Tuesday, July 31, 2007

What’s Important?

When selecting a financial system today what applications within the system are the most important?  Where is your greatest need?  Where is your maximum exposure?

The goal of all financial systems should be to manage the company’s money and provide the required reporting for governments, banking, and internal management.  Certain applications should provide the tools and safeguards against making mistakes that could expose you to government and civil legal situations.

Accounts Payable needs to provide taxing authorities with the payment information that you made to your vendors.  Accounts Receivable needs to interface to your operational systems (ERP, etc.), as it is basically your “cash register.” Fixed Assets and Customer Management also come into play.  Having said all that, clearly the most important applications are Payroll-Human Resources and General Ledger.

Payroll and H/R are extremely important!  There are more blogs, chatrooms, and bulletin boards devoted to these applications.  Your company may face all kinds of legal and regulatory issues if these systems don’t provide you with the tools that you need! 

• Payroll must be timely and accurate.  The Payroll Department needs to have the ability to formulate any payment, voluntary deduction, or taxation that may occur. 

• H/R needs a close integration with Payroll to manage employee benefits. 

General Ledger is the “collecting pot” where everything financial comes together.  Without flexible, open-ended data collection, statistical information, and a powerful report generator, this application is worthless as a management tool.  Data needs to be stored without Date Restrictions (i.e., “Buckets”)! 

Your company needs to know its true financial status in a timely manner to determine where improvements can be made to make the bottom line better.

If you have any doubts about these applications in your current system, go look for a new one.  The cost of conversion is nothing compared to the cost of failure of one of these systems!  Don’t select a new system unless it addresses these needs!

Sunday, July 22, 2007

$5 Fixes

I have a wish list of 5 things I would like to see added to current Financial Applications.  They’re not that difficult (at least to the end-user’s way of thinking), and I call them, “$5 Fixes.” I realize they would take time to implement, and the impact on the system’s selling price would be nil.  However, the impact of these features for the end-user would be a day-to-day revelation!

Here they are:

Fix #1:  A visual-lock message on a record that is being modified by another user BEFORE you start to edit that same record, instead of when you try to write your edited record back to the file.

Fix #2:  A real-time update when someone has changed a record that you are currently viewing, so that your screen automatically reflects the changed information without you having to refresh the screen.

Fix #3:  Allow the end-user to build and save their own search filters.  This feature alone will save considerable time on daily, repetitive operations.

Fix #4:  Save answers to dialog questions for routine reporting and procedure functions.  Why enter the same information every time you run a routine report or update files?  Make sure you can also edit the dialog as needed when you run them.

Fix #5:  Accurate timestamps on ALL records.  If you have ever had to go back and reconstruct what someone did, this feature will save hours and help to analyze what happened.

Fix #6:  Okay, I lied.  There are at least 6 things I want changed.  Give the application administrator “column-level security” (read/write on each field in a record).  Some systems give “row-level security” (by record), but column-level security is really needed.

This is a short list.  I could go on and on, but I would really appreciate it if any developers would address these $5 Fixes.  You know how developers are, cheap and lazy!

Sunday, July 15, 2007

OOPS!  We’re Down, Now What?

Relying on an outside firm to handle your critical system needs became very painful recently for several companies.  A major satellite-based Internet provider lost their primary e-mail accounts during what was described as “routine maintenance,” and their recovery from back-ups failed!

Almost 2 days went by before accounts were re-established, and no one knows how many lost messages there were, especially for those that used web-based e-mail accounts.  Support was terrible.  There was a pre-recorded message that stated in effect, “Sorry, there’s nothing we can do right now.” Individual home users were inconvenienced, but many businesses were brought to their knees!

What has all this to do with accounting software?  It’s our ever-increasing dependence on other companies for mission-critical systems that puts us at risk.
So, how dependent is your company on outside software providers?  When you lose the use of your accounting system because of a design flaw or a system failure, how quick is the system restored, and how thorough is the recovery?  What would the loss of its use mean to your company?  Can your company survive a week, or even a couple of days without access to your business data?  Oops!

What should you do?  If you’re looking for a new system, consider the following questions for the software developer: 

• How strong is their knowledge of the actual system?  Did they just buy the source code from someone else? 

• What’s their track record?  Talk to their current user base.  If they won’t provide you with that information, pick another provider. 

• How long have they been in business?  Did the entire staff just graduate from business school? 

• How strong are they financially?  Are they a target for takeover? 

• How many levels of support are there?  Count the consultants, VARs, etc.  The more levels there are, the slower the response, and you’ll find more finger-pointing going on.

Even if you’re not looking for new software, you should ask these same questions of your current software provider.  The results could be scary!  Do your research, and get it right.  You could lose your job by making a bad decision!

Saturday, July 07, 2007

Communications, Get Involved!

It’s no wonder why software developers spend most of their time and money trying to attract prospective new clients.  After all, that’s where the money is, so you can’t blame them.  But, how well do they communicate with existing clients?

I’m so tired of developers who make little or no effort to inform their clients about new enhancements to the existing software.  Sometimes they don’t even provide this information to prospective clients (see the Smoke and Mirrors rant)!  These developers are the elitists, and you probably already know who they are.  They figure the client will discover these enhancements at the next major release, and that’s good enough!

Having said that, it’s not always the developer’s fault that their clients are not up to speed on the latest improvements and modifications to the software.  Often the client doesn’t put forth any effort to become informed.  The client’s reply to this accusation is that they don’t have the time to read all this information that inundates their e-mail and/or the Postal Service.  If they won’t read their mail, they for sure aren’t going to take a phone call from their sales rep.  Of course, when they do find out that the developer has a new feature (one that the client has needed desperately for 6 months), the client is going to be upset with the developer for not letting him know sooner!

What’s answer?  I don’t have the answer.  Apathy is hard to overcome.  Probably the best solution (as a client) is to belong to the software user group and get involved.  Participate at the conventions and establish contacts within the group.  If your developer does provide software update information, make sure you read and understand it.  It may be exactly what you need. 

A regular dialog with your software rep and a concerted effort to stay abreast the latest enhancements will keep you on the leading edge.  And, when the developer doesn’t furnish you with what you need, communicate – often and loud!