Author Archives: Brett Mundell

About Brett Mundell

Brett has more than 20 years of business software sales and company management experience. Brett has been involved in more than 300 ERP projects. His passion is customer satisfaction, making sure every client is more than just satisfied. Brett wants our customers to be driven to refer their friends and peers because we offer the best services and technology available and because we exceeded their expectations.

ERP for professional services organisations looking to streamline operations

SAP Business ByDesign – ERP for professional services organisations looking to streamline operations and grow at the speed

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If your business is in the professional services industry, consider SAP Business ByDesign to help your business streamline operations, improve customer service and access information to enable growth.

Industries that are in professional services and might benefit from SAP Business ByDesign:

  • IT companies
  • IT services
  • Marketing companies
  • Marketing agencies/services
  • Project-based professional services companies
  • Software as a service
  • Development companies

SAP Business ByDesign offers a completely integrated ERP solution which helps turn leads into cash, helps with cash flow management, provides real-time access to data and information to assist with project profitability and gives you the flexibility to grow fast while supporting critical business needs.

SAP Business ByDesign for Professional Services Companies

SAP Business ByDesign offers several benefits to companies in the professional services sector – efficiency, communication and access to timely data highlight the core focus of SAP Business ByDesign. Efficiency is enhanced as SAP Business ByDesign drives improvement through an increase in cooperation, project delivery and contribution across services teams, managers and customers. Communication and access to data is improved through connections to PDF, MS Excel, mashups, MS Outlook and integration to other external project-based applications.

From customer acquisition to project and resource management, project billing and revenue recognition, SAP Business ByDesign offers a complete solution for project-based businesses.

Customer Contract Management

SAP Business ByDesign makes it easy to manage customer service contracts. Companies that provide contracts or businesses that are dedicated to management services will appreciate the customer contract management component of SAP Business ByDesign. The automation of processes through contracts helps develop access to data to assist with customer communication and consistent revenue billing and revenue recognition.

Examples of managed services include software as a service (SaaS), meeting hosting services, telecommunications services, marketing services etc.

  • Integrated contract management creates a seamless quote-to-cash cycle
  • Raising service requests is easy
  • Performing service work on time increases customer satisfaction
  • Financial integration allows for a quick quote to cash timeframes and increases cash flow
  • Contributes to new revenue streams from managed service operations and support activities
  • Upcoming pricing and service level contracts can be managed for profitability
  • Increase customer Net Promoter Scores by providing constant and open communication with your customers

Marketing to Sales

Every customer-based journey starts with marketing.

  • Simplify marketing processes with a scalable end-to-end marketing solution
  • Move leads into prospects by working together with sales and other business units
  • Benefit from new campaigns and performance in sales

SAP Business ByDesign allows you to review leads created by marketing and accelerate the customer lifecycle from lead to opportunity to order to cash. Increase the value of your customer with a true 360-degree view of customer interaction, including integration with Microsoft outlook.

Resource Management

  • Increase efficiency by allocating the right person to a project and task

If you want the capability to locate and allocate resources that have the right skills and are available at the right time for project staffing tasks, SAP Business ByDesign can help.

SAP Business ByDesign uses parameter-guided searches to support, effectively manage and staff internal and external projects through team management.

  • Records time against projects and establishes project readiness – integrated with time and labour management.
  • Works with scheduling concept of “earliest availability”
  • Offers simple and rapid resource search functions

Project Billing

SAP Business ByDesign offers an end-to-end solution for billing – from timesheet capture, creating accounts receivable invoices and chasing debtors to create strong cash flow. Report by the customer and by the project to enable quick and comprehensive analysis of work in progress.

Project Reporting

KPI’s, dashboards and reporting across customers, projects, profitability and resources to ensure that you are always in control of your professional services business.

Financial Management

SAP Business ByDesign ERP For Professional Services includes comprehensive functionality for financial management including multi-company, strong general ledger with dimensional analysis across profit centres.

If your professional services business wants to automate business processes, increase project profitability and enable rapid growth, contact the team at Leverage technologies at 1300 045 046 or [email protected]

ERP Implementation Risks– Use Best Practices To Reduce It

Implementing ERP – keep it simple and use best practices to reduce risk

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Implementing ERP and want to avoid the risk of budget overruns and project delays? Learn from the experts – focus areas to help you implement your ERP project on budget and on time.

When project teams discuss implementing ERP solutions they focus on key outcomes:

  • Delivering business value and the associated return on investment
  • An on-time implementation/project delivery
  • Staying within budget

There are multiple risks that need to be managed when implementing an ERP solution for your business. These ERP implementation risks include:

1.     Timelines and Project Scheduling

Businesses often underestimate the resources required to implement an efficient ERP system. These businesses will not be prepared for change management and scope changes that could push back their deliverables and ultimate go-live date. In some cases, when the delivery of one functional area is delayed, it causes other areas to be set back as well. It is important to allocate the correct resources (internal and external) to the project when implementing a new ERP solution.

2.     ERP Functional Area Involvement

Another important risk is the absence of interest or time/resource allocation from cross-functional areas and subject-matter experts when implementing an ERP system. The challenge is that the best knowledge of your businesses requirements rests with internal super users and subject-matter experts. These team members are busy running the business and usually don’t have enough time to allocate to an ERP project. To fix this, we suggest a full-time process owner who is in charge of collecting information and coordination across the internal subject matter experts during the ERP implementation project.

3.     Data Management Risk

The main risk with data conversion and validation is the lack of a time and required resources for mapping data structures, checking data and reconciliation of data. Once again, as with many risks in an ERP implementation project, make sure enough resource and time is allocated to the data conversion. These resources should be reasonably technical with a high level of proficiency in MS Excel.

4.     Technical Risk

Formal risk assessments don’t always consider technical, development and integration challenges. Most modern, cloud-based ERP solutions are capable of integration to third-party applications, development and user-specific configuration. Many ERP implementation teams are so focused on the delivery of core functionality that they pay little attention to the management of integration and development projects. Ironically, it is the integration, development and technical delivery within ERP projects that has one of the greatest risks of project blow-outs (if not carefully managed). Ensure a comprehensive functional and technical scope is delivered prior to agreeing to any integration or development.

5.     Security Risk

In a modern world, data security, privacy and cybersecurity are at the forefront of all CEO’s risk management concerns. Security, passwords, multi-factor authentication and end-user access ought to be driven by segregation of responsibilities and access regulations which are accepted by internal and external auditors.

The challenge with ERP implementations is balancing complexity (functional requirements) and resources (budget and people). Here are some ideas to help you reduce ERP implementation risks:

Keeping the project simple

  • Follow standard business processes

Many ERP software solutions have standard business processes covered with “out of the box” functionality. For example, quote to cash, purchase order to goods receipting and purchase planning business processes might be covered by a standard ERP process. Businesses should stick to standard functionality as this allows for a low-risk, easy-to-implement solution. Wherever the business has nonstandard business processes or business processes that are not covered by the standard ERP functionality, these processes should be carefully reviewed to see whether changes can be made to fit the standard ERP solution.

  • Concept of minimum viable product

When implementing ERP solutions there is a lot of change in the business that needs to be managed. Businesses can decrease ERP implementation risks by starting with the delivery of “minimum viable product” (core functionality) and then building out new functionality after go-live. This approach gives users the opportunity to get used to the system before new functionality is added and allows the system to be bedded down in a short time frame, producing a quick return on investment. Consider the initial implementation phase the delivery of a “foundation” that can be built out over subsequent ERP implementation phases.

  • Implement the project in phases

Most ERP projects can be delivered in phases or stages, the benefit of staging an ERP implementation is that you reduce the risk of overwhelming staff with new functionality, and you provide a quicker time to value. The stages of an ERP implementation need to be carefully considered to ensure no sunk costs and to ensure that all core functionality is delivered in phase one. As with the concept of minimum viable product, there are many benefits to staging an ERP implementation that is carefully managed and the timing between the stages is not too long.

 

Avoiding Scope Creep

When we are discussing implementing ERP software, scope creep is a trap that is especially easy to fall into. This is largely on the grounds that balance is difficult to achieve with larger corporate changes such as new enterprise software. It is important to refrain from incorporating every single big idea that comes from the team, while at the same time not losing creative advancements to the original design if you want your project to stay on schedule and within your financial plan.

There is functionality that is vital to the success of the project and must be delivered within the core, phase one, solution and then, there is functionality (scope creep) that does not need to be delivered in phase I. It is crucial to put into place a process of evaluating these scope changes and “nice to have” deliveries. It takes time and energy to implement an essential change, but they are required. A “nice to have” change should be carefully considered and, where possible, delayed to a future phase. Remember, constant changes to scope will increase budget requirements and timeline. An important follow-up step is to educate the company and users with the consequences that come from each change of the initial project plan, and what it means for deadlines and budgets. Education and communication are key.

If you want to know more about implementing ERP solutions, contact the friendly team at Leverage Technologies on 1300 045 046 or [email protected]

Metrics and KPI’s for SaaS and Contract Billing

Metrics and KPI’s for SaaS and Contract Billing – measuring what really matters in a cloud world

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Software, consultancy and services companies are increasingly moving away from large one-off sales and are structuring their go-to-market and revenue models based on regular contract billing. Companies love the recurring income nature of repeatable, predictable revenue. Customers love the fact that they do not need to invest large sums of money upfront – they can pay a monthly or annual fee for the software, services etc. The business model works for both customers and suppliers – a true win/win. These new revenue models which include contracts, recurring billing and incremental additions to existing contracts create challenges for the new-age CFO. Without software to automate the contract, billing, project and recurring nature of invoicing, SaaS and contract billing companies will struggle to scale. Once ERP software is implemented to manage contracts, recurring billing and projects the business can start to manage based on the right criteria for a SaaS and recurring contract billing company. Yes, the profit and loss and balance sheet is still required for financial and tax reporting but, new age recurring income businesses need to monitor a new set of KPIs including:

Customer Acquisition Cost – CAC

For your business to be profitable in the SaaS industry a huge factor is knowing how much it costs to find new customers.  Being able to choose the best sales and marketing approach.  Often depends on knowing how much it costs to acquire new customers.

To calculate CAC it is best to divide your total costs of sales and marketing by the number of deals closed in a particular time.

Monthly Recurring Revenue – MRR

Recurring revenue is the backbone of any SaaS company – quite simply, you have to keep adding to your MRR.

Your MRR is a single number you can track even if you have many billing cycles and pricing plans.

Customer Churn

Customer churn is the number of customers who will cancel their contract or “churn” away from the business. It is often due to customer dissatisfaction or other products being cheaper or more appealing.

Churn is always bound to happen, but it is important to know what numbers are acceptable. In SaaS companies, churn rate should be around 5-7% annually.

The goal regarding churn rate is to ultimately achieve negative revenue churn. To attain this, you must prevent customers from unsubscribing, as well as you must find a way to get existing customers to upsell and use more of your solution stack.

ARR – Annual recurring revenue

A key performance indicator for any SaaS and subscription billing company the ARR helps management and investors understand the value of annual subscriptions which without any customer churn is effectively guaranteed revenue.

Net new ARR

A similar measure to ARR except that net new ARR shows the amount of new annual revenue that you are adding to your annual subscriptions. High-growth SaaS and subscription billing companies will be looking for substantial net new ARR.

ARR average per customer

Similar KPI’s to those mentioned above. Except the ARR is divided by the number of customers to show the average ARR per customer. High growth businesses typically want to see an increase in the ARR per customer which indicates an upward trend in the customer size and therefore recurring income.

Upsell – A KPI that measures how much additional subscription income is added to an existing contract.

Sage Intacct provides an end-to-end solution for contract billing, recurring income and revenue recognition with automated KPI’s and reporting that allows recurring income businesses to measure the metrics that matter. The Sage intact digital bord book is a pre-built highly configurable set of dashboards and KPI’S built specifically for the subscription billing industry. This provides instant access to real-time information for accurate decision-making across the business and investor groups.

Sage Intacct Digital Board Book

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If you want to know more about Sage Intacct for your subscription billing business, please contact the Sage Intacct team at leverage technologies on 1300 045 046 or email us at [email protected]

Contract Billing for cloud and SaaS companies

Contract Billing for cloud and SaaS companies – making complex contract billing and management easy

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If your business is in the SaaS, cloud, IT services or any other recurring income/contract billing industry, you will understand that recurring income and customer contracts is the lifeblood of your business. SaaS, cloud, recurring billing, subscription and IT services business love the fact that the business has recurring income – this makes for a great, high-growth business.

The challenge for finance teams in recurring income/contract billing businesses includes:

  • Complexity associated with different types of contract billing – monthly, quarterly, annual etc.
  • Consumption-based billing
  • Integration to projects for service delivery associated with a contract and contract billing
  • Revenue recognition based on multiple criteria (for example, revenue releases based on the life of the contract or the billing period)
  • Matching of costs and revenue across the contract period
  • Integration to CRM solutions
  • Changes to contract billing – additional users, modules, etc.
  • Pro-rata billing
  • A combination of different billing types
  • Contract renewals

Contract billing and contract management can be further complicated when you add in requirements for project billing and services associated with a recurring income contract.

Many Australia and NZ-based SaaS/cloud and other companies in cloud / SaaS billing industries work with manual systems and spreadsheets to manage contracts and recurring billing. Whilst this works for small companies, as soon as the business grows, the number of contracts and the complexity of contracts require an automated solution. The finance team needs better systems to accommodate the volume and complexity of the contract management and recurring income process.

Sage Intacct is a financial management and contract management solution with deep functionality for contract management and recurring income billing, revenue, cost matching and revenue recognition. Sage Intacct aims to automate, report and streamline the process from client quoting and acquisition through to contract creation, billing and revenue recognition. As an example of this automation, when a contract is changed, the relevant revenue recognition will be adjusted based on the revenue recognition rules that have been created for the particular contract. No need for manual journals and updates to the revenue recognition.

SaaS, cloud, IT services and recurring income businesses that have contract billing use a number of new reporting and KPI measurements that go well beyond the traditional financial measures of Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet:

    • ARR – Annual Recurring Revenue
    • ARR GP – Annual Recurring Revenue GP
    • Customer churn
    • Avge contract value per customer
    • Avge billing per user

Sage Intacct provides dashboards, KPIs and reporting built for recurring income and contract management – giving you the information that you need, when and where you need it. In fact, access any financial aspects of your subscription lifecycle at the click of a button.

ERP and financial management solutions must be implemented to produce real business benefits – increased cash flow, automation to save time so that users can focus on more important, high-value tasks and increased customer satisfaction. Sage Intacct for contract billing and revenue recognition takes previously manual and cumbersome tasks and automates the tasks and the associated reporting, providing immediate and long-lasting business benefits that scale as the business grows.

Sage-Intacct-Contract-and-subscription-billing-Datasheet

Contract and Subscription Billing

Gain control and visibility around your contract and subscription billing with Sage Intacct.

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More information, demonstrations and e-books about Sage Intacct for contract billing are available at Sage Intacct – Solutions for SaaS and Software Development companies alternatively, please feel free to contact the Sage Intacct team at Leverage Technologies on 1300 045 406.

Improving Your Business with Intelligent Business Document Processing

Improving Your Business with Intelligent Business Document Processing in SAP ByDesign

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Want to understand automation and let ERP software help your business grow?

SAP Business ByDesign helps small to medium businesses grow at pace through automation and digital transformation.

SAP Business ByDesign is a cloud ERP application with functionality for finance, distribution, professional services, and manufacturing. More information about SAP Business ByDesign is available here – SAP Business ByDesign Cloud ERP.

Intelligent Business Document Processing and How It Can Help Your Business Grow

Intelligent Business Document Processing supports the admin team to help save time through automation of data entry of invoices, remittances, purchase orders and proof of delivery documents. This automation allows users to focus on the aspects of the business that really matter – freeing up time for strategic decision making, customer interaction and staff retention.

In older style ERP solutions – prior to using AI and intelligent business document processing, a user would manually download and enter AP invoices, purchase orders etc. When using SAP Business ByDesign and intelligent invoice scanning with SAP automation BOTs, SAP AI business services and robotic process automation, you get better data accuracy and quicker processing times to produce real business benefits.

Adding receipts to travel expenses or converting business cards into contacts is easy, thanks to SAP Business ByDesign intelligent mobile scanning. The SAP Business ByDesign mobile app uses OCR and machine learning models to assist you every step of the way.

If your business receives purchase orders and wants them converted into sales orders, we all know that this can be a long and tedious, manual process. With the help of SAP Business ByDesign document information extraction services, the intelligent RPA bot will once again, automate the process for you. All you need to do is validate drafts and deal with exceptions.

In another great example of automation to provide business benefits – SAP Business ByDesign can help you match proof of delivery documents to a delivery note. You can now classify, identify related information, and upload a pdf with the customers signature to the right business objects in SAP Business ByDesign.

These bots are provided as best-practice templates in SAP Business Bydesign and are customisable to multiple business documents.

Thanks to the RPA bot, you can also refresh excel reports with updated data without the need to push the refresh button.

In summary, Intelligent business document processing will help save time through automation allowing you to focus on aspects of your business that really matter. This functionality will get you better data accuracy and faster processing times to help your business grow.

Watch a video on SAP Business ByDesign – Intelligent Business Document Processing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOL4xOjxArw

Contact the award-winning SAP team at Leverage Technologies on 1300 045 046 or [email protected] to find out more.

Why it costs less than you think to implement SAP Business ByDesign-01

Why it costs less than you think to implement SAP Business ByDesign?

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SAP Business ByDesign is a cloud-first ERP solution developed by SAP for medium-sized businesses. It is a well-kept secret that SAP has been delivering ERP solutions for small and mid-sized businesses for well over a decade. Most people associate the SAP brand with large-scale implementations of ERP and might not be aware of the fact that SAP has been extremely successful with ERP and other technology solutions for smaller businesses. In the Australian ERP landscape, solutions like SAP Business One (HANA) and SAP Business ByDesign (HANA) have been designed from the ground up to provide a rapid implementation, quick return on investment and the ability for customers to implement and maintain their ERP solutions with minimal internal resources.

SAP Business ByDesign has been developed by SAP as a native cloud solution – born in the cloud, for the mid-market – high-growth businesses that want to scale their operations across new geographies, new markets and a connected world.

The question is, “what does it cost to implement SAP Business ByDesign?”

As with any ERP solution, there are many factors to consider when calculating the SAP Business ByDesign implementation cost:

  • Cloud software licenses
  • Support
  • Implementation
  • Internal resource requirements (internal / company implementation resources)

The major upfront cost associated with any ERP solution is the implementation investment:

  • User training
  • Project management
  • System configuration
  • User acceptance testing
  • Go live support and more….as part of an ERP implementation methodology.

SAP has a track record in providing solutions for more than 250,000 small to medium-sized businesses to grow at scale. SAP has taken these learnings and has created a “best practice” implementation series for SAP Business ByDesign. These ERP implementation best practices have been packaged into SAP Business ByDesign as a “suite in a box” implementation. These SAP Business ByDesign pre-built business scenarios are available “out of the box” to be deployed in quick timeframes – shortening the time to value and reducing the risks of budget and timeline “blowouts” during the implementation process.

Typical business scenarios include:

  • Cash and liquidity management
  • Expense reimbursement
  • Fixed asset management
  • Order to cash
  • Procure to pay

With low-cost options in the cloud and the suite in a box implementation scenarios, Australian mid-sized companies can grow at scale with SAP Business ByDesign – ensuring quick time to value from ERP project start date to system go-live.

Want to know more about SAP Business ByDesign and the required investment for SAP Business ByDesign cloud, support and implementation – call the SAP team at Leverage Technologies on 1300 045 036 or contact us – [email protected]

Small Business to Digital Business-super-charge your business growth

Small Business to Digital Business – implementing ERP solutions to super-charge your business growth

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Almost every business in Australia is embracing technology to open new channels to market (e-commerce etc.), to help streamline operations and grow at a rapid scale. Technology is advancing at lightning speed and companies need to keep pace with advances in technology or risk being left behind in a world that is adopting cloud, IoT, artificial intelligence, mobility and e-commerce.

Many businesses get left behind because they use outdated systems designed for smaller businesses or they are using legacy systems which are not designed to take advantage of technology to fuel business growth.

At the heart of most technological advances for businesses site an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution. An ERP solution operates across the business – finance, inventory, CRM, sales, purchasing, manufacturing and analytics. ERP should be seen as a foundation system – from which other technologies (EDI, E-commerce, AP automation, etc.) operate. The challenge for many small businesses is that their ERP solutions are old, outdated or cannot scale as the business grows. To achieve growth, increase profits and offer better customer service businesses should consider investing in a modern, cloud-based ERP solution.

The challenge for many small to medium-sized businesses is the process, investment and potential risks associated with an ERP product selection and implementation. To help SME’s across Australia, the team at Leverage Technologies has written an e-book – Small Business to Digital Business – Your Guide to moving from accounting software to ERP to help your business grow.”

Small Business to Digital Business

Small Business to Digital Business

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In this e-book, we cover topics including:

  • Identifying the need for change in your business

  • Why the “do nothing” approach to systems is flawed

  • The risks of using outdated systems that your business has outgrown

  • The cloud advantage – available now for Australian SME’s

  • How to determine the best way forward

  • Ensuring lasting benefits from your ERP investment

  • Tips and tricks to implementing ERP solution

  • SAP Business One, Sage X3, Sage Intacct, MYOB Advanced, SAP Business ByDesign

If your business is ready to transform download the e-book now.

Enter your details here to download the Leverage Technologies “Small Business to Digital Business” e-book

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