Posted by Plus Consultants on Thu, Sep 09, 2010 @ 12:32 PM
by Leon Colton, leon@plus.ca
So what is Sage Accpac Intelligence (SAI), everybody asks these days, and do I have the intelligence to work with it? Well, to help you decide for yourself and instead of giving another definition of this great product I decided to build a simple consolidation report, over the course of the next few blog articles, which will provide you a trail on how to build your own more complex reports, using the power of SAI. So what is hiding behind the SAI Connector icon?
Let’s consider the following scenario, a company runs two Company databases for two separate locations, but uses the same suppliers and runs monthly Aged payable reports in each company. The management of the company would like to consolidate these two reports, but exporting them into Excel and then analyzing the data involves too much of ‘spreadsheet acrobatics’, besides how would you know which company which invoice belongs to, without adding more columns to the report? It is all possible, of course, but too time-consuming. Well, you can do it in Crystal Reports (CR), somebody says..that’s true, but CR can only work with one database at hand.
And here is the point – SAI has CR capabilities of working directly with data tables, but goes beyond it, in that it can consolidate various databases, and in a few different ways, depending on what you want to do.
Some people would like to compare SAI with other familiar products, in order to pin it down on their maps, and here is another comparison – Financial Reporter (FR) can produce G/L based reports, and even drilldown to details, but SAI can withdraw data from subledgers, where FR has no access. Similar to FR, SAI maintains formulas for specific financial data (such as Account Name "GLAMF"."ACCTDESC", or Fiscal Period - "GLPOST"."FISCALPERD"). More than that, SAI has its own set of canned Financial Statement templates, and I encourage you to explore them at your own time. In regards to drilldown, you can decide what level of details you want to drilldown summary figures (to be covered in future articles on SAI series).
Another great feature of SAI - having it’s own Launcher it can be accessed directly outside of Accpac and save you a Lanpak. In other words, a manager wishing to look up specific operations figures or review financial information doesn’t have to kick a clerk out of Accpac to access the reports.
Stay tuned for more detailed information about Sage Accpac Intelligence in the weeks to come and how you can better use this to get the information you need from your Sage ERP Accpac system.
Posted by Scott Davies on Fri, Sep 03, 2010 @ 02:26 PM
Whether you are in the market for an eCommerce site or already own Iciniti Store, exciting advancements are on the horizon.
Iciniti is now teaming up with Sitefinity by Telerik to bring you not only a more powerful, easier to use webstore, but a complete CMS (Content Management System) that you can use to build and maintain your entire web site. (If you so choose, of course. You can still just use Iciniti’s solution to maintain just the webstore portion and leave the rest of your site untouched.)
Iciniti eCommSuite 5.0 (the successor of Iciniti Store 4.3) still has true two-way integration with Sage ERP Accpac and Integrated Credit Card Payments, but now you can build other pages such as News, Promotions and Events, Blogs, Forums, and Wiki with Sitefinity’s industry leading, off-the-shelf content management system. With thousands of templates and slick workflow, maintaining your webstore (or entire site) couldn’t be easier.
Check out more information from Iciniti here:
http://www.iciniti.com/Products/eCommSuite5.aspx
For further information contact our office at info@plus.ca
Posted by Alison Boons on Tue, Aug 24, 2010 @ 03:23 PM
by Geoff Williams (smallbusiness.aol.com)
Sure, some businesses are cash-only and do just fine - the local ice cream parlor, the greasy spoon diner down the street, the flea market that's been around for a century. But these days, in a nation where floating on credit is as American as apple pie, you've got to take plastic.
While they require some infrastructure upgrades & come with annoying fees, it has become increasingly difficult to run a full-fledged business --especially in retail-- without accepting credit & debit cards. But despite the drawbacks, the added convenience for customers could lead to bigger purchases at the register. "You want to be accessible, and you want to broaden your opportunity to close the sale," says Greg Hammermaster, president of Sage Payment Solutions, which helps more than 140,000 business & organizations accept electronic payments, including credit and debit cards, electronic checks, gift cards & automatic recurring payments.
So how can you make your business credit card-friendly? Here are five things you need to know.
1) Apply for Merchant Status - What is merchant status? The term means you can be entrusted to allow customers to pay you with a MasterCard, Visa, American Express and the like. So why shouldn't they trust you?
To read the rest of the article, visit; http://smallbusiness.aol.com/2010/07/05/how-to-accept-credit-cards/
To find out more how Sage Payment Solutions can benefit you & your business, contact us today at sales@plus.ca for more information.
Posted by Bonnie Wittmeier on Fri, Jul 16, 2010 @ 11:06 AM
Sooner or later, it happens. You run your AP Aged Payables Report, and compare the total to the balance in your GL, (AP trade account), and they are not equal. What now?
A reconciliation will need to be done, there’s no getting away from that. You will need to do a comparison between all the transactions that have gone through AP and cross them off against all the entries in the GL Listing to find out which one(s) are different and/or missing. This can be a tedious process. However, there are a couple of tips and tricks that might help short-circuit the task.
- Ensure all your AP batches have been sent to the GL. (AP Periodic Processing / Create GL Batches). Then, POST all the AP batches in the GL. Re-run your reports to see if we are now in balance.
- Run your reports as of a future period, such as the end of the current fiscal year. Sometimes AP transactions get posted to prior periods. After they get sent to the GL, the period may be adjusted to a current period before posting. (So as not to affect an already published financial statement, for example, or because that period has already been closed). Therefore, the imbalance may only be due to a fiscal period discrepancy, and will even out at a later period. This is not normally a concern unless it crosses over a year end.
- Under GL Transaction History, select the AP trade account. Change the source code to different modules besides AP and check if there are any entries which originated from somewhere besides AP. These entries may be the cause of the variance.
If these 3 tricks don’t reveal the difference between your subledger and your GL, a full reconciliation will be required. Here’s how to make that process simpler:
- Locate the last fiscal period where the AP and the GL were in balance. Use that as a starting point to begin your reconciliation.
- Identify the variance amounts for each subsequent period since AP & GL were in balance.
- If several subsequent periods are out of balance by the same amount, locating and adjusting the first of those periods will bring the following ones into balance.
- If the periods are out of balance by different amounts, then there are variances in each period that need to be identified.
| Period |
AP |
GL |
Variance |
| 04 |
120,000 |
120,000 |
0 |
| 05 |
114,500 |
118,000 |
-3,500 |
| 06 |
95,000 |
98,500 |
-3,500 |
| 07 |
108,000 |
106,500 |
1,500 |
| 08 |
87,800 |
98,700 |
-10,900 |
In this example, period 4 is balanced, and there are discrepancies in periods 5, 7 and 8. The reconciliation process needs to begin at period 5. Depending on the adjustments required to bring period 5 into balance, (the AP may need to be increased, or the GL amount decreased, or some combination of these), the variance amounts of periods 7 and 8 may be changed, therefore it will be imperative to start the reconciliation at the earliest period that is out of balance.
- Print the GL Transaction Listing for the AP trade account for period 5. Then print either of the AP Transaction reports – Vendor Transactions, or GL Transactions – depending on which one works best for your particular set of data.
- Compare each of the entries in the GL to each transaction on the AP report. Once each line item has been compared and crossed off with its match, you should be left with the ‘orphan’ entries – your variance. You could also export each of these reports into excel and use some sorting and comparison formulas to assist with this task.
- Now that you have the source of your discrepancy, you will be able to correct the imbalance by making the appropriate adjustments.
This process is identical for the AR subledger as well.
There are some settings which can be optimized for reconciliation purposes.
- Ensure your AP trade account is set to be a ‘control account’ which allows only AP transactions to be posted into it. (GL Accounts / Accounts – select ‘control account’ and then add ‘AP’ to the ‘subledger’ tab)
- Check your AP Setup / GL Integration / Transactions. Set your Detail Transaction Types (invoice, credit note, payment, etc) to have easily recognizable fields sent to the GL Detail Reference and GL Detail Description columns (vendor number and document number for example). This will make identifying specific AP transactions easier in the GL Transactions Listing report.
Give us a call if you need assistance with this!
Posted by Glen Mund on Tue, Jul 13, 2010 @ 02:29 PM
When I speak to clients and prospects in the distribution sector, and ask about their inventory problems, the most common response is the lack of inventory accuracy. Most often this means the quantity of inventory on the warehouse floor does not match the records in the ERP or other system. Obviously this is very critical functionality that an ERP system can provide but the functionality requirements should not end here.
Other critical inventory accuracy functionality that should be expected from your ERP software are:
Inventory Value
- Obsolescence : What is the value of obsolete inventory? This reporting assists with the determination of how well an organization manages its inventory and how accurate the existing demand forecasts are. Perhaps product quality is poor. An ERP system should help make this type of assessment.
Check out the rest of my lastest article on the Sage ERP blog at; http://blog.sageerpsolutions.com/inventory-accuracy/
Posted by Plus Consultants on Wed, Jun 23, 2010 @ 12:01 PM
by TK Haran (tk@plus.ca)
1. What is Accpac Intelligence?
Organizations are increasingly suffering from information frustration. Having to manage large volumes of data, and needing to report from several databases and using inflexible reporting tools. Information delivery and user empowerment is increasingly taking centre stage in all enterprises with a resulting growth in the end user query and reporting (EUQR) category of the business intelligence market.
Sage Accpac Intelligence is an innovative software reporting solution that offers users, in organizations of all sizes, a powerful and intuitive reporting tool to take control of their own reports. It introduces a revolutionary approach to leveraging the reporting power of Microsoft Excel and protects and extends organizations existing IT skills and investment.
2. What Components does it have?
- Report Viewer
- Security Manager
- Report Manager
- Connector
- Analysis
- License Manager
3. Description of above components
- Report Viewer-This is used to view or to run the standard/shipped reports.
- Security manager- The Security Manager is an Administration tool that lets you (as System Administrator) manage Roles (User Groups) and assign Users and Reports to each Role. When security is enabled the User will be required to login and then will only have access to the Reports selected for the Role that User belongs to.
- Report manager- The Report Manager Interface allows users to design and manage their own reports and to display results in Microsoft Excel.
- Connector- The Connector allows an organization's system administrator to make a connection to their database in order to access the relevant tables for reporting purposes. It also allows an organization's system administrator to configure the metadata to empower the users to create their own reports.
- Analysis- An OLAP (On Line Analytical Processing) database allows business decision makers to analyze data that has been sorted into hierarchical structures. The data is static, so all mathematical aggregations can be built into the database query, thereby providing a more efficient and resource friendly means of reporting. This data warehouse can then be pulled into a pivot table within Excel, where the user is able to drill down into the report, using the hierarchical dimensions built into the query.
- License Manager- The License Manager provides a snapshot of your Sage Accpac Intelligence licenses and module configuration.
4. What Components come with a standard Accpac 5.6 installation?
- Report Viewer (1 user license)
- Report manager (1 user license)
- Security manager
5. Benefits of "AI"
- Works with a standard Microsoft windows look and feel.
- Reduces the need for IT department intervention.
- Reduces the need for custom complicated report creation by hired consultants.
- Consistent format (MS Excel) for reporting across multiple data sources.
- Business intelligence can become a standard desktop tool.
- Avoids inefficiencies in the report development life cycle thereby improving productivity.
- Empowers the user, thereby improving overall productivity.
- Optimizes return on investment by leveraging your existing IT infrastructure.
- Extends MS Excel skills rather than requiring learning of a new set of software skills.
6. Is there standard report/s available?
Yes and the shipped reports are as follows,
- Financials- Financial Report S, Financial Report D, Financial Report SB,
- Dashboard Analysis, Financial Trend Analysis
- Sales Master, Purchase Master, Inventory Master
Posted by Plus Sales on Fri, Jun 04, 2010 @ 01:00 PM
The economy is slowly recovering. So, will everything just go back to "business as usual"?
You've managed to stay afloat through one of toughest economies ever. Now signs are pointing toward a recovery. But will everything just go back to the way it was before the recession? Not likely. The post-downturn economy will redefine how businesses operate and compete.
Welcome to the "New Normal"
The current downturn is not simply part of a regular business cycle; it's part of a "new normal."
Recovery will happen-albeit slowly-but business has fundamentally changed.
Customers have adjusted their attitudes and shifted their expectations-and these changes are becoming entrenched. Doing more with less-cost-cutting, downsizing, improving efficiencies-is here to stay. The competitive landscape has also dramatically shifted. The recession caused a competitive shakeout, and only the strongest have survived. Your competition is leaner, hungrier, and wiser than before.
But uncertain times can be an ideal time for bold companies smart enough to take advantage of opportunity. While others are waiting the recession out, you can get a head start on the competition and watch your sales soar and your costs decrease.
To thrive, not just survive-you need to get ahead of the curve.
Read More...
Posted by Dee Dutton on Wed, May 19, 2010 @ 11:34 AM
The BC HST is imminent! Are you prepared? Do you know the supply and transition rules for your business? Do you know the reporting requirements, especially in relation to the transition period?
I participated in an HST Webinar presented by the CRA today. There was a lot of valuable information and they covered many of these important topics. The CRA also provided a slide show document as well as a reference document that links to specific documents on their website. All the pertinent information can be found on CRA's website at http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/gncy/hrmnztn/menu-eng.html but I have mentioned some of the topics covered during the webinar below;
Key Dates
- May 1, 2010
- Date that HST would generally apply to amounts that become due or are paid, without having become due for property and services, supplied on or after July 1, 2010
- July 1, 2010-Implementation Date
- Date that HST would generally begin to apply
- November 1, 2010
- Date relevant to exchanges, returns and self-assessment
Changes to Place of Supply
- There is now less reliance on the suppliers' location and a greater reliance on where the consumer of the intangible personal property or service is located
Transitional Rules
- HST would apply when goods are delivered and ownership is transferred on or after July 1, 2010 and consideration becomes due or is paid without having become due on or after May 1, 2010.
- HST would not apply when ownership is transferred or the good is delivered before July 1, 2010 regardless of when consideration becomes due or is paid without having become due.
Exchanges & Returns of Goods
- Special rules apply to exchanges made on or after July 1, 2010 and before November 1, 2010 for goods purchased before July 1, 2010.
- Exchanged good exceeds what was paid for the original good, then the HST would apply to the difference; and
- Exchanged good is less than or equal to that paid for the original good, then the HST would not apply.
- HST would apply to all exchanges on or after November 1, 2010.
Services - General Rule
- HST would apply to any consideration due or paid on or after May 1, 2010, for a supply of a service, when the consideration relates to the portion of the service performed on or after July 1, 2010.
- For Example: A landscaping service for June and July 2010. 40% of the service is performed in June 2010. It was invoiced in August 2010.
- HST would apply to 60% -the July portion
- GST would apply to 40% -the June portion
- If 90% or more of the service is performed before July 2010, no HST would be payable on the amount for the service.
Other topics covered include:
- Intangible Personal Property
- Sales to Government
- Indian/Indian Bands
- Leases & Licenses
- Services - Special Rules
- Reporting
You can sign up for these webinars (there are 3 left) yourself or view webcasts at: http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/gncy/hrmnztn/menu-eng.html
Posted by Plus Sales on Fri, Apr 30, 2010 @ 01:04 PM
by Brian Morris brian@plus.ca
Are you losing valuable time and resources to inefficient reporting? In a typical month, how many hours do you spend manipulating your current data to make it more meaningful, or to integrate it with other applications? Even when custom Crystal Reports have been developed, many Accpac users have made it known that they spend a significant amount of time on manual reporting chores in Excel. I'd like to tell you about an offering from Sage, which aims to address these very issues.
Sage Accpac Intelligence is an exciting enhancement to Accpac ERP, which will illuminate your data, and allow you to make better-informed strategic decisions. It is a powerful report designer and data analysis tool, but since it is based on Excel, most spreadsheet users will have no problem learning how to use the program. In addition to reporting on your Accpac data, you can easily link up to outside data sources, thus preventing the need for manual consolidation. Other key features include:
- Dashboards can be quickly setup, giving you a holistic view of the company's vital signs
- Pre-defined reports templates are included, and can be modified to better suit your specific requirements
- Scheduling automation allows you to run resource-intensive reports during off-peak hours, and email them to authorized recipients.
A FREE 1 user license of this Report Manager component of Sage Accpac Intelligence is available with all 5.6 versions of Accpac, and Sage University is also offering an online training course at no charge. For more details, contact me and let's unchain your data.