Category: data integration

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Fix the Data, Then Let AI Scale It

For SMB’s Using Solutions like QuickBooks Online, Service Titan or Jobber, High-Quality Data Is Critical for AI

Many small and mid-sized businesses now run on a combination of operational and financial tools. A typical stack might be QuickBooks Online (QBO) for accounting plus Service Titan or Jobber for field operations. Noobeh helps these businesses centralize their data, making it available for analysis and AI.

What we increasingly find is that various AI vendors promise AI-powered forecasting, automation and insights, but AI does not create clarity on its own. When data across these systems is inconsistent or poorly structured, AI simply automates confusion. To get real value from AI, SMBs must first ensure their data is accurate, aligned, and trustworthy.

The Reality of Disconnected SMB Systems

For these small businesses, each system serves a different purpose. QuickBooks tracks financial transactions, revenue, and expenses, where Service Titan or Jobber manages the jobs, customers, technicians and billing. There may be problems lurking in these various systems, and it is often revealed when the data is centralized and made ready for reporting and AI-enabled analytics.

These problems arise when the same business concepts—customers, jobs, revenue, costs—are represented differently in each system. Common examples of this include jobs marked as complete in Service Titan or Jobber but not fully invoiced in QBO, or customers duplicated or named differently across platforms, or any situation where manual spreadsheet adjustments are needed to make the reports work.

Imagine training your AI on this data. It isn’t going to resolve the data issues or repair them, it will repeat them at scale.

A Practical AI-Ready Data Path for SMBs

Before deploying AI features across QBO, Service Titan or Jobber, our consulting teams help our clients focus on making sure the data is ready by cleaning and standardizing QBO financial data and ensuring jobs, customers, and invoices align across systems. Our cloud services team leverages Azure platform services to create automation and eliminate manual spreadsheets and workarounds. Then we centralize the data in Microsoft Fabric, creating a single source of truth allowing reports to be validated prior to laying AI on top. This approach turns AI from a grand experiment into a dependable business tool.

Trust Is the Real Measure of AI Success

AI only delivers value when business owners, finance teams, and operators trust the outputs. That trust comes from seeing numbers that reconcile, reports that make sense, and predictions that align with reality. When this alignment occurs through high-quality data, AI forecasts become credible and insights are explainable. Decision-making improves consistently.

Fix the Data, Then Let AI Scale It

AI can help SMBs compete with much larger organizations—but only when it’s built on a strong data foundation. QuickBooks Online, Service Titan, Jobber, and Microsoft Fabric form a powerful stack, but their value depends on data quality and alignment.

For SMBs, the winning strategy is clear: fix the data first, then let AI scale what’s already working.

jm bunny feetMake Sense?

J

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Unlock KPIs and Improve Reporting with QuickBooks

It is surprising how many businesses still keep boxes of 3×5 ledger cards with customer and vendor information on them. More likely than the card box, the business may be storing its essential customer billing and vendor product information in the accounting system because that is the system they have.

These growing businesses need a better system to capture more information that delivers greater detail for accounting and reporting purposes. Just as likely, the business has other information it should and possibly could be capturing but isn’t sure about what steps to take next.

When details that inform a process are not part of an integrated system, it creates greater potential for lost or inaccurate data. The larger the volume, the more difficult and error-prone managing the information becomes.  

Business needs more detailed information about… everything.

Businesses may need to track time for payroll or jobs or both, job tracking may be a requirement, inventory tracking or more detailed inventory management may all be areas for greater attention. Mendelson Consulting can help develop these capabilities by making sure the business is using the right software, and then enabling the functionality needed to support the workflow and capture more and better data.

No data means no KPIs.

More and better data means more information to fuel KPI reporting. Key performance indicators can reflect operational performance in a variety of areas and may help identify where improvements are required.

Using data from the accounting and operational systems, businesses of all sizes measure their effectiveness using KPIs to evaluate the successes – or failures – of their processes and activities.

Mendelson Consulting’s team of QuickBooks Enterprise Experts and ERP consultants provide guidance, implementation and training, and report development to get beyond bookkeeping to proper processes that result in good accounting data. Mendelson’s cloud services team – Noobeh – sets it all up on Microsoft Azure, where data connectors, data warehouses and Microsoft Fabric weave it all together.

Whether just starting out or an enterprise or franchise expanding at a national or global level, we help businesses do more with their systems and software. We understand each stage of business and how to help our clients reach their next best level.

jm bunny feetMake sense?

J

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Transform Your Business with M365’s Integrated Accounting Solution

The Best Alternative to QuickBooks May Be Part of a Fully Integrated Framework You Already Use

When looking at the business accounting and finance systems available in the market – particularly considering those which have earned a level of market share – there are visible gaps – big ones.

This is clearly reflected in the numbers, where Intuit QuickBooks leads in the small business market but has no reciprocal in the midrange or enterprise markets.

QuickBooks fits into that early space where the business is just starting out, but QuickBooks Enterprise can expand to keep more detailed customer, vendor and item information. Yet there often comes a point where a business has requirements that extend beyond the ability of the QuickBooks software.

Sometimes the mere thought of change is so terrible, usually based on a bad initial implementation experience, that the business uses the software far beyond what it was built to handle. In other cases, add-on solutions are adopted which offer more in-depth or complex capabilities to handle the growing business requirements. Both options may prove to be temporary solutions, meeting most functional demands as long as business needs don’t change.

If a change is in order, it makes sense to consider the benefits of using tools built on a familiar platform that is essentially a framework for designing exactly the system the business needs now, and which has flexibility and scalability enough to change as the business changes.

We understand that an integrated framework can provide much more scalability and support than a standalone solution.

We also recognize that, in today’s modern business, creating workflow efficiency and enabling user productivity are paramount.

While many products calling themselves ERP systems offer a broad range of functionality, integration, and data management capability, they often dictate more to the business how it must operate rather than revealing how it might operate.

Instead, we believe every business should have the opportunity to adapt their business software to make it easier for users to accomplish their work effectively while delivering the data and insight to guide the operation forward.

The need is for an entire tech stack and framework, not simply an application.

Competing ERP systems on the market typically address more and increasingly complex business processes while scaling to support larger business sizes. But the cost and complexity of these products, coupled with poor or too-expensive implementation services, is often the barrier to their adoption and retention.

In most cases, there is no small business version of the big business software, so the upgrade path is unclear and problematic.

Given the huge gap between the “typical” small business system and the upper-levels in the enterprise applications catalogue – the transition from very small to very large software is not likely to be made in a single step. Yet businesses can reduce the number of migration steps in the lifecycle of the company by moving to a flexible platform that can adapt and scale with the operation.

There are three things every business does: communicate, produce information, and keep score.

Microsoft places at the top with the first two, providing email and other communication tools used by businesses of all sizes around the globe, and creating the Microsoft Office family of productivity tools recognized and used by just about everyone.

In the third spot, keeping score, Intuit QuickBooks remains the clear winner. But when the business needs something beyond QuickBooks, or desires to have a solution that fits better, and maybe even integrates into their current M365 working environment, we can introduce the stakeholders to M365 Dynamics Business Central.

Business Central is part of the Microsoft 365 family of products.

Business Central is part of the Microsoft 365 family of products and is integrated with Microsoft Outlook directly, as well as the rest of the family of applications.

It is all able to be connected to the Microsoft Fabric, which weaves together the solutions and services that drive business operations around the globe.

Microsoft has the framework to provide the entire stack of applications, services and technologies working seamlessly together to deliver functionality and process support to fit the business and how it works.

When a siloed financial solution no longer supports the business requirement, or as operations become unworkable due to software that no longer fits the needs, connect with the experts at Mendelson Consulting to see what options are available.

There is never just one way to solve a problem, but there is usually a best way.

jm bunny feetMake sense?

J

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Software and the Business Lifecycle

Every year, roughly 4.5 million US small businesses are started. The fuel which drives the American economy, small businesses account for more than 99% of all businesses in the US. And job creation happens in small business, which means growth also happens here. Growth happens at every stage of a business if the business is moving forward. From just starting out to achieving large enterprise status, the lifecycle of a business carries with it a multitude of learning moments.

As businesses implement solutions to manage accounting and operational needs, there is often less consideration for the agility of the solution to meet changing and expanding business needs than there is for affordability and the immediacy of the implementation. Small business owners frequently adopt solutions because they fit the needs now, not understanding what may happen when the business outgrows the solution. Sometimes a product meets the functionality requirements quite nicely yet can’t handle the increasing volume. These are among the issues facing growing businesses and forcing stakeholders to make more buying decisions regarding the software supporting the operation.

Each stage of a business where functional or process requirements change drives to another software buying decision. This buying decision is most often met with angst, as considerations include not only cost, but data conversion vs re-loading, new process or system design and setup, user training, proofing the system (running parallel?) and a host of other issues, not the least of which is the business benefit to be derived.

If information is power, too many businesses are losing that power when they migrate from one software product to another.

Businesses often lose valuable historical information by leaving transactional and other detail data behind when they change from one business software system to another.  This should be an area of focus and key discussion point when any change to systems is considered.  After all, the insight and business intelligence gathered over the years was likely instrumental in helping the small business grow to become a successful big business and will continue to be important for years to come.

Maximizing a return on investment is crucial with any business expenditure, whether it is in people, processes or systems.

The selection of software to support the operation plays a most important role in finding that value return, as the software is what empowers the people, guides the processes and drives the systems’ foundation. Knowing the crucial positioning of the software selection in supporting business growth and recognizing that future changes may risk loss of valuable business intelligence, the importance of the initial selection becomes that much greater.

Mendelson Consulting will help you review your business and processes, building an understanding of what functionality needs to be supported and how the business intends to operate. For businesses looking to take the next step, we help identify where automation can improve efficiency and productivity. With that understanding, we help business owners and stakeholders navigate through the overwhelming landscape of solutions and approaches to find the right one for your business.

At every step and stage of business growth, Mendelson Consulting looks ahead to what’s next, helping our clients plan for the future.

While we don’t have a crystal ball, our experience coupled with industry and product knowledge allows us to make recommendations which minimize loss of valuable business intelligence while maximizing the ROI of the software which it informs.

jm bunny feetMake Sense?

J

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Write it Once – The Value of Integration

It’s amazing how much time and energy continues to be spent on duplicate data entry and re-keying information generated by one system into another.  Human-based data entry is prone to errors, takes time, and carries with it the burdens of employee costs and resources.  It is a problem that businesses of all types have battled for years even though enabling solutions have been around for a while. 

Methods of integrating applications and data have existed for quite some time, and in recent years these methods have expanded to include a wide variety of platforms and more open standards-based approaches.  Even in the small business world, business owners using traditionally limited software products can enjoy sophisticated extensions and integration of their applications and business data.

To provide a simple example of the problem: when an individual writes a check, that check must be recorded for several purposes including the recording of the cost or expense as well as the reduction of funds in the bank account.  When a product is sold to a customer, inventory is relieved, sales are increased, accounts receivable or cash is increased, costs of goods sold are experienced, and customer activity is captured.  All of this information must be recorded, and the activity accounted for throughout the financial and operational systems and can represent a tremendous burden if not automated. This also means that data exists in a variety of places, increasing the challenges of information collecting and reporting.

 Cloud-based integration and infrastructure services such as DBSync and Microsoft Azure enable seamless collection, transformation, aggregation and storage of business data. Whether linking accounting with sales CRM or pushing financial and operational data to an Azure data warehouse for analytics, Noobeh and DBSync provide the data engine and the infrastructure to put it all together.

A small business owner’s situation offers a direct illustration. He sells computer parts through an ecommerce website.  Orders from this website are emailed to his order operators, who then turn around and re-key the orders into their accounting system where the inventory is also tracked.  Because of the increasing number of sales orders and product purchase orders to enter on a regular basis, there were three operators working in the department responsible for making sure website orders make it into the accounting system. Orders were frequently missed or misplaced, entry errors caused problems in accounting and product delivery, customer satisfaction went down, and the cost of handling web orders was increasing.

By implementing a single software solution, the company was able to not just address the current problem, but was set up to seamlessly increase business without increasing headcount. The solution was a system which takes transaction data from the ecommerce system and imports it into the accounting/ERP system. This single step allowed the business to reduce and redirect personnel costs, improve accuracy and timeliness of data entry, and increase customer satisfaction as well as overall business performance.

In even a small company, one piece of information may be used in a variety of ways and in a variety of systems. This complexity is found in simple business models as well as larger and more complex enterprises, revealing the value of integration solutions and automation tools at every level of operation.

Mendelson Consulting and Noobeh cloud services recognize that every business needs the right information at the right time to operate effectively. Our expert teams help businesses implement the solutions which bring business data together, empowering workers to be more productive and giving stakeholders the decision-support tools they need.

jm bunny feetMake Sense?

J

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Cloud and Digital are Transforming Business

Businesses, whether small or large, must change how they operate. They need to find ways to leverage the technologies and influences shaping society. Transformation is essential for companies to face today’s rapidly changing environment and embrace the opportunities it provides. This means mapping out a strategy and prioritizing activities which will fundamentally shift the operation towards greater intelligence and agility.

Digital transformation is about changing how businesses operate at a foundational level. It involves transforming processes and capabilities. This is done to leverage digital technologies across all strata of the business. 

Change in business is an ongoing process and not a one-time activity.

Transformational change is enabled in large part by cloud technologies. Cloud computing solutions are in high demand. They allow businesses to scale easily and affordably. They also provide the mobility and remote access that workers require. 

More fundamentally, cloud computing services improve collaboration by users. They also enhance collaboration by applications. This improvement enables seamless integration of functionality and data from various sources.

Microsoft Azure platform provides infrastructure and services previously available only to larger businesses and enterprise IT departments. Noobeh, Mendelson’s cloud services team, uses Microsoft Azure to deliver SQL data warehouses for structured data. It provides data lakes for the storage of unstructured and different data types. The Azure Data Factory and Microsoft Fabric are used to transport, transform, and weave it all together.

Converged wired and wireless networks and smarter telephony solutions deliver location and usage data that were not previously available to most IT departments. Today’s imaging technology can easily reduce a picture to searchable and identifiable metadata. The introduction of IoT brings an even further integration of data from virtual and physical realms. This enhances potentials for intelligence. It also improves understanding and interaction.

Mendelson Consulting recognizes that true transformation is guided by the vision and objective but is supported through operational efforts.

The collection of data for inspection and analysis is the first requirement. Only through the proper establishment of processes and workflow is the required information developed.

Mendelson Consulting partners with businesses to define the scope and strategy for advancing into the digital future. They take fundamental steps to introduce greater agility in platforms and services. These platforms and services support an ever-changing business environment. They also ensure visibility, which drives greater business intelligence and operational insight.

jm bunny feetMake Sense?

J