In concluding our series on the signs you’ve outgrown QuickBooks, the last sign is perhaps the most important and relates to the previous nine points discussed in past blog posts – you’re doing more and more outside of QuickBooks. Chances are you have started to put data in various spreadsheets and work off of various manual processes. These spreadsheets probably address channel sales, complex inventory issues, budgeting, and a host of other business challenges that QuickBooks is not equipped to provide.

Do you also create reports in QuickBooks? If so, chances are you’ll most likely hit a performance bottleneck because your data is growing as fast as, if not faster, than your company. So now that spreadsheets are being used, your employees are spending more time trying to find the right data to use while searching for the latest version of a report on your servers. Managing all these reports then opens the door for increased errors and incorrect information.

Your business has complex needs and requires a business management system that isn’t only about invoicing and writing checks. How can you sell to multiple channels? Do your customer service personnel have one place to look when answering customers’ questions? Manual processes and spreadsheets introduce many errors and slowly eat away at your company’s productivity.

When manual processes consume the time you require to manage your business, it is time to think of a new solution. It’s time to replace QuickBooks with a more comprehensive and robust business system that will manage not only accounting but address the whole enterprise. Contact Third Wave today to learn more about making the switch to a business system that will profit your organization in the long run!

As we have mentioned in a previous blog, customer service is often a driving force for setting your organization apart from competitors. The main way to accomplish respectable customer service is by engaging your employees. Additionally, in such a competitive market, you need worker engagement to ensure that your talented staff stays with you for the long run. Obviously, staff engagement is crucial to business.

Talent is quickly turning into a competitive advantage – so it’s imperative for every manager to put practices into place that help retain staff while keeping them happy. But with the pressure to succeed, managers often lose sight of how best to engage team members in a way that increases employee satisfaction. Remember, extremely involved people outperform companies with the most disengaged people across a wide spectrum of metrics.

The following are five ways to encourage great performance and engage employees:

• Listen to your Employees: Hearing your employees’ voices is the first step toward engaging them. One of the greatest ways to accomplish this is through annual engagement surveys. By gaining a deeper look into each department and understanding what your staff is trying to tell the organization, you are able to analyze what your company is doing as a whole. Remember, engagement begins when your staff understands the “why” behind their jobs, what they’re expected to achieve, and why it’s essential to the greater good.
• Guide Employee Goals Based on Results: Collecting data and communicating is only part of the story. It’s important to be able to take useful information regarding employee satisfaction to improve goal development and alignment. Managers must be able to analyze satisfaction results and connect them to changes adopted as a result. Every staff member must know how important their work is and how other employees and managers depend on it.
• Develop Goals Specifically with Engagement in Mind: It’s crucial that your goals are specific, especially those that apply to engagement. To see improvement in staff engagement, employees must have specific, measurable goals and must be held accountable for ensuring these goals stay measurable and specific.
• Communicate Clearly and Consistently with Employees: If you want to engage your employees, you need to keep them in the loop about what is going on. There is nothing more disengaging for employees than finding out they’re the last to know about significant information. By utilizing things like regular feedback meetings, you can keep your employees informed about what they are doing well and what areas need improvement.
• Connect Goals to Development: Understanding the “how” behind employees’ jobs is just as important as understanding the “why”. The “how” is more than just measurement and goals – employees who want to know how to be better at their jobs and build careers. Development helps employees gain the necessary knowledge and skills.

Contact Third Wave today to learn more about analyzing business data and utilizing CRM systems!

Our last blog in the Outgrown QuickBooks series went into detail about what happens when you start to experience bottlenecks in your processes. You are comfortable with using QuickBooks. But what happens as key processes such as order processing, invoicing, and fulfillment get slowed down as the volume increases? Instead of looking at the longer term benefits of implementing a more robust, scalable system, you continue using QuickBooks and decide to try and integrate other solutions to better manage the roadblocks. For example, as your organization continues on a path of growth and more and more orders start coming in, you may turn to an order management solution that integrates with QuickBooks. This solution still can’t provide you with the scalability and overall performance upgrade you need. Similarly, you may need your eCommerce site to integrate directly with your accounting system and inventory management system. Most likely, there are customizations you need but are unable to implement. You keep adding more and more systems because you are not ready to give up QuickBooks.

With so many different systems used to run your business, your IT group spends too much time and money trying to integrate them all, maintaining the applications, and upgrading to the latest versions. Your data is all over the place, making it impossible to do any real-time analysis. This should be enough of a reason for you to consider leaving QuickBooks. Why not move to one system that can manage all of your business processes?

If you have experienced any of the above pain points while trying to work off of systems you have integrated with QuickBooks, it is most definitely time to consider upgrading to a more robust solution. Contact Third Wave today and find out what your next steps are!

The pace of your organization is steadily increasing, as global competition emerges you want your business to remain agile and take advantage of new opportunities. If you are not able to stay connected with all operations and manage performance to meet your goals, how will you be able to make informed decisions to uncover new opportunities?

You are probably at a crossroads; maybe you need new IT systems that offer greater efficiency and transparency to promote competitiveness. You want your processes and data to optimize profits and create competitive advantages. Aging, disconnected systems don’t provide you with real-time visibility into what’s coming next. With SAP Business One, you are provided with a solution that includes complete functionality for financial, human resources, marketing, sales, service, supply chain, procurement, and project management processes, all within one application.

When you run SAP Business One, you and your workforce can:

Get the Needed IT and Scale it Affordably:  Business One is ideally suited to companies that need to react swiftly to changing business models; enter new markets; and innovate new service, sales, and delivery models. Address your most pressing challenges and business processes at an affordable fixed price and scope.

Increase Visibility and Insight to see Behind the Numbers:  In order to manage corporate performance, you need real-time information and tools that can turn every transaction and organizational activity into clear business intelligence. With SAP Business One, you have intuitive analytics and reporting tools that leverage up-to-the-minute data.

Provide Access for a Productive Mobile Workforce:  Mobile devices enable work to be done anytime and anywhere, keeping business moving forward. With Business One, you can easily and safely access processes and data from the office or on the web using a browser or mobile device.

Scale, Grow, and Respond to Change without Difficulties:  As your business evolves, processes become more complicated and transaction volumes increase. You need to leverage new technology to support and streamline operations. You want the software to grow with you while avoiding the risk of incurring a large, up-front expense. SAP Business One is a highly flexible, configurable system that adapts quickly as your business changes and grows.

Run a Connected, Insightful, and Adaptable Business:  You need a solution that supports end-to-end processes for running your entire business via a single application, anytime and anywhere.

To keep pace with the velocity of business today while driving higher profitability and growth, you need a full, real-time visibility and control over the big picture and tiniest detail. Contact Third Wave today and find out how SAP Business One could be the solution to enable you to do just that.

How are you managing your daily business processes? Do you sometimes find that you have trouble customizing various tasks and processes to fit the current needs and requirements of your organization? As we near the end of our series on the warning signs that you’ve outgrown your QuickBooks solution, it’s important that we discuss what happens as you begin to experience bottlenecks in your processes.

Do you find yourself having to add headcount to keep up with demand and your increasing workload? Without the ability to streamline and automate the processes that are key to running your business smoothly, you realize you are in over your head. Your back office staff is growing to process payments and manage accounts receivable. The filing cabinets are taking over the office because you don’t have the workflow tools from QuickBooks to handle the documents electronically. Approvals are handled through signatures on paper instead of online. You’ve looked into integrating a system with QuickBooks but there aren’t many that you’d consider and they don’t enable you to customize processes to fit your business needs.

Your processes are also being slowed down because you have to manually re-key data between QuickBooks and your other applications. For example, you may need to add the same data into your CRM system, order management solution, and your eCommerce platform. This repetitive data entry can take several hours a week and take away the focus from your core business initiatives. Now you also have to be concerned about human error as information is entered into these different applications.

As more time is spent entering data and creating workarounds for your processes, you’re unable to respond to customer queries or the information is incorrect due to manual errors. Then you have your sales team waiting for their commissions to be entered into the system but there’s a consistent backlog of data-entry that needs to be completed. You need to break through these bottlenecks to streamline and automate in order to increase efficiencies and experience new revenue growth.

If you have experienced even one of the bottlenecks mentioned, it’s important that you reevaluate how well your QuickBooks solution is working for you. You need a solution that can not only handle your current processes, but that can grow with you as your processes and requirements become more complicated. Contact Third Wave today and discuss your next steps.

As we’ve discussed in previous posts in the Outgrown QuickBooks Series, there are numerous signs that your QuickBooks solution is slowing down or hindering your company’s growth. For example, the solution isn’t scalable enough to keep up with employee growth, you‘re having difficulty with your budgeting and forecasting processes, and you don’t have the tools to achieve compliance.

Without insight into these key business functions, your inventory management capabilities will usually suffer. How do you go about streamlining inventory management, while staying profitable?

Most likely you didn’t purchase QuickBooks because of its inventory management capabilities, but you may have used it for this purpose as well. QuickBooks even added new functionality over the past few years such as location tracking, bin locations, and tracking parts by serial or lot number.

These added features made you feel like you could get by with QuickBooks, but it’s important to remember that getting by isn’t enough. As your company grows, you want to constantly be thinking ahead and anticipating your next move. With such basic inventory management capabilities, it is nearly impossible to set yourself up for future profitability.

As managing your inventory becomes more involved, you’ll most likely find that QuickBooks lacks the features you need to effectively and efficiently manage your inventory. For example, you may need to track inventory in multiple warehouses, perform barcode scanning, or do kitting.

In addition, QuickBooks will only calculate average costing of inventory so you’ll need to find another way to determine the landed costs. This is a huge disadvantage for your business and should be one of the major factors in your decision to move forward with a new system.

After all, if you can’t determine inventory valuation, then your pricing strategies are nothing more than guesswork. If you can’t effectively track and analyze what inventory you have on hand, it becomes nearly impossible to perform demand forecasting. These shortcomings prevent your organization from experiencing the growth it can achieve with a complete business management system.

Learn More: SAP Business One: Inventory and Distribution

Investing in a more dynamic business system with strong inventory management capabilities is just what your organization needs. If any of the above pain points resonate with you, it is a good idea to reevaluate just how well QuickBooks helps you perform.

Beginning business intelligence (BI) initiative doesn’t need to be an expensive investment, but it’s important to choose a solution that enables you to easily achieve your initial BI needs and later grow to more advanced ones. When you first implement a BI solution, you most likely will be coming from an undisciplined spreadsheet environment. The key is to start small and work to expand the BI deployment to additional applications and added functionality as your business adopts and masters the technology. Your ultimate goal is getting organizational users less dependent on IT for their analyses.

After using BI for operational purposes, you will likely want to progress to deeper analysis, like comparing one period’s results to another. This is accomplished by using a data warehouse containing historical data values, which makes time-period comparisons possible. A data warehouse usually contains data from many sources, and the BI solution will be able to consolidate the data for exact, consistent reporting.

It’s crucial to consider other key factors when choosing a B1 product. How easy is it to implement and run the solution? How well will this new system assimilate with the existing platform and environment of your organization?

A few more important considerations include:

• An integrated product suite with a range of functions that your company can deploy as needed
• The scalability to handle an expanding user base as the company grows and usage increases
• Data-quality functionality to ensure a trustworthy structure
• The capability to access and integrate a variation of data sources
• 64-bit construction that can allow you to analyze large quantities of up-to-the-minute information
• Robust report cataloging and distribution functions

Another crucial consideration in the implementation process is selecting an appropriate vendor. It’s imperative to consider numerous aspects, including experience, reputation, stability, professional services capabilities, and the quality and strength of their partnerships.

Some other important considerations include:

• A proven track record and a history of effective growth, both in revenue and capabilities
• A history of vision and innovation
• Reputation and ability as a BI leader
• Education and training capabilities

To conclude the Business Intelligence blog series, it’s important to remember that BI allows you to analyze and better understand your plans and results. It provides insight into what’s working correctly and identifies potential problem areas in time for corrective actions to be taken. If you think a BI solution would benefit your business, contact Third Wave today!

Our past few blog posts in our warning signs that you’ve outgrown your QuickBooks solution series have discussed budgeting and forecasting troubles, improving accounting controls, why database performance is important, and how to expand into new business channels. Another sign that QuickBooks isn’t cutting it anymore is that your customer service team begins to feel the strain  you start to experience a strain on customer service. How do you address this issue while continuing on a path of growth?

Your customers are vital to the success of your organization. Ensuring their happiness is essentially what keeps you profitable and competitive. They deserve the security of knowing that if a problem arises, it can be easily rectified. Additionally, strong customer service skills can differentiate you from your competitors. When you are selling the same products as a handful of other companies out there, how will you set yourself apart so that potential clients will choose you over them? Remember, the more repeat business you can create, the more profitable you will be in the long run. A bad customer service experience is often all it takes for a customer to cut ties with you.

Your customers also expect to receive a certain level of customer service. In order to accomplish this, your employees must have visibility into orders and order history. When a customer calls with a question or concern, your customer service representative or sales person must be able to instantly pull any pertinent information to provide immediate answers. Without the ability to respond to any customer question in a timely fashion, you’re going to end up with poor marks.

Good customer service also means being able to answer questions regarding stock levels in real-time, while confirming all shipping information as soon as an order is placed. If a customer calls back a day later to make adjustments to the order, does your customer service team have the ability to do this?

In order to ensure that you maintain strong relationships with your customers, you need a business solution that enables you to manage customer contacts, track opportunities, and provide support to build lasting relationships. To learn more about how you can manage all of your interactions with your customers and stay competitive in your marketplace, contact Third Wave today!