Tag: Azure

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Unlocking Insights in QuickBooks Enterprise Data

Businesses of all sizes are under pressure to turn their data into actionable intelligence.

As organizations adopt modern analytics platforms like Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft Fabric, the ability to unify, govern, and analyze data across systems is no longer optional—it’s foundational.

High-quality, connected data enables leaders to move beyond intuition and toward AI-assisted, insight-driven decision-making across the organization.

While enterprise companies have long relied on sophisticated ETL platforms, small and mid-sized businesses are often left behind. Many still depend on manual exports, spreadsheets, and point-to-point integrations that are brittle, time-consuming, and fundamentally incompatible with AI and advanced analytics. These approaches create data silos, limit scalability, and make it difficult to trust the results.

Mendelson Consulting and the Noobeh Cloud Services team help SMBs modernize their data foundations using Microsoft Fabric and Azure.

By deploying and supporting core business systems—such as QuickBooks Enterprise Desktop, Acctivate Inventory, Sage ERP, MISys Manufacturing, and others—within the Microsoft cloud ecosystem, we position application data for seamless ingestion into Fabric’s OneLake, enabling analytics, reporting, and AI workloads to work from a single, governed source of truth.

Modern data platforms like Fabric bring together data integration, engineering, warehousing, real-time analytics, and BI into a unified experience. This matters because growing businesses don’t just have more data; they have more types of data. Financial systems, inventory and manufacturing platforms, operational tools, and external data sources all need to be analyzed together to deliver meaningful insights and support AI models.

Even traditionally desktop-bound systems such as QuickBooks Enterprise can be extracted, structured, and integrated into a Fabric-backed data warehouse or lakehouse. Once centralized, this data can be enriched with operational and external data, exposed through Power BI, and used to power AI-driven insights, forecasting, and anomaly detection.

A successful analytics and AI strategy starts with the right data architecture.

Before businesses can leverage copilots, predictive models, or intelligent automation, they must first collect, organize, and govern their data at scale. Mendelson Consulting and Noobeh provide the expertise to build that foundation, helping businesses move from disconnected reporting to a future-ready, AI-enabled analytics platform.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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J

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PowerBI, Data Warehouses and Combining QuickBooks Enterprise Data with Other Data

Businesses of all types are looking for ways to discover more useful information hidden in their systems. With a desire to implement business intelligence tools such as Microsoft PowerBI, companies need the ability to combine and analyze data coming from a variety of sources. The data can help businesses inform their conclusions rather than leaving it up to “gut”, supporting decision making in all areas of the company.

The tools for exposing and combining data are many. Enterprise ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) products have been available for many years. When it comes to SMBs and the applications they utilize, the options aren’t quite as prevalent nor as powerful. In most cases, businesses are left to working with data exports and a bunch of linked Excel worksheets.

Noobeh understands that businesses need their data available for integration, analysis and reporting. Noobeh are experts in deploying SMB applications such as QuickBooks Enterprise desktop, Acctivate Inventory, Sage ERP, MISys Manufacturing and more, all on the Microsoft Azure platform, positioning the applications and their data perfectly for use in business analytics and data warehouses.

Data warehouses and data lakes are growing in popularity because there is simply too much disparate data present in any growing business to effectively analyze it one data silo at a time. The number and variety of data sources in a single small business can be far larger than the company realizes until it attempts to capture and report on that data.

Any approach to data warehousing should consider the potential number and variety of data sources involved. This is among the reasons for Noobeh electing to work with Microsoft Azure and PowerBI. The Azure platform provides the infrastructure services and platform tools to enable data connections needed, powering the data warehouse and exposing the data to PowerBI and other reporting and analysis tools.

Even QuickBooks Enterprise desktop data can be extracted into its own standalone data warehouse, connected to a broader data warehouse and then combined with other business data. When businesses can combine data from their various solutions, even those which may still be desktop-bound, the power of the information and intelligence contained in it can be revealed.

Whether the purpose is process improvement, performance monitoring, management reporting or combined operational intelligence, collecting and storing the data is the first step. Noobeh is there to help make it happen.

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J

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Timing is Everything: Security, AI and the Tech Stack in Restaurants

Running a restaurant or chain of restaurants is no easy task. Margins are often razor thin while customer demands continue to expand. Food service, like so many other industries, is struggling to bear the weight of change as labor shortages, rising costs, increasing cybersecurity risk, and demands for an improved customer experience push the industry to do more efficient and effective business. To keep up, businesses must learn more about what’s really going on in the operation, and to turn that insight into action. Timing is everything, and now is the right time to look at technology and platforms which will deliver greater insight and intelligence.

Whether it is leveraging commercial solutions available from partners or through building the tech stack by DIY, businesses in the restaurant industry are looking for innovative solutions to drive more profitability as well as increasing revenues leveraging resources they’re already paying for. AI is playing a big role in this evolution and businesses of all sizes, from the single-location entrepreneur to the multi-location franchise, are taking steps to incorporate it into the operation. Yet AI is all but useless if it doesn’t have the data to analyze.

An example of a transformational solution for the restaurant industry might be Curbit’s products, which include digital infrastructure and real-time AI capabilities that enable the software to analyze the data around service, real-time order progress, kitchen performance and guess sentiment. Microsoft’s Azure and Azure AI platform is key to Curbit’s innovation and development, enabling them to give the information which powers timely decision-making rather than offering only after-the-fact reports or outdated dashboard data.

In the category of maximizing the resources you’re already paying for, look at new services available through DoorDash, where lunch special and happy hour promotional offerings help businesses drive demand in off-peak times. Designed to increase revenues and drive greater sustainability, the service also reflects how restaurants are increasingly faced with the need to leverage online tools and mobile ordering to replace the reduction in foot traffic at brick and mortar location.

On the other side of that coin is information security and privacy and how businesses deal with the realities of cybersecurity threats and the need for greater levels of protection. Collecting more data for analysis means there is an increased risk of exposing private data if not adequately protected.

Considering high profile incidents like what happened with Panera, adequate cybersecurity protections must be part of the essential infrastructure that supports the operation. What was initially described as a systemwide technical outage at Panera was ultimately found to have been a cybersecurity breach exposing some employee personal data and the basis for a class action lawsuit filed by Panera employees.  

Whether it belongs to employees or customers or others, personal and private data must be protected. The cost of protecting the data is likely lower than the cost of dealing with a data breach and the potential resultant backlash, which is another part of the equation which must be considered.

Mendelson Consulting and Noobeh cloud services recognize how businesses need to modernize their systems, developing greater intelligence and resilience in the operation. We also recognize the importance of redundancy and agility in systems, and how quality managed cybersecurity solutions and services help guard against attack.

From ERP and specialized business solutions to platform, hosting and managed service, Mendelson Consulting and Noobeh cloud services can help your business meet the demands of doing business now and in the future.

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J