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.

What does SAP Business One Cost

What does SAP Business One Cost?

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“Surprisingly less than you might expect” is the answer that many people will give to the question “what does SAP B1 cost?”. Whilst many people associate the SAP brand with high-end ERP solutions for large customers it should be noted that SAP has been providing ERP and other technology solutions for small to medium businesses for many years. In fact, more than 250,000 of SAP’s customers are SME’s. With a strong focus on small to medium-sized business, the pricing for SAP Business One has always been attractively positioned for SME’s.

Furthermore, SAP Business One can be deployed in the cloud for a relatively low monthly fee.

When implementing an ERP solution, the SaaS (Software as a Service) or cloud monthly fee for the software is only one cost consideration. Others include:

  • Maintenance and support
  • Implementation services
  • Internal resource requirements

To provide an accurate cost for SAP Business One you must consider multiple factors:

  • Number of users
  • User types – SAP B1 software is available with professional (full access) and limited (partial access) – CRM, finance and logistics users.
  • Data conversion requirements. Does the business have specific data conversion requirements, how many data sources are there, does the business have the internal expertise to assist with data conversion?
  • Internal resource – as with the implementation of any ERP solution, SAP Business One requires internal, customer, resources to assist with the implementation.
  • Reporting – what level of reporting is expected? Are the reporting requirements standard?
  • Functional footprint – what core functionality is required?
  • Which modules will be implemented?
  • The number of legal entities to be implemented.
  • Integration requirements – will the SAP Business One solution be integrated to any third party or in-house developed solutions?
  • 3rd party products – are any pre-integrated third-party solutions being implemented as part of the solution?
  • Development expectations – is any development required?
  • E-commerce – will an e-commerce portal require integration?
  • EDI – many wholesale/distribution clients who sell to the major retailers in Australia will require automated EDI.

Most of these questions are focused on the cost to implement SAP Business One – establishing how many days training, data conversion and user acceptance testing will be required to implement the solution.

A seasoned SAP B1 professional will be able to go through the above questions with you and in 10-15 minutes will give you an estimate for the implementation of SAP Business One. Feel free to call our experienced SAP Business One team on 1300 045 046 to discuss your requirements and SAP Business One costing in more detail.

Once you have received a high-level budget estimate for the implementation of SAP Business One you can move through the demonstration process with confidence that you have budgetary numbers for SAP Business One implementation services and cloud software. When you move to a shortlist of one potential ERP solution and you want a more detailed costing summary you might consider doing a Leverage Technologies Requirements Analysis.

Sage Intacct - Intelligent Time – Using Artificial intelligence to create business value

Sage Intacct – Intelligent Time – Using Artificial intelligence to create business value

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Sage Intacct is a cloud-first solution for medium-sized companies wanting to automate processes, grow rapidly and improve financial management across complex corporate accounting requirements.

Sage Intacct has strong financial management software solutions across multiple industry sectors including project services/project accounting for the professional services industry sector (IT services, marketing services, SaaS developers and other professional services based organisations) that invoice time and services to a range of customers. For any professional services business, the capturing of time is an important task:

  • Capture time against the correct project
  • Compare time expenses to budget
  • Allocate the correct activities and task “descriptions” to the line entry

These tasks must be done in a timely manner and must include the ability for users to capture tasks anywhere, anytime. Any professional services-based business understands the importance of timesheet accuracy – after all, services-based businesses sell time for a living. Incorrect timesheet entry or poor allocation of time to projects can lead to issues with invoicing and payment – causing delays in the all-important quote to cash timeframes.

When it comes to timesheet entry, speed and accuracy are critical.

Sage Intacct (cloud financial management) is constantly looking to improve workflow and automation to help your business grow. The team at Sage Intacct has recognised the importance of timesheet automation for services businesses. Using the latest AI technology Sage Intacct now offers intelligent timesheets:

  • Use the AI assistant to make sure all time is accurately captured
  • Works across multiple projects to ensure no time is “lost”
  • Improve job costing
  • Save time with faster timesheet entry
  • Easy timesheet reconciliations
  • Reduce human errors
  • Continuous insights
  • Reduce “late” timesheets and time taken chasing professional services teams

Of course, Sage Intacct is a cloud solution – available anywhere, anytime. Timesheet entry is the same – access timesheets in the cloud from any device with an internet connection – true mobility.

Watch Sage Intacct Intelligent Time in Action:

Download our Sage Intacct – Intelligent Timesheet information sheet

If you want to know more about Sage Intacct Intelligent timesheets and how Sage Intacct can help your professional services business grow, CONTACT US.

Sage Intacct – Contract income and billing for SaaS and IT Services

Sage Intacct – Contract income and billing for SaaS and IT Services

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SaaS and IT services development/companies operate in a new and exciting world where the traditional mechanisms for measuring success no longer apply. The traditional P&L and Balance sheet become a static reporting mechanism replaced by new-age concepts:

  • CAC – Client Acquisition Costs
  • Recurring income
  • Customer churn
  • Revenue churn
  • MRR – Monthly Recurring Revenue
  • ARR – Annual Recurring Revenue
  • ACV – Annual Contract Value
  • LCV – Lifetime Contract Value

Recurring income is the ultimate measure of success for SaaS and IT Services companies. The growth rates and retention of recurring income is a great indicator of future cash flows. Research has shown that SaaS and IT Services companies that have high recurring income growth rates with good customer retention achieve higher market valuations.

With so much importance placed on recurring income and subscription billing, as SaaS and IT Development and services companies grow the focus should be on automation of the quote to the cash billing process. The challenge is that the subscription billing process for software companies can be complicated:

  • Annual and monthly billing cycles
  • Upsell, cross-sell, downgrades
  • Milestone billing
  • Tiered pricing
  • Customer-specific billing
  • Usage-based invoices
  • Do and charge services billing
  • Included units invoicing
  • Contract billing
  • Recurring billing with variables

Clearly, this is not your typical quote to cash accounts receivable billing cycle. So, let’s stop trying to implement standard accounting software solutions to cater for complex contract and subscription billing – bending and twisting software solutions to try and cater for the challenges of automating subscription billing.

Sage Intacct has subscription billing functionality built specifically for the contract/subscription billing industry sectors. As SaaS and IT development businesses grow, the requirement to automate and streamline the quote to cash process becomes increasingly important. Sage Intacct offers functionality to help companies manage the customer lifecycle:

  • Manage complex billing cycles
  • Revenue recognition
  • Automated billing
  • Expense and revenue matching through the customer lifecycle
  • Bi-directional synchronisation with SalesForce
  • Automate customer renewals
  • Data analytics to review SaaS metrics
  • Real-time billing forecasts
  • SaaS data dashboards

Your corporate accounting team can automate manual calculations and customer contract/billing renewals to achieve real business outcomes:

  • Increased cash flow
  • Better customer service
  • Less customer churns
  • Time and money saved through automation

Revenue recognition can be automated to recognise revenue as and when the business provides the service and has performed to the contracted terms.

Sage Intacct provides bi-directional synchronisation with SalesForce to assist with all aspects of the customer lifecycle – from CRM, opportunity through to contract creation, billing and cash collection. Automation to streamline your business.

Sage Intacct offers strong financial management beyond pure subscription billing with a strong chart of accounts, dimensions for additional analysis, multi-company / inter-company, consolidations, fixed assets, budgeting and financial reporting.

Sage Intacct is a cloud-first solution that can be deployed in relatively quick timeframes to help you achieve a quick ROI. If you want to know more about Sage Intacct and subscription/contract billing, contact the team at Leverage Technologies on 1300 045 046.

MYOB Advanced – Creating a foundation for Digital Transformation

MYOB Advanced – Creating a foundation for Digital Transformation

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The business landscape is becoming increasingly competitive. To win in competitive world companies are looking to technology to resolve challenges, automate tasks, streamline operations, and provide a competitive advantage. Technologies like mobility and cloud are taken as a given – particularly given the requirement for work from home and remote access to systems. Even smaller businesses are now focused on the next wave of automation – big data analytics, IoT and AI for competitive advantage.

The question for Australian SME’s is where to begin? This “digital transformation” journey from entry-level accounting solutions or older systems to a fully integrated ERP solution with access to all the latest technologies appears to be a long road to travel. As with any journey, you need to start with the first few steps. A good starting point is a core ERP solution which can be implemented as a “foundation” for future technology enhancements.

MYOB Advanced is a cloud ERP solution aimed at small to medium-sized companies. MYOB Advanced has functionality that runs all the core processes for a growing business:

  • Financials
  • Purchasing and accounts payable
  • Sales and accounts receivable
  • Inventory
  • CRM
  • Manufacturing
  • Services
  • Field services
  • Dashboards, KPIs and analytics

As a cloud solution, MYOB Advanced can be implemented in relatively quick timeframes providing you with an excellent return on investment. When companies talk about digital transformation, they are referring to using technology to evolve and change how services are delivered to add value for customers. Digital transformation should lead to:

  • Improved customer service
  • Faster and better outcomes through automation
  • More efficient, agile businesses
  • Access to timely, more accurate information for improved decision making

Digital transformation starts with thinking about a “whole of business” approach – how do we improve customer service, add value to our suppliers, keep our team members motived, grow the business across product lines and geographies and increase cash flow whilst protecting margins?

The good news is that cloud computing has given rise to multiple point solutions for almost every business challenge:

  • Apps and tools for managing debtors and cash flow
  • Accounts payable automation
  • Workflow and approvals
  • Expense management automation
  • Data analytics and business intelligence
  • EDI integration
  • E-commerce integration
  • Marketing automation
  • CRM

These point solutions can add value to a company’s quest for automation by providing highly targeted functionality to help automate tasks. The challenge is that business functions don’t operate in isolation – information has to flow through the company from finance to operations. What’s required is a central repository for information and data. An ERP solution like MYOB Advanced operates across the business and forms the foundation for further technical advances. Due to the popularity of MYOB in Australia, several 3rd party solution providers have pre-integrated their solutions to the core ERP offering. As a result, as you take your business on the journey towards digital transformation you can start with MYOB Advanced for your core ERP solution and then add point solutions for specific areas of automation. This phased approach to automation allows a business to grow into new technology. This limits the upfront investment in consultancy, change management and internal resources whilst allowing the business to build a programmatic approach to automation and digital transformation.

If you want to know how Leverage Technologies can implement MYOB Advanced to help your business grow, please contact our team.

Sage Intacct – taking the hard work out of corporate accounting

Sage Intacct – Taking the Hard Work Out of Corporate Accounting – Multi-Company, Inter-Company and Consolidations Made Easy

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A key area of complexity for the modern CFO is multi-entity accounting. Financial management is at the forefront of compliance and accounting standards in Australia and across the world. Financial management and corporate accounting become increasingly complex when you add multiple entities, inter-company transactions, eliminating entries and consolidation requirements into your financial structures. Sage Intacct is a cloud-first solution aimed at simplifying and automating complex financial management requirements.

Businesses that could benefit from Sage Intacct include:

  • Financial Services
  • Professional Services
  • IT and Technology Services
  • Healthcare Services
  • SaaS and Software development
  • Franchise Companies
  • Real Estate
  • Non-profit organisations
  • Investment Family Offices

See Sage Intacct in Action:

Businesses that implement Sage Intacct can expect to automate inter-company and multi-company processes:

  • Multi-entity management within a single database
  • Inter-company transactions
  • Eliminating entries
  • Consolidations
  • Foreign currency reporting
  • Set-up users to have access only in certain entities

Way too many companies (that operate multiple ABN’s / Entities) struggle with entry-level accounting solutions that are not designed for multi-entity accounting. If you are battling with each company in a sperate software database with separate login requirements, manual consolidation reporting and manual inter-company transactions then, it might be time to consider Sage Intacct.

Sage Intacct has been designed for the finance team – catering for corporate accounting requirements in industries with complex financial and financial reporting requirements. Over and above offering excellent multi-company and inter-company functionality, Sage Intacct also offers:

  • General ledger with dimensional analysis
  • Revenue recognition models
  • Expense amortization
  • Fixed assets
  • Purchase order and Accounts Payable management
  • Accounts receivable
  • Banking
  • Workflow
  • Collaboration tools to help with internal communication
  • Integration to Salesforce©
  • Dashboards, KPIs and analytical analysis including scheduled reports
  • Financial reporting

Sage Intacct offers additional modules and functionality for specific industries like non-profit based organisations, financial services, professional services and IT services companies.

The design of Sage Intacct as a cloud-first solution means that you can access the system via a web browser – anywhere, anytime, on any device – true mobility.

If you are looking to automate your financial management across multiple entities and you want better analysis of your inter-company accounting and consolidations, get in touch with the Sage Intacct team at Leverage Technologies.

Phocas Branch Dashboard 2

Phocas Business Intelligence –Data Analytics and Reporting for SAP Business One

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Australian companies are seeing substantial shifts to digital transformation – the use of technology to streamline operations is offering a competitive advantage to companies that embrace technology. With an ever-increasing number of data sources – ERP, CRM, marketing data, IoT and e-commerce, businesses are trying to turn big data volumes into meaningful analytics for timely and effective decision making. More than ever before, companies are investing in technology to drive growth, differentiate themselves from the competition and carve out niche markets.

SAP Business One offers customers a great platform for digital transformation – the ERP functionality available in SAP Business One across finance, purchasing, sales, inventory, manufacturing and services offer a great foundation for total business automation. Once the “foundation layer ERP solution” is in place a business can continue the path of digital transformation by adding additional technology to the SAP Business One solution.

The focus of today’s blog is one area of digital transformation – business intelligence (BI) reporting, analytics and data building – helping you get more from your investment in SAP Business One.

SAP Business One customers using either the MS SQL Server version or the SAP HANA version of SAP Business One have access to several reporting, business intelligence and data analytics options. If you want to further build on this data analytics layer you might want to consider Phocas BI. Phocas Business Intelligence has data analysis integrated to SAP Business One to offer you quick and easy reporting, slice and dice analytics and business intelligence. The team at Phocas has pre-built the data analysis layers into SAP Business One – this ensures a quick return on investment as dashboards and reports can be configured quickly – tailored to your business requirements.

Phocas BI is a cloud, web-accessible application that allows users to build their own reports and dashboards and interrogate data based on defined dimensions. For example, a sales user might start with a sales report that lists the sales by month. The dimensions allow the sales user to analyse the data. The user might want to:

  • View the data by product group
  • Change the view to analyse the data by sales rep
  • Look at product data
  • Compare sales this year vs last year
  • Review which customers are the top-performing
  • Understand which products and product groups are the top-performing
  • Review product margins

All of this is reasonably standard for analytics and business intelligence solutions. Now, let us start to get a bit smarter about our data analytics. With the click of a button, we can start to analyse data to arm our sales team with meaningful insights to help them sell more. With Phocas it’s easy – the user spots a month where sales are below budget. This is obviously problematic. Now, the user starts the data slice and dice analytics:

  • Drill down on the month in question
  • Review the month vs the same month last year
  • Review sales by the customer this year vs last year
  • Review sales by item and item group this year vs last year
  • Review sales by customer and by item or item group this year vs last year. Do the same for this month vs last month or this quarter vs last quarter.
  • Use pre-defined analysis in Phocas to review what products customers purchased last year vs this year – where are the gaps?
  • Use pre-defined analysis in Phocas to analyse product sales – which products should be sold together – if a customer purchases product A – they will usually purchase product B. For example, customers that purchase a notebook computer usually purchase a notebook bag, external mouse and charger. Once again, identify the gaps in the sales process.

See Phocas for SAP Business One in Action:

This level of data analysis moves from simple data views to insightful analysis on which decisions can be made. The real benefit of Phocas is that the data sets and dimensions I referred to above are available in predefined data analysis dimensions. The user has effectively viewed ten different reports from a single data source with different views.

Phocas offers data analysis and reporting across the business:

  • Financials – P&L, balance sheet, cash flow reporting, trial balance
  • Sales – by the customer, item, item group and a whole lot more
  • Inventory – item analysis, stock holding by warehouse etc.
  • Purchasing – purchase analysis
  • Manufacturing – data at your fingertips
  • Management – data views and dashboards to help you run a better business

Phocas is available in the cloud – making deployment simple, low cost and providing you with a quick return on investment.

Access Phocas from the web – anywhere, anytime on any device.

If you want to know more about Phocas and SAP Business One, contact the SAP Business One team at Leverage Technologies.

Implementing ERP – Don’t ignore reporting, analytics and BI

Implementing ERP – Don’t Ignore Reporting, Analytics and BI

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When implementing ERP solutions, companies often overlook business intelligence and analytics requirements – assuming standard ERP reporting will “do the job”. It is true that most modern ERP solutions offer standard reporting, analysis and dashboards but, there are other reasons to consider Business Intelligence solutions when implementing ERP.

Modern, cloud-based ERP solutions offer several reporting, business intelligence and analytical reporting options:

  • Standard, pre-configured reports
  • A query generator to write your own system queries
  • Built-in analysis tools to slice and dice data
  • Integration to 3rd party Business Intelligence (BI) tools

ERP solutions do a great job of collecting data from various functional areas of the system:

  • Finance
  • Inventory
  • Manufacturing
  • Purchasing
  • Sales

Now add into the equation data from other solutions as we connect in a world of big data:

  • Marketing
  • CRM
  • E-commerce
  • In-house built solutions / databases
  • EDI

Why is data so important?

More than ever before we live in a connected, mobile-enabled world where companies are leveraging data to make informed decisions. As we increasingly move to a digital world the volume of data is increasing exponentially. Correctly sorted and viewed this data can be used for effective decision making:

  • What is the impact of COVID-19 on product sales and product group sales?
  • Which product groups carry the highest margin?
  • What is the client acquisition cost per product or product group?
  • What is the true cost of moving stock inter-state?
  • How many orders are lost because of low inventory levels and what is the true cost of these lost orders?
  • What is the impact of foreign currency movements on the P&L and Balance Sheet?

The importance of timely access to data that can be easily analysed will increase over time as the world we operate in becomes increasingly “connected” via IOT and artificial intelligence.

Big Data from multiple data sources

There is a new challenge associated with data – big data volumes from multiple sources. As discussed above, in an ever-connected, IoT world, data is being made available from multiple sources and systems. The dominance of cloud-based solutions makes it easier to store large data volumes and access these data volumes with ease. Having access to large data volumes from multiple data sources is only part of the solution – now, what are you going to do with this data? How can this data that you are collecting add value to your decision making?

The days of static reporting are long gone

Static data reporting is still required for certain statutory reports but, the real value adds in a big data world is mobile, analytics, business intelligence and the ability to slice and dice data. The beauty of business intelligence integrated to ERP is that the hard work has been done for you. Correctly integrated to ERP solutions, the BI provider will have pre-built the data analysis layers for you. These data analysis layers are typically built across different functional areas – sales, purchasing, finance, inventory etc.

If a sales manager wants to analyse sales data, they can start with a standard report – for example, sales by item for a period. Then the user can slice and dice data for additional analysis:

  • Last year’s sales vs this year
  • Add in sales by customer by item
  • View GP by customer and item
  • View trending sales by customer and item
  • Review which customers have purchased more or less than last year by product group

By running this quick analysis in a BI analysis tool, the user can get access to meaningful insight across the business.

When implementing ERP solutions, consider the different data sources that you will have access to and decide what information is important to your users and managers – to help make better decisions. Talk to your ERP implementation partner about data sources, data volumes and analysis and the advantages of including an integrated BI solution into your ERP project.

ERP data conversation made easy with Business Intelligence

There is another reason to consider BI solutions when implementing ERP – access to historical data. When implementing ERP solutions your ERP implementation partner will convert master data and open items. A standard ERP data conversion does not include historical data conversion. When you go live on a new ERP solution this can make year in year sales and financial reporting comparisons difficult. The “new” data in ERP cannot be compared to historical data in the new ERP solution because that data (historical/closed transactions) has not been imported. One solution is to access historical data from the legacy ERP solution in a BI solution and then run your year on year, month on month comparisons in the BI software.

If your business is looking for advice on ERP, Business Intelligence, or analytics, get in touch with the team at Leverage Technologies.