Tag: document management

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Improve Processes and Profit More

Reducing paper, streamlining the work and producing better financial results

Article 2 in 4-part series

When it comes to providing solutions that help small businesses manage their finances and other information, Intuit QuickBooks is typically the first choice. This decision usually occurs just after the business determines what sort of productivity and messaging (email/voice) solutions will be used, and more often right after the first revenues are earned which need to be accounted for.

For most small businesses, having a copy of QuickBooks is how the company tracks the money.

What’s interesting is that most of these small businesses really operate outside of the financial application, doing the actual deliverable work using some other type of solution. Finding a way to support the work performed in the business and then having all that information flow through to the accounting system isn’t always easy.

On the one hand there are the people, resources and activities which make up the work, but there are payroll, billing, expenses and cash management activities that result from all that work. Tracking it all in a meaningful and affordable way was exactly the challenge that Jeff and Donovan Sachs faced with their business, Alembic Computer Services, Inc.

Alembic Computer Services is among those small businesses that use QuickBooks for financial management but not to actually support the wide variety of processes that make up the business.

ACSI, also known as the QB Resource Center, sells QuickBooks software and provides custom development and implementation services to customers throughout the US. The team at ACSI recognizes the benefits of applying the right technology and applications to any particular task, and embraces the same philosophy and working models internally that they recommend to their forward thinking clients.

The business of software development and implementation isn’t simple, and it is founded in the delivery of professional consulting and development services. Where some professional service offerings may be standardized to the point of enabling “templated” production and performance, custom software configuration and development requires that each project be viewed individually in order to fully understand the requirements and deliverables.

Where the actual production requirements of the project may be unique, the processes for guiding the flow of work through the business are highly consistent and well understood.

Providing consulting and implementation support in addition to custom development has introduced Alembic Computer Services to a wide variety of businesses and working models.  Because QuickBooks software is recognized as a fundamental tool for most small companies, delivering guidance and support to QuickBooks customers became a solid foundation for discovering where customization or other software implementations were required in order to fully address the business needs of their clients.

What became apparent to ACSI while working with these vastly different organizations was that there were similarities in the fundamental workflows and information management processes, and that these processes were not being adequately supported by any of the accounting or ERP systems. Even more than with software customization and development, ACSI recognizes the potential for helping a wide range of businesses with improvements that could be made by implementing standardized workflow and business process support systems.

The real basis for delivering work at Alembic Computer Services is the team that makes up the company. 

Fully leveraging the capabilities of each developer and supporting staff member is essential to creating and retaining profitability, which places employee time, resource and project management as the absolute top priorities. Managing the scope of information necessary to support each consulting or development project is no small task, nor is managing the time and activities of a team of developers and other employees, and flowing all of that data through to scheduling, payroll and billing systems.

To meet these internal requirements as well as establishing a basis for expanding high value service offerings to clients, Alembic Computer Services selected Exact Synergy Enterprise, a business management solution from the Dutch software company Exact (www.exact.com).

“For over 35 years, the tag line at Alembic has been ‘Productivity by Design’. It is our mission to improve the businesses of our clients by providing quality software solutions and the highest level of customer service. Exact Synergy Enterprise provides us with a unique tool that enables us to help almost any business achieve a greater level of productivity. With our many years of experience with Synergy, we are very excited to be the ones to introduce this special product to the QuickBooks community.”

Alembic Computer Services stands out among the numbers of consultants and resellers working with Synergy, largely due to the focus on bringing the value and power of Synergy Enterprise into the QuickBooks user space. 

While there are other partners selling ERP products that integrate with Synergy, Alembic Computer Services works primarily with QuickBooks Enterprise customers who need flexible workflow and business process management support that can’t be handled with QB alone or by other solutions in the QB marketplace.

“The Exact partner community has a rich history of enabling integration with other small and mid-size financial applications, giving companies the ability to modernize the business processes surrounding financial data that is so important to them. We strongly support what firms like Alembic Computer Services are doing to marry Synergy Enterprise with QuickBooks” says Philip Bini, Director for Exact Americas.

“Exact is excited to see advisors like Alembic Computer Services apply their passion for Synergy Enterprise by creating a business management blueprint for businesses that use QuickBooks for their accounting needs. Exact Synergy Enterprise allows business users to interact on their business transactions in a collaborative environment.  As a result, the integration between Synergy and QuickBooks makes the complete solution more relevant and widely accessible to QuickBooks ProAdvisors, reseller communities and the QuickBooks customer base at large. It really is an exciting time for the entire QuickBooks market to be introduced to Exact Synergy Enterprise.”

Within Synergy Enterprise, the people, actions and activities, and business resources are all tracked in order to inform other applications and processes which support the business and operation. 

By centering the Synergy workflow solution in the business applications infrastructure and utilizing its flexible and extensible framework to embrace the full realm of business activities, Alembic Computer Services is able to automate and fully streamline processes that were previously very time-consuming and which did nothing to directly support or improve business profitability.

In order to create the most efficient and high performance approach possible, Alembic Computer Services knew they wanted a solution which natively addressed standard business needs like electronic document management, customer relationship and personnel management, but which could also be custom configured to handle their development and project-related workflows at a very detailed level.

While Jeff and Donovan are developers by profession, there was little interest in embarking on a large customization project to support their own business needs, so any solution would have to provide not only strong essential functionality right out of the box, but should allow for a great deal of customization of the solution without coding. Synergy delivered on those capabilities richly.

Using a standards-based approach to framing the activities and guided by logic infused into the Synergy system, Alembic Computer Services created their own professional project management and time and billing system within Synergy that directly and efficiently addresses the specific tasks, activities, resources and services involved in any given customer project. Storing not just customer and baseline project information, the system tracks every document, activity, research item and production element which associates to the performance of the tasks or which is provided through guided workflow.

Further, by integrating the project, time and resource data with their QuickBooks financials, the company was able to create an end-to-end solution which addresses the wide array of activities involved in running the business, increasing efficiency and effectiveness in back-office operations as well as those in front. This benefit was among those most apparent to Alembic Computer Services, and was the fuel behind the development of the integration between QuickBooks and Synergy.

Unaccounted for time or resources, incomplete task performance, and undocumented project activities leads to inconsistent performance and lower profits.

Integrated workflows and the elimination of double-entry ensures greater accuracy in payroll, billing and other related processes, allowing ACSI personnel and business managers to more efficiently perform their required tasks, reducing friction and smoothing performance to a consistent and predictable flow.

For the project managers at Alembic Computer Services and the QB Resource Center, the big benefit of Synergy is that the developers know what projects are assigned to them at all times and can view exactly what tasks must be performed and when. For owners Jeff and Donovan Sachs, the confidence comes from knowing that every business process structured and defined, that the processes will be handled in a complete and timely manner, that all documentation and data is sufficiently collected and filed, and that their systems have the agility and power to carry the business well into the future.

Make Sense?

J

 

Read the Introduction: Fringe to Foundation: Aligning Business Goals and Lifting Business Performance through Digital Workflows

Article 1: Every Business Deserves a Chance to be Better

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Every Business Deserves a Chance to Be Better

Amazon's Domes

Article 1 in 4-part series

Every business owner or manager wants to see growth in revenue and profits, and sustaining a high level of performance requires that the business operate smoothly and without breakage or imbalance. When workers know their jobs and do them well, and when workload performance is regular and timely, the business operation glides.

Yet few organizations fully understand how all of their processes weave together to form the operation, or how changes in workloads and task performance will impact the bottom line. Growing or shrinking workloads, supply chain interruptions and other conditions influence the flow of work in the business, which is why a clear understanding of the workflows and the dynamics of the processes they connect is so essential.

It really comes down to a “degrees of success” question: how much better could the business be?

It is said that the only constant is change, and businesses must find a way to effectively and cost-efficiently meet changing demands and conditions in order to survive.  What frustrates many business owners is that change is generally disruptive to the business, representing a significant challenge when it comes to the development of internal processes, procedures and the workflows which bind them.   At issue is the understanding that proven, structured and repeatable processes help to improve efficiency, yet changing conditions often require changes to these processes.

Creating agility and sustainable value in the organization suggests that guidance for workers, processes and controls, business and system policies, activities and agents and resources all be brought together to form a complete picture of the business and operation.  With this in hand, the business is better able to communicate to each member what is expected of them and when, and to make adjustment or enhancements to how the work flows in order keep moving toward the stated goal.

Informed workflows guide smarter processes, and smarter businesses are more resilient.

Smarter business is built from knowledge and understanding not just of the systems and actors in the enterprise, but of the higher level goals motivating the activity.  In a global economy, where competitive pressures are increasing every day for even the smallest of businesses, making process improvements and creating sustainability become as much a focus for the business as growth once was.

Developing strategies for retaining profit margins, improving cash flows, solidifying supply chains and streamlining operational processes is essential when designing the business to handle the stresses of a changing economy. The foundations of such strategies are the people, processes and knowledge in the business, and the workflows which tie them together into a cohesive, high performance enterprise.

What comes as a surprise to many businesses is that their efforts to structure the work – defining the activities which string together to form the process, or connecting the processes in a workflow – often reveals why certain things are done the way they are. Where process and workflow modeling most frequently addresses the “what” and “how” of the business, less often is the “why” question directly approached. The discovery of “why” is sometimes a revelation which comes unexpectedly, providing insight into areas of the business where change could be made, leading to improved process performance and moving the operation closer reaching its goals.

With the popularity and proliferation of online applications and cloud computing, many businesses have transformed how they manage activities, people and resources.

The adoption of individual apps to support specific business activities and processes is increasing, where solutions are often loosely connected, integrating or syncing only selected data used for a particular purpose.  The Internet-connected marketplace has introduced both opportunity and challenge for businesses of all sizes, and much of the focus has been placed on the management and control of digital documents and data.

Centralized electronic document management has been commonly used in business for many years, yet has not always been viewed as an essential technology to apply in the context of organizing and structuring the workflows in the business.

Particularly in situations where apps and activities are not always directly connected to their dependent or resultant processes, electronic document management and integration of external data elements become critical to structuring the flow of work.

In structuring workflows and documents systems which support the various business processes, the organization will find that it has developed the means to collect and memorialize the business and operational knowledge owned only by individuals in the business.

Gathering together the “tribal knowledge” from users in the business – investing the learning and experience of individuals into the DNA of the business processes and organization of work– is an essential element in crafting meaningful workflows which capture the human-based considerations that are often overlooked.

When individual knowledge becomes business knowledge and is turned into documents, systems and structured processes which guide the operation, results are able to be reproduced more consistently and reliance upon individuals is reduced significantly.

Business processes are now considered to be corporate assets which require consistent and ongoing management and review.

Because business is not stagnant, processes and workflows will necessarily evolve as conditions change. Managing these processes and the workflows which attach them is an iterative process that must be actively pursued in order to ensure that evolving approaches don’t fail to support higher level business objectives.

While an electronic document management solution may address many of the challenges involved in working with large volumes and varieties of documents and data, there are few DM products on the market which can approach the full realm of business workflows and how they are impacted by business or data-driven events or by the availability of people or resources to facilitate the process.

Businesses must not only structure their documents and data, but also their workflows necessary to support the various processes and should seek to normalize those workflows as much as possible. Through a standards-based approach to workflow development, businesses are able to develop a consistent and methodical approach to the work which results in more predictable and consistent outcomes.

The workflow “engine” is truly the workhorse in the business, connecting the people, activities and information required to fulfill each required task.

Fueled by stored documents, data and business policy, workflows inform the organization on the effectiveness of applied resources, events and agents. Not only providing a basis for measuring process effectiveness, structuring all workflows in the business often reveals why certain previously unrecognized processes occur.

Sometimes referred to as “process mining”, activity monitoring and regular workflow and process evaluation allows the business to develop greater understanding of the rationale it must apply to detect or diagnose processes which deviate from the desired path and cause the business to track away from its strategic goals.

Exact Synergy is the workflow engine which powers global businesses and drives performance.

The business fundamental framework of Synergy allows organizations to structure the entire realm of business activities and provide digital workflows and automation to enhance productivity and ensure accuracy at every step. The core of Synergy connects and tracks the entities, transactions and documents associated with every aspect of the business.

Recognizing that business happens with people, systems and processes, Synergy is the tool organizations use to describe the various entities, actions and requests involved in performing the business, guiding process performance with meaningful workflows which clearly communicate to each participant what is expected from them, when it is expected, and even how to perform.

While essential business needs are met with the initial installation, Synergy is extensively configurable and customizable, considering all areas of the enterprise and offering functionality to support a vast array of requirements.  A business may use the solution in a limited capacity, guiding certain HR and other back-office functions, or it can be applied to the entire business and operation, spanning departments and locations, joining processes and acquiring data which might otherwise remain unmanaged and disconnected.

Synergy helps businesses keep actions and decisions aligned, sharpening the competitive edge.

Synergy’s framework combines entity management, process governance and strict security and data controls with a presentation which allows for everyone in the business to view and manage their workloads quickly and directly. Synergy provides each user with the information they need to get their job done without complication or interference, providing the views and access to increase process effectiveness and supporting the most efficient flow of work through the business.

If actions and decisions inside a company aren’t aligned, processes are disrupted and the competitive edge gets lost. With a more intelligent approach to enabling and managing the work flowing through the enterprise, businesses can be smarter and introduce new value for those involved with them.

Make Sense?

J

Read the Introduction: Fringe to Foundation: Aligning Business Goals and Lifting Business Performance through Digital Workflows

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Servicing Fundamentals: Are Vertical Software Products Becoming Obsolete?

Servicing Fundamentals: Are Vertical Software Products Becoming Obsolete?

As mobility and the Internet continue to drive changes in how people interact with technology and each other, businesses are finding that the compelling arguments presented by many cloud service providers are tough to ignore.  Anytime/anywhere/anymode access to business applications and data, focusing on core business issues and outsourcing non-core processes, streamlining and connecting processes to create efficiency and predictability in operations – these are the benefits which “connected” and cloud technology models are delivering.  Cost efficiencies in supporting business operations are also being experienced, as the outsource IT solution often provides fault tolerance, scalability and performance at cost and service levels difficult to achieve with in-house systems and personnel.  The scale economies of the cloud cannot be argued with, and it is this cost-efficient and effective provisioning of fundamental business services to users that is increasingly pressuring vertical software makers to either address the market with more fundamentally useful tools incorporated into their products or risk losing users to generalized and commonly used solutions.

Consider that many accounting solutions today have introduced the ability to connect document files to transactions.  It makes sense, and provides a basic capability for accounting/bookkeeping which is necessary.  On the other hand, what happens to the rest of the documents used in the business – the ones that aren’t associated with a financial transaction?  And, if there isn’t mobile access to the accounting system, how are those attached documents made available to remote users and mobile devices? Another thing to think about is the fact that users now have the ability to interact with various files and applications natively on mobile devices, as opposed to having specialized applications to access limited data sets.  File sharing applications and productivity tools are widely used by these mobile users, as they provide the flexibility to seamlessly access files regardless of device or location.  This fundamental benefit of simple and affordable information access, storage and sharing is proving the value of a generalized approach to enabling users and helps to explain why the operating and file systems were the previous “killer apps” in computing technology.  The question for vertical software developers now is whether or not they can effectively incorporate these popular services into their solution, or if the solution must limit its focus on addressing only the truly unique elements of the business rather than the general or fundamental ones.

A great discussion on the subject is an article on PrismLegal.com where author Ron Friedmann describes his similar question in the context of Box.com increasing use in law office environments and how this impacts the legal software market.

More generally, it should cause us to question the future of legal market specific software. I understand the need for customized software; for example, I am currently involved with developing and deploying legal project management software (Cael LPM™ by Elevate Services). But the market – both customers and vendors – must balance the need to meet legal specific requirements with economics and scale.

Box and other cloud providers can potentially sell millions of seats to thousands of organizations. Contrast that enormous reach, which spreads development cost over so many users, with legal market scale. The large law firm market has no more than 400 organizations and 500,000 seats. The development and service cost per user is much higher. Nonetheless, many companies have prospered creating highly customized software for the legal market. In the age of cloud and economies of scale, however, will those economics still be so favorable?

There will always be a place for vertical and industry-specific solutions of certain types, but there is an increasingly large population of businesses which have adopted generalized solutions to address fundamental business requirements, and users (and solution providers) are recognizing that these essential solutions are meeting the majority of the business requirement without specialization (and additional cost) required.

jmbunnyfeetMake Sense?

J

Read more about Cloud Computing for Small Business: It’s All About 3 Apps

Read about why Lawyer Immunity from Delivering Customer Value is No More

Read about The Line in the Sand: Your RPO (Recovery Point Objective)

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Innovation and Disruption: Challenging the Professional Accountant’s Value

Innovation and Disruption: Challenging the Professional Accountant’s Value

It’s tough, being a professional accountant or bookkeeper for small businesses and it’s not getting any easier.  Yes, there have always been challenges to the relationship, particularly with the perceived value of performing the work being fairly low yet the value of the work product being quite high. But professionals are facing new competition – competition in more areas and delivered in more ways – than ever before.  This competition and the advantage it often represents is founded in the disruption of traditional IT created through cloud computing services, and the innovative use of technology, people and process to craft entirely new service models.  Accounting professionals must recognize and leverage these elements to improve client service levels and differentiate offerings, or they risk losing revenue, business value, and relevance to their clients and markets.

Accounting and finance technology has, for many years, been necessarily focused on managing the ever-increasing volume of paper-based information.  This paperwork provided the basis for financial transactions and had to be collected, translated and normalized, keyed into the system as data, and finally summarized for various reporting purposes.  It makes sense that the simple fact of “document and paper handling logistics” have resulted in a variety of approaches and computerized tools designed to deal with all that paper. The “reality of paper” is firmly entrenched in business, and has been for so long that accounting solutions and financial systems have been developed to make working with supporting documents easier, yet continue to approach the use of those documents simply as support for data entered after-the-fact.

But there are new participants in the world of small business accounting and bookkeeping, and this entirely new generation of solutions does not carry with them the weight of years of paperwork and paper-based processes.  Rather, this generation of online application solutions is developed with innovation in mind, and is seeking to develop a new approach to what are generally referred to as “best practices” for accounting for small business.  Bear in mind that the term “best practices” describes something well-known and

There are two very important aspects of these “new generation” solutions and the services they provide, and which represent the challenge to the old rules of doing business.  Based on early adoption and usage of many of these solutions, they will be successful.  How they fit into the profile of today’s accounting or bookkeeping practice remains to be fully exposed.

1.  Real-time information

It was always broke, and now we can fix it.  When most of the business and accounting information was paper based, it meant that accounting and bookkeeping would always be performed after-the-fact.  It takes time to gather the information, and even more time to organize it and turn it into useful digital data.  The new approach is not to provide a better way to manage paper or to turn it into data more quickly.  The disruptive and innovative approach introduced is the belief that information should originate as data and not as a document.

2.  Consumer-oriented service

DIY is fundamental to many of today’s small business solutions and services.  While the term Software as a Service describes how software and systems are being sold in the form of subscription services, the reality of many of these solutions is Service through Software, where the work product is the service rather than the software and systems (and people) performing it. Customers subscribe to a supporting business service, and it’s delivered through a software-based interface. The innovation delivered is the simplicity and affordability of getting the work done for the business owner, and the disruption is the further-diminished perceived value of the accounting or bookkeeping professional and the fundamental services they provide.

Accounting and bookkeeping service providers have difficult decisions to make regarding how they will address these very immediate challenges to the value of the services they provide.  Professionals who learn to understand and appropriately select and apply this new generation of technology-supported services are likely to find that the competencies they develop – which represent differentiation – serve to make them as valuable to their own enterprises as those of their clients.

Make Sense?

J

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Smarter Online Document Vaults: Document Management for QuickBooks, Microsoft Office and more

Smarter Online Document Vaults

Document Management for QuickBooks, Microsoft Office and more

Document management used to be just about storing and retrieving files.  Being able to easily store document images and other files, and then quickly finding them when you need them, is an important aspect of business record keeping.  If you are an accounting or bookkeeping professional offering outsourced services to clients, having a secure way to store and manage client document files from a variety of sources is key to developing workflows and standardizing service delivery.   Invoices, bills, bank statements, and all the other paperwork which is generated by various business processes must be captured, accounted for, and retained for future reference and documentation support.  With all of this going on, having a secure and easy way to handle all that paper and computer-generated reporting is really important.

Using an electronic document management system isn’t really that much different from dealing with paper filing systems, at least in terms of the process.  You obtain the document, you translate it into a journal entry or transaction, and then you file the document away for later use.  The difference is simply that the document becomes digital image data and is stored electronically, instead of keeping the paper file around.   And, the earlier in the process where you can turn paper documents into digital images, the better, because it reduces the need for “paper-based” processes which take more time and resources, and which may introduce risk of information loss or damage.

In an outsourced bookkeeping arrangement, for example, allowing the client to convert paper to image files is highly desirable as it prevents the outsourcer from having to travel to client offices to obtain paperwork, and reduces the time involved either with traveling to and from client locations or time spent waiting for mailed information to arrive.  For the client to handle this process willingly, or with any frequency, tools which are simple to understand and use must be supplied.   Scanning a document, saving it to the hard drive, and then trying to find the file to upload later to an accountant “portal” is not a simple process and it is not efficient.  If the user is somewhat nontechnical (most business owners?), or if there is a lot of paperwork to scan and upload, that multi-step process just won’t work for the client.

SmartVault, a solution for QuickBooks-connected and general purpose document management, has an elegant solution to the problem, and it’s called the “InBox”.   Just like the inbox on your desk, the SmartVault InBox is where new documents arrive to be processed. The ingenious part is that the InBox is a little applet that gets installed on the client workstation, and provides them with a very simple way to scan files directly to SmartVault.  The accountant or bookkeeper then accesses the client files from the inbox and processes and/or attaches them to QuickBooks transactions as required.  The client has only to perform the simple task of telling the SmartVault InBox app to obtain documents fed into the scanner.  No local file saving and retrieval required.  For the accountant or bookkeeper, the inbox is the first stop in the workflow, and is the place they go to obtain whatever information the client has provided.  The SmartVault InBox can also be used to return files easily and securely to clients, bypassing the need to have the client access and log in to a website in order to get the files (but a website portal is also part of the system, just in case the client prefers this method).  If providing seamless service and easy to follow procedures describes how you work with your clients, then SmartVault could become a key element in your service delivery.

Affordability and ease of use are important factors to consider when looking for document management solutions for small businesses.  In addition, having the ability to store documents from popular small business applications allows users to centrally store and manage all their business documents and files, not just those related to accounting.  When users wear many “hats” in the business, and need access to a variety of document types, a centralized filing system is an absolute necessity.  SmartVault addresses this by providing direct integration with Microsoft Outlook, Results CRM, and a variety of other popular small business solutions.

Oriented for use by small businesses and the accountants and bookkeepers who serve them, SmartVault delivers a surprisingly powerful solution which addresses the variety of document storage, attachment and retrieval requirements of most businesses, coupled with the workflow tools and a unique QuickBooks integration capability to specifically address the needs of accounting and finance department users.  You know you need to work smarter and not harder, so your document vault should be smarter, too.

Make Sense?

J