “cloud” offering through Sage. Not many know that SageCRM was one of the early CRM applications running on the Internet like many new “cloud” CRM products, enabling users to access customer data from the office or on the road through virtually any Internet connection. SageCRM’s “cloud” option makes it a perfect offering for businesses that want to lower their up front investment, minimize downtime and improve overall ROI.

Many customers of Mindover Software now run Internet based SageCRM to handle a range of business functions. One such customer, an oil field services company in West Texas, uses SageCRM to post the status of anchor testing jobs for its oil production customers to review in real time. Customers access the secure job status information through a website designed by Mindover Software. The job status website also allows customers to request new jobs, speeding up the processing time by as much as 50%!

Mindover Software also recently used CRM to create an RMA (Returned Material Approval) process for a military uniform contractor in Mississippi. The RMA functions were designed using SageCRM’s automated work flows, which during the design phase looks like a flow chart and allows multiple steps to be set up with automatic alerts, emails and field information requirements. The work flow design tool ensures critical data is never missed during the RMA process, an especially important requirement given that the principal customer of this uniform contractor is none other than the US military!

Still another SageCRM customer uses CRM in its stone and tile showrooms across the country. SageCRM allows sales and customer service representatives in Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Denver, Newport Beach and Houston to access inventory data real-time so that customers, who are often home builders with demanding information requirements, are given the latest stone and tile prices and inventory availability to factor into their project time-lines. Compared to phone calls to the warehouse and plants, the new CRM-enabled process stands to yield a 30% savings in time and 10% savings in erroneous product shipments.

With Sage offering 60% discounts on SageCRM software for new customers leaving competing CRM products, the math really starts to make sense. Another factor for the ROI equation is SageCRM’s ease of deployment, which takes a fraction of the time compared to many popular CRM products on the market today. Another big plus is SageCRM’s user-friendliness. It simply takes very little time to learn how to use SageCRM and begin experiencing the time-saving features such as quote creation, live inventory updates, customer credit requests, automated AR collections, and much more!

If ever there was a time to jump into SageCRM, now would be it! The financial incentives from Sage make it a no-brainer. The user-friendly screens and lightning fast set-up make SageCRM a best choice for many small and mid-sized companies in need of a true productivity jump. The out-of-the-box integration to Sage Accpac ERP is a bonus many companies can’t believe exists, so comprehensive is the integration to critical financial data! If manual work is the bane of efficiency in business today, then SageCRM is the answer for businesses in need of faster processes, fewer entry errors and greater financial security.

One of our CRM consultants would be happy to discuss any questions you have about SageCRM, the financial incentives Sage is offering to switch or any other business process automation issue you may have. Call us at 512-990-3994 or visit our website at www.mindovercorp.com.

The president of Mindover Software has a picture in his office of the Berlin Wall. I can still remember where I was when I heard that the Berlin Wall fell twenty years ago, and I remember what it symbolized to the world before and after it fell. Lately, I’ve been thinking that businesses have walls inside them, too. Granted, “business walls” are not imposing and threatening edifices along the lines of the infamous Berlin Wall, but they nevertheless are walls that can keep apart the free exchange of ideas and information inside an individual company.

CRM is the only application I know of that effectively breaks down walls separating departments, strategic initiatives and well-meaning employees in a business.

CRM products from Sage like Internet-based SageCRM, with its standard and customizable work flows, bring together many diverse functions like finance, sales, customer service, management and operations into a seamless flow of business processes. Gone are the guard stations where the flow of information had to stop for inspection before getting waved through to the “other” side. SageCRM is more akin to a bridge bringing together previously isolated parts of a city rather than a wall providing separation and traffic regulation.

So what are some real world examples of how Sage CRM breaks down walls inside a business? Credit limit requests and approvals are a perfect example of dysfunctional behavior hindering the free flow of information. Think of when a salesperson has a customer who wants to place a larger order on account than is currently allowed by its credit limit. The procedure most companies employ requires the salesperson to send an email to an accounts receivable clerk in the finance department in hopes of getting the request processed and approved before the customer loses patience, or worse, walks away.

Here’s how it works. First, the salesperson sends an email to the accounts receivable clerk, which as we know takes time to write, send, be read then acted upon. If additional information is needed, the AR clerk sends an email back to the salesperson, starting the cycle all over again. Once approved, the AR clerk has to go into the ERP (enterprise resource planning) system to change the credit limit in accordance with the new terms. Finally, the AR clerk sends an email back to the salesperson letting him or her know about the new credit limit.

Here’s the bottom-line: as business procedures go, credit approvals for new and existing customers are extremely manual, subject to error and time consuming. Plus you run the risk of angering customers if you can’t turnaround the approval fast enough, which sometimes result in customer defections and lost sales. Sounds like a pretty risky way to run a business, doesn’t it? You’d be surprised at how many companies still run their business just like so much patchwork of unconnected and independent processes, still living with a personal Berlin Wall smack dab inside their business.

How SageCRM breaks down the communication and procedural walls that divide a business transaction like credit approval is a study in operational efficiency. When a salesperson needs credit approval for a new or existing customer, the whole process takes place in SageCRM. The salesperson simply fills out the credit request fields in CRM, submits the information, then waits for a response from AR. The clerk in AR then receives a task assigned in CRM to review the credit request, which can be reviewed and approved in short order because of integration to the ERP system. Once the AR clerk sets the new credit limit, the approval is submitted and the salesperson is alerted, again all within in SageCRM.

The entire process from start to finish takes very little time, eliminates the risk of angering or losing a customer because of a slow approval process, and improves the productivity of the company.

Sage CRM integrates multiple departmental functions into one platform. 

Indeed, highly customizable work flow processes literally facilitate the flow of data throughout a company, cutting out manual tasks and reducing the chance for costly mistakes. For instance, a call center handling customer complaints and product returns can utilize SageCRM’s CTI phone integration to recognize in-bound customer calls, opening customer records automatically as soon as the phone call is received. The ability to receive inventory back, notify the warehouse to send out return packaging and postage to the customer, set up a credit memo or arrange for a new product shipment results in a vastly accelerated problem-resolution cycle, saving the company time, preserving customer loyalty and preventing lost revenue.

Because of the flexibility of CRM, many companies now see it as the most important investment they will make in business software technology. CRM is pushing decisions on which ERP applications a company must implement, not the other way around. Once CRM customization breaks the bonds of manual processes there is no desire on the part of the company to undo those liberating changes. That’s not to say that ERP systems are irrelevant or unimportant, quite the contrary. Organizations simply recognize that to operate with hyper efficiency and keep customers happy in today’s competitive world, more business processes have to be automated and integrated across multiple systems.

And nothing breaks down walls, automating previously manual transactions, like a well-designed CRM application, particularly one from Sage CRM!

Visit the Mindover Software website for helpful information about CRM, the SageCRM product like or to try a free 30-day SageCRM trial..

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.