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This is part two of a three part series where we consider the perspective of an existing customer on traditional Great Plains (Microsoft Dynamics GP) and the benefits of using Microsoft Dynamics GP with SMB Suite as an alternative to learning a new ERP system.

You may be a business with an older version of Great Plains. Your business would like to go to the latest version of Microsoft Dynamics GP, but it’s currently not on the maintenance plan. Of course there is an option to upgrade, but your business is faced with heavy fines for being behind and fees for upgrade services.  That’s not all -- your hardware may be outdated and in need of replacement. Your business might also be constantly patching and upgrading the operating system to protect from data compromise and viruses.  If your business is like many others, it may be running on Windows XP, of which Microsoft is ending support for soon, leaving your business at risk.  Traditionally, the fix for this problem requires a lot of upfront capital expenditure.  Many consider this to be a dark cloud hanging over them; one they just can’t escape from.

However, there is another cloud subscription worth considering: SMB Suite.  The cloud is “the new way of doing business” and many businesses are finding that this is indeed the answer to their problems.

Consider the advantages that SMB Suite brings to existing Great Plains customers. First, customers get to keep Great Plains, and are automatically upgraded to the latest version. SMB Suite brings business into the modern cloud world where businesses can forget about patching, updating, and performing daily backup of critical data. It’s all done securely at a cloud datacenter with 24/7 monitoring. Businesses no longer have to worry about buying or maintaining server equipment and the outdated operating system will be a thing of the past. In fact, SMB Suite customers are able to log into the latest version of Microsoft Dynamics GP with just a web browser.

The new way of doing business in the cloud includes monthly subscription pricing. With subscription pricing, customers only pay one fee per month, making it is easier to plan and budget for. This fee includes all of the software licenses, including the database and operating system licenses; along with the Microsoft Dynamics GP upgrade licenses, upgrade services and cloud services. This is possible because the cloud only requires a subscription, not a full purchase of the licenses. SMB Suite offers a full 36 month subscription for the entire core offering of Microsoft Dynamics GP & CRM solutions, without any upfront fees. This innovative, single-fixed payment also includes unlimited support and all future upgrades and upgrade services. This eliminates the need for a large investment of capital upfront, since all fees are spread over 36 months.  Most importantly, businesses don’t have to switch to an unfamiliar new system. SMB Suite customers are able to keep Great Plains and enjoy all of the benefits of a modern cloud solution.

Another big benefit of the moving to SMB Suite is the ability to continue using Excel. A leading cloud provider of a non-Microsoft ERP would not only move your business off Great Plains, they would prefer to move your business off of Excel.  Most businesses use Excel every day for business analysis. Dynamics GP allows for a seamless integration with Excel. In the latest version, most reports can be easily exported to Excel -- not just in a CSV or flat file, but in a fully formatted Excel worksheet. Because Excel is so popular for business, users are even able to produce a budget in Excel and bring it directly into Dynamics for budgeting.

SMB Suite takes this a step further by including an Excel based reporting tool. This acts as add-in to Excel, giving Excel new capabilities, and is fully integrated into Microsoft Dynamics. This brings together the best of both worlds -- the new capabilities provide access into the Microsoft Dynamics database, where the user can create a report by simply dragging and dropping the fields into Excel.

We’ll explore more about how this helps a business gain insight, plus more on how the cloud makes it possible to access your system from anywhere, and much more in the third and final part of this series.

Leading ERP companies would like you to believe that they are the best cloud ERP option for your business. However, to take advantage of their cloud offering, you’ll have to make some tradeoffs -  including giving up much of the Microsoft platform. SMB Suite has a better solution. Enjoy all of the benefits of a modern cloud solution with a proven Microsoft based platform, all for one low monthly subscription.

In this three part series, we will take a look at the benefits of using SMB Suite solutions as an alternative to other cloud ERP offerings. We’ll examine the benefits of using a cloud based solution, discussing what to look for when reviewing Cloud ERP offering, and why SMB Suite offers the most value.

A major advantage of the cloud offering of SMB Suite is that it is built on the proven Microsoft platform. Microsoft is widely used by professionals worldwide, as it is the most predominant business productivity application. Microsoft has made extensive on-going investments in the Microsoft platform, including Dynamics ERP, to add more robust functionality.  At the same time, they have improved the user experience with streamlined and personalized menus, role based home pages, and tools to help businesses gain greater insight with easy-to-use reporting and advanced business intelligence. It is important to look for one publisher for all of the critical foundation components of a cloud solution, because this helps to ensure seamless integration. With SMB Suite, the database is Microsoft SQL Server, the productivity apps are Microsoft Office, the document storage is Microsoft SharePoint or Microsoft SQL Server based, reporting tools include Microsoft SQL Reporting Services as well as Excel, and the ERP and CRM solutions are built on Microsoft Dynamics. By design these solutions work together better than components assembled from different publishers. Compare the Microsoft platform with cloud ERP solutions that piecemeal together their solution with Google docs, BoxNet, and a database from another publisher.

Another consideration to look for is fully integrated applications. This will greatly reduce the duplication of data and the risk of errors. SMB Suite features a fully integrated suite of products that will increase your productivity, reduce cost, and save time. As many traditionally deployed businesses know, the cost of implementation, integration, and on-going application maintenance of typical on-premise environments can be many times the cost of the software itself. However, with SMB Suite you’ll never have to worry about an approach that requires costly integration to get different applications to work together. Each application of the SMB Suite works together.  Gone are the days of separate on-premise software packages—one for accounting, one for sales force management and automation, one for ecommerce, one for service management, and perhaps one for warehousing.  SMB Suite has combined Microsoft Dynamics with solutions that add value, all designed to take advantage of the proven Microsoft platform. These fully integrated solutions include customer relationship management with sales automation, service and marketing solutions, ecommerce for both business to business and business to consumer transactions, human resource and payroll solutions, service management, job costing, distribution and warehousing, plus unique Excel based business intelligence.

A great benefit of moving to the cloud is the elimination of on-premise IT costs. The cost of using on-premise software includes purchasing and maintaining of computer hardware, operating systems, software upgrades, service packs, virus protection, plus daily backup and recovery. Not to mention taking care of equipment breaks, password resets, and training employees. For most small to medium businesses, having an IT department is an expensive luxury. Yet without at least one IT person, there is a very real risk of costly viruses, loss of data, and downtime. Using a modern cloud based solution eliminates this concern. All of the purchasing and maintenance of the hardware and software is taken care of by SMB Suite. SMB Suite keeps your data secure by protecting your business from viruses, maintaining required service packs, and performing daily backups. Additionally, your business won’t be tying up funds in server hardware or paying for charges for additional hardware upgrades as your business grows. This greatly reduces risk, gives more bandwidth to IT for strategic projects, and allows your business more time to focus on what you do best to serve your customers. 

In part two we’ll explore how you can move to the cloud for one monthly subscription, how Microsoft Dynamics works seamlessly with Excel, and how to gain greater visibility into your company with business intelligence.

Moving Dynamics to the Cloud will allow you to provided truly integrated, anytime access to company data

• Have financials on-demand while providing access to more users
• Position accounting for expanded Dynamics GP functionality
• 24/7 Live Premier Help Desk at no additional cost

Alter your Financial Reporting Model in a positive way

• No upfront investment
• Eliminates the burden of technology management
• Locks in pricing with a predictable monthly fee

Grow your Business

• Slash IT Budget and reallocate to more strategic areas
• Avoid recruiting or maintaining staff to support infrastructure
• Move CAPEX to Operating Expense

Benefit from the Managed Service Model

• Lower Total Cost of Ownership per user
• Quicker deployment with flexible scalability
• Integrated extra layer of security that reduces risk

Take the SMB Suite challenge! 

Compare the cost of on-premise Microsoft GP vs. Cloud ERP and see why more companies are trimming their technology budget and lowering IT expense by moving their ERP to the Cloud. SMB Suite’s flexible pricing plans allow you to choose exactly what you need for a predictable and easy-to-budget monthly fee. No surprises.

Many small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) use pieced-together spreadsheets, applications and other tools to maintain their financial information. This kind of patchwork system requires a lot of manual effort and duplicated data entry.

Fortunately, streamlining your financial processes is as simple as using a cloud ERP solution. Such all-in-one platforms are robust enough to track all the data you need without limitations. After all, it’s better to maintain one system than five, right?

Here are four ways that cloud ERP systems help to reduce manual and duplicated tasks.

1. Cloud-based platforms are integrated: This means one system handles everything from entering an order or reporting that something’s been shipped and delivered. When you have all your invoice information in several different systems that don’t talk to each other, the risk of mistakes is significant. Maintaining many financial spreadsheets is also time-consuming. To maintain accuracy between the sheets, accountants must take multiple steps to transfer data and verify changes are made at every location. For companies that want one source of the truth or one set of numbers that’s accurate, cloud-based ERP systems are the clear choice.
2. Quality cloud ERP systems help ensure that proper audit trails are produced in your accounting system: If someone changes something in the system — adds a figure, delete funds, move accounts around, etc. — the action is tracked. The system tells you who made the change and when the change happened. This way, when something harmful happens, you can restore an earlier version of the system and determine how the error occurred.
3. Cloud ERP systems are great for disaster recovery efforts: If your data is in the cloud, it’s getting backed up at least every day. For companies using an on-premises solution, which are not automated to back up data, the risk for error is significantly higher. Even if these legacy systems are programed to make backups, the data is still located in the same place as your office. That’s a problem if your office is damaged or destroyed. With the cloud, data restoration can be nearly instantaneous.
4. Outsourcing your financial processes to the cloud means you have fewer IT issues to worry about: Service pack applications and patches, virus protection, data management and application upgrades are all included in your cloud subscription costs. If you take those tasks off of your internal IT department’s plate, it can focus on core business issues rather than day-to-day maintenance tasks. Cloud programs keep your limited resources from being constrained. It allows everyone to focus on big picture revenue-generating processes.

At the end of the day, cloud services free your company to spend more time building the business, and focusing on what you do best as an organization.

We are inviting you to join our live webinar on Thursday, February 22nd for an educational series to learn about 9 GP add-on solutions.

Kim Peterson will lead an overview of 9 GP enhancement tools that is educational in scope, and your only investment is your time.  

She’s been around the table in working for Great Plains/ Microsoft, ISVs, a VAR organization and led GPUG for over 5 years.  She understands the GP market. 

This educational webinar will expose you to solutions that will help minimize your tasks.   

60 minutes you can't afford to miss!  Companies featured (you’ll be surprised at what you’ll learn):

• Dynavistics (AR Management Software)
• Envisage (Automated Post Batching & Project Tracking)
• Encore (Project Tracking with Advanced Analytics)
• Gorilla Expense (Expense Management)
• Dynamics Budgets (Alternative to Management Reporter)
• GP Power Tools (DB, Admin & Developer Tools)
• Mekorma MICR (Multi-Batch Management)
• Metaviewer (AP Automation)
• Sierra Workforce Solutions (Time & Attendance)

 

If interested in joining, you can register below.

Thursday, February 22nd @ 1:30pm CST: Register Here

 

It’s critical for staff at all companies to prioritize their daily tasks to allow as much time as possible to focus on the core competency of the business. After all, this is why the company exists; administrative tasks are part of life, sure, but it’s not supposed to eat up the entire day.

This is not easy, of course, especially for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) where employees often have so much on their list to sort through. Typically, these employees wear several hats, meaning many line items on their to-do lists are more about maintenance than productivity. They also spend significant time putting out “fires” (and in the SMB space, there are many) and dealing with “drive-by” disruptions (other people who interrupt the flow by asking questions and adding tasks to your list).

The only way to navigate this messy minefield and maintain clarity is to useto automate and streamline as many items as possible. You must condense this disparate and complex workload to a more manageable daily checklist if productivity is ever going to be achievable.

While just about anything on your list can be easily outsourced using the cloud — IT, financial management, human resources, marketing, sales and operations, etc. — some areas are more common to outsource than others. These days, IT seems to be the most popular and the most crucial for SMBs to hire out of house. The reason this is so common is because technology plays a significant role across the board.

The key is to find the balance between cost, flexibility, control and scalability. In other words, you want the time and money savings, but you also want to make sure you settle into a solution that can scale with the growth of your business.

For busy SMB owners, it’s important to remember that moving line-of-business systems into a well-managed hosted environment will improve several areas right out of the gate. Cloud solutions, especially cloud ERP, will help keep your overall IT spend at a minimum and moves the process to a subscription payment model, which is predictable. In fact, this ability to be a predictable expenditure is one of the biggest distinguishing features for a cloud subscription model; it spreads the potential line items in a software investment (software, support, licensing, etc.) across the course of the contract. What was once an uneven expenditure is now consistent each month.

Using the cloud to outsource also means that your disaster and recovery will be more secure and manageable. For example, if a server crashes today, how do you respond? How much time does it take to recover? Hosting takes this off the list of things an SMB owner should worry about, and solves this issue (among several others) with a predictable monthly investment. Remember, with the cloud, you don’t have to worry about constantly changing costs and managing upgrades.

If they are to succeed — and actually have time to spend with their families — SMB owners must eliminate administrative tasks and focus on the core competency of the business. The key to this is using cloud ERP technology to automate and streamline your tasks.

It’s been a few years now and your startup business is really starting to grow. Orders are coming in and several contracts with clients are taking off. So what’s holding you back? 

For many medium-sized companies, one of the biggest inhibitors to success isn’t finding the right employees, leadership, distributors or substantial cash flow. For the most part, you already have those important assets. What you lack is the right technology to manage the financial workings of the company.

QuickBooks and Excel have worked fine for a while, but in order to take your startup business to the next level, you need powerful financial accounting software. Here are eight ways that having the right software for your company can help your business take off. 

1. Mature financial accounting helps to reduce mistakes created by human error: Using QuickBooks or spreadsheets to run your growing business is a bad idea, especially when it comes to tracking information about customers. The problem with spreadsheets is the manual data entry they require. Juggling multiple sets of QuickBooks for several parts of the company (or companies) also can lead to serious mistakes. 
    
2. Powerful software provides insight about customers, payables and receivables: These tools are functionally mature and have built-in best practices, which provide greater insights about the company. What do you need to do today to prepare for next quarter or next year? The software is able to help you answer such questions. 
    
3. Financial accounting tools help with self-auditing: These tools create auditing transactions and a paper trail. Even for businesses that make only a couple of million dollars each year, auditing is highly important. Using spreadsheets to manage your financial information will create challenges for this effort. 
    
4. Powerful software is agile and scalable: Accounting software is able to grow with you in both transaction volume and functionality. It gives a company a long runway for growth. Spreadsheet systems will often cripple the ability for a business to go to the next level.
    
5. Accounting tools provide better access to a SQL Server Database: Leveraging a Microsoft SQL server is widely accepted because it provides access to your data anytime, anywhere. Spreadsheets, on the other hand, can become corrupted and must be manually consolidated. 
    
6. Mature financial software is able to add new features and modules that are specific for SMBs and are easy-to-upgrade: When you’re trying to grow fast, you don’t want to become bogged down in upgrades or be unable to do business because you’re too busy trying to get your system to work.
    
7. Accounting tools have the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO): That’s because these services include the cost of upgrades, maintenance and support. There is no need for additional IT personnel.
    
8. Some accounting tools are available with an online subscription model: Cloud-based tools are more manageable and require less capital because you’re less likely to have to write a huge check for something unexpected. Plus, when you have a manageable solution you’re able to budget against, you can avoid putting stress on cash flow or the ability to run the business. 

Give your company the wings to reach the next level and stop relying on primitive accounting tools. Having the right financial accounting software is the key to successful growth.

The faster you can bill your customers, the faster that revenue is available to use as working capital. This is why streamlining billing processes is critical for services companies.

But the reality is that many smaller companies struggle with this because they use slow, unreliable manual methods for tracking employee time, approvals, expenses and cash flow.

The best way for services companies to effectively manage project billing is to use a tool that improves accuracy, reduces the need for manual data entry and eliminates redundancy. These companies need quality financial accounting software.

Of the many ways these tools improve billing processes, here are the top four.

1. Improve accuracy: With software tools, companies can capture time spent on a project and related expenses the moment they occur. For businesses that charge by time and expenses, this is particularly important. If you miss logging even a few minutes of work — and this is easy to do when you’re tracking time after the fact — the lost revenue can really add up. For example, if you’re creating a financial report for $150 an hour to cover writing, design, editing, approvals and executional time, and a step that required two hours actually took four hours, you’ve lost $300. If you capture the time and expense immediately, you’ll be able to bill faster and get paid faster, improving your cash flow.
2. Determine profitability of jobs by tracking time and expenses at the project or job level: When you track all of your time and expenses for each project, you can easily go back to the software and see if you made any profit on a particular job. If you discover that you took a loss, you’ll need to find out where you spent too much time or too much money for expenses. With that information at your fingertips, you can adjust your price to cover any potential loss in the future. That’s the value of financial accounting software — you can figure out if something’s not profitable and fix it for future projects.
3. Personnel can eliminate the need for data re-entry and any collection of data on paper forms: Maintaining paper forms requires significant resources. It takes time print them out, fill them out and send them in. And that doesn’t count the cost of postage. It’s much more efficient to perform all record keeping online. By imputing data directly into the system, you also don’t have to pay someone to look at the form and retype it, which is a big waste of time.
4. Improve cash flow and speed up payments: Because time and expenses can be captured as they occur, billing doesn’t have to wait for these items to be updated in the system. As soon as the project is completed, the information about time and expenses will instantly be available for your accounts to send an invoice. And just like that, you’ve shortened your time to payment. Cash flow is better because no one is sitting around waiting for information. Accounting doesn’t have to call project managers for more information, only to discover they’ve gone on vacation for a week, letting even more time elapse between completing the project and billing for it. The sooner you send the bill, the better your chance of getting paid on time.

You need to bill your customers faster to sustain optimal cash flow. The key to this is eliminating manual processes for dealing with your bookkeeping by using financial accounting software. These systems allow you to streamline your operations, eliminate errors and improve productivity.

For many small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), longer invoicing cycles cause confusion, accuracy issues and serious cash flow problems.

Without powerful financial accounting software to rein in these complications, SMBs wrestle with maintaining the integrity of their bookkeeping. This struggle makes it difficult — if not impossible — to forecast or make sound business decisions without questioning the validity of the data.

Here are three key invoicing issues that SMBs frequently deal with, along with an explanation about how financial accounting software helps to eliminate these problems, effectively speeding up the cycle time and saving the company money.

1. Some SMBs store their invoicing information in more than one location: Keeping financial information on several spreadsheets or in more than one system makes it difficult to track anything. What money is coming in? How much money is actually in the bank to pay the bills? Is there enough to make payroll? Without storing all of this information in one location, or at least integrating the different systems that require financial data, it’s much too easy to make mistakes. That’s because these spreadsheets and systems are not communicating with each other. In other words, there’s a lack real-time updates between the systems.
   
   Let’s say, for example, someone in accounting pays a bill for $1,000. Unless that accountant logs that payment into the spreadsheet and all four of the company’s various systems, someone else in another department could go into one of these systems — which haven't been updated — and assume there’s $1,000 more in the bank than is the case. Without integration between the systems, the second person could easily bounce a check.
   
   With financial accounting software, all financial data is updated in one location and in real time.
    
2. Storing invoice data in multiple locations means your accountants must use time-consuming processes to maintain accuracy: This particular invoicing issue — which is related to the first problem listed above — happens when the accountants must invest significant effort to make the data on each of the different spreadsheets and systems produce the same truth.
   
   If the accountants have to update two spreadsheets and three systems for every transaction, they’ll spend far too much precious time juggling manual processes. Plus, should they forget to update even one of these locations, the accuracy of the bookkeeping goes out the window.
   
   A fully integrated financial accounting system doesn’t require any data to be tracked on spreadsheets. So when you correct the information in one system, it’s corrected across all of them. You don’t have need someone to enter it in system A, system B and system C. When a change is made in any of these systems, everything is updated. This ensures that no matter what system you’re in, you’ll receive the correct and most up-to-date information.
    
3. Longer invoice cycle times cause customers to take longer to make payments: Studies show the longer you wait to send a bill, the harder it is to receive full payment. By using disparate systems to invoice customers, the process takes longer and delays payments.
   
   Financial accounting softwareincludes fully integrated sales order processes. This means accountants have fewer steps and no manual processes to send an invoice, drastically speeding up delivery time and billing cycle time.

Here’s the bottom line: SMBs don’t have to endure the confusion and headaches that come with long invoicing cycles. Thanks to its integration abilities, quality financial accounting software is able to vastly improve the quality of your data, enabling business leaders to make better decisions.

Most small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) don’t produce what the industry would call “Big Data.” They just don’t aggregate that amount of information — yet, anyway.

But these smaller companies do have some data that’s able to offer them powerful insights into their business. So while SMBs don’t need mega software to process Big Data, they should use technology to produce powerful, actionable information. 

Here are six reasons for SMBs to jump ahead of the competition using cloud ERP dashboards. 

1. You can start small: Depending on your role at the company, you can pick anything to track. Take this finite data set, track it and then add more pieces. People often feel intimidated because data analytics seems so complex. They think they don’t have time to do it and feel like they’re already stressed out so much that it seems impossible. But starting small with your data analysis efforts makes it more manageable and removes that stress. 
    
2. The technology is easy to use: The nice thing about cloud ERP’s built-in dashboards is that they’re very simple to use. Configuration capabilities with this platform are tailored to the nontechnical user. In most ERP and CRM platforms, it’s quite simple to pull data into a graphical representation or chart that shows trend lines or other metrics. The ease of creating these in a modern-day financial accounting system is definitely a big benefit. 
    
3. It’s affordable: Not only does the cloud offer a user-friendly environment, but you’re not required to “break the bank or “sell the farm” to get these sophisticated platforms that offer dashboards. Subscription-based models provide consistency to your IT budget as well. 
    
4. You can try before you buy: It’s important to find a solution that offers a user-friendly, familiar environment, and one that’s able to integrate with other software application platforms you use to run your business. Unlike legacy ERP systems, where companies need to invest thousands of dollars immediately, cloud ERP tools are subscription-based. So, try it for a while and if it doesn’t work, you haven’t invested too much money or time. While the 30-day trial seems to be status quo for many software providers, others offer a more accelerated approach with trial environments already set up for companies to test data, post journal entries and run reports. In other words, it really only takes a few days before you know if the system is right for you.
    
5. Technology can help you gather information about marketing sources: For SMBs, it’s very important to track marketing and sales efforts, build KPIs around those areas of the business and then set goals. During this information-gathering process, determine your marketing sources and website referrals. Find out who’s coming to your site and where they’re coming from. It’s also a good idea to track keywords. 
    
6. Cloud ERP can monitor bounce rates and landing page data: These KPIs are critical for SMBs. Is the majority of your traffic coming in on the wrong landing page, or is your format and content impactful? You’ll want to track the effectiveness of your landing pages so you’re able to start critiquing your content. 

SMBs need to understand their data so they’re able to confidently measure their desired outcomes. That’s why it’s critical to track marketing trends, customer feedback and all financial information such as outstanding invoices, cash flow and inventory. The key to this effort is using cloud ERP dashboards to gain deeper insights into the business.