Month: February 2015

How to Analyze and Report on your Data

Part 2 of 2 in Data Warehousing series

Every business from startup to larger established businesses needs to track details about their customers, products, sales, purchases, social media, website logs to name a few.  By extracting, manipulating and analyzing this data you can determine key metrics to help you understand more about your customers and grow your business.  In part 1 we talked about how to kick start your data warehousing with BI360 and now we need to know what to do with all this data.

Basically you can use your Data Warehouse for financial statement reporting and analysis, dashboards and data mining. I previously went through how to use BI360’s One Stop Reporting here (link to Part 5 – BI Series Nov 2013) so I will be talking more about data mining and .

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Web-Series and the ERP Client

What am I doing? The same thing I have always done? The same thing that hasn’t given me the results that I wanted, that hasn’t helped me hit my goals?

These are the questions businesses are asking themselves all the time.  They know what they are doing, they know it’s not working, but they don’t know how to change it.  And in the world with budgets, time restraints, managers and employees to answer to the idea of changing what you are doing to get better results can leave you stagnant while you figure out what exactly it is you need to change.  And being stagnant means losing money.  Who has time for that?

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Where do Value Based Enable Rules get their data for the CRM 2013 ribbon?

A recent request tasked me with adding functionality to the form ribbon of an Order in CRM 2013. The goal was to capture information from two fields on the Order’s associated Account and based on that information enable or disable a button on the ribbon of the Order which for the purposes of this article we can call Has_Value. I was not able to pass the values to the Order when it was created as these values could change some time after it had been created. Additionally, if the associated Account were found to be a duplicate, it would have to be merged and updated on the Order that could also change the results of the information I was capturing. This left me with having to query for my information using Javascript when the Order form loaded. With this Javascript query, I then updated a hidden Boolean field on the Order if the criteria was met or left it blank if it was not. This might not seem important now but having to take these actions in order to meet the requirements affected how this customization had to be modified at later steps in the functionality.

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Five Steps to Keeping Software Selection Focused

I often speak with owners, managers and staff at organizations struggling with growth or a changing business model who sense “things are out of control” and believes there “must be a better way” to manage their business.  Many reach out to technology as a corrective path to this “better way”.  With so many different technology solutions on the market, each offering a countless number of unique attributes, sorting through them and selecting the right solution for your organization can be an extremely time-consuming and even mind-numbing task.  I’ve often seen this process become unfocused, frustrating your attempts to improve things.  I have boiled a technology selection process to five focused steps.

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Entering a Fixed Asset in Acumatica

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines a Fixed Asset as a “tangible object of a permanent or long-term nature. Businesses of all sizes purchase and maintain equipment, computers, machinery, furniture, tools and other items to assist in running their enterprise. Tracking the cost, current value and the depreciation expense of these items is a vital exercise of the accounting department of a business. The accurate accounting of assets is important for annual overall profitability of the business and for accurate income tax calculation. Large organizations, as well as some smaller ones, will use some sort of fixed asset tracking software. Asset tracking software allows companies to track what assets they own, where they are located, how much they cost, the monthly or annual depreciation expense and their current value.

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Publishing Web Client Blog

We recently had a requirement where a client wanted to be able to access the web client outside of their network from the web without having to use a VPN client. Microsoft’s installation instructions direct you to implement an additional server outside of your firewall to provide windows authentication. I am going to give you the steps to publish the web client outside of your firewall without the need of an additional server and you don’t need to use a VPN.

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    The Importance Upgrading

    We often say that accounting systems are “sticky”. Once you find one that works for your business you feel locked in because of:

    1. The cost. 
    2. The fact that you need it up and running every single day so that your business can function efficiently.

    The problem is that most organizations are constantly evolving and changing and re-evaluating their needs. You may now need functionality that was not initially needed when you implemented the system. How do you rectify this without starting from scratch with a new system? It’s actually quite simple; you upgrade your current system. 
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    Can Peer Feedback be Your Best Influencer?

    Have you ever had that one friend who was always “down with the trends?” He/she would also have the designer clothes, newest kicks, or best hairstyles before any of it even came into your radar, or better yet before it even hit stores. You would, in some ways, look up to them for advice on where to get these items for; where was the best deal or bargain; and what was coming out next so you could try and prepare yourself for it. They were, in a labeling sense, your “influencer.”

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    States look to the cloud for more revenue in 2015

    With over 12,000 jurisdictions in the U.S. and hundreds of thousands of rule changes annually, sales tax is a moving target in the best of times. Managing sales tax accurately requires a level of expertise many companies simply don’t possess. And 2015 is shaping up to be an even thornier year for sales tax compliance.

    In addition to the usual suspects—constantly shifting nexus rules, product and service taxability changes, etc.—states are working even harder to capture untapped sales tax revenue in 2015.  One place they’re looking is the cloud.

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