Posts by admin

Tired of using spreadsheets for your accounting tasks? Sometimes they can have hundreds — if not thousands — of fields where one misstep or mistyped number can send you into a tailspin wondering where you went wrong and how you can reconcile it.

Or maybe you’re frustrated by having all of your accounting functions tied to an older proprietary system that silos data and requires you to manually input or import data you already use elsewhere so you can balance your books.

Accounting is serious business and it’s a core task you should handle with confidence and ease — without worrying about potential errors caused by repeated manual data entries across multiple systems within your company.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software for accounting can revolutionize the way you access, use and calculate data within your organization for more fiscal responsibility and greater accountability.

Here are a few ways you can use ERP software for accounting so you can focus more on growing your business and less on repeated manual data entries:

All your core data in a single dashboard

There are a lot of moving pieces and parts that go into fiscal accountability. From the costs of supplies and manpower to manufacturing fees and other services, a quality ERP should integrate into most, if not all, of your core operational systems and processes to ensure your team can always access accurate data when you need it.

An ERP can also decrease human error and standardize processes to ensure you have fewer mistakes — and therefore more financial accuracy — for your business.

With a single dashboard, your ERP software can give you instant visibility into all the numbers that keep your business thriving, and in so doing, can help reduce opportunities for fraud or misuse, including user access privileges so you can see who has access to your data and accounts and what they’re doing with them, in near real time.

Integrations for sales, operations and accounting

If your organization hasn’t adopted an ERP to help streamline your operations, you may be frustrated by siloed information that’s entered into one program, for example your sales system, yet never makes it to your accounting system.

Or maybe your accounting solution gets an update with accurate, current prices and information, but your sales solution doesn’t. It’s a flawed system that can mean when it’s time to balance your books, your numbers don’t match up and you have to dedicate valuable time and resources to uncovering discrepancies so you can make sure everything balances in the end.

A quality ERP solution should offer seamless integrations for your existing sales and operational systems into accounting so you can follow your business from sales lead to closed deal and final payment.

Let’s look at this quick example for a hypothetical company:

• A member of your sales team is ready to connect with a sales lead that your marketing team educated and nurtured to the point of a likely product sale.
• Your sales rep can use your ERP, which also integrates into your marketing CRM and CMS platforms, to access the lead’s contact information, find out which product the lead is most interested in, and then quickly and accurately determine cost estimates and review pricing structure. The information the sales rep uses at this stage is the same information available simultaneously for your operations and accounting teams.
• Your sales rep closes the deal! The rep processes the order with an invoice.
• Your new customer pays for the product.
• Your operations team gets instant notification of a new product order and can also see other pending orders.
• Your ERP can help manage product shipping and receiving, again sharing related and valuable information with your accounting team.
• Your team can also use your ERP to track orders, review sales notes, and follow your product through delivery and sales rep follow-up.
• When the process is complete, you can even automate sales commissions and link them directly to product delivery and payments.

Task automation

Looking again at our fictional company and the great job your sales team member did to close a deal, you can also automate a number of tasks directly related to sales and accounting.

Here are a few examples:

• Your sales rep is ready to create an invoice to obtain product payment. There are likely a number of parameters for accounting your sales rep should include in this process. Your ERP can automate and standardize these tasks; for example, it can address whether or not this deal requires a purchase order (PO) number, if the client has any credit limits or concerns, if the customer qualifies for any discounts, and handle any relevant tax information.
• If there are issues, your accounting team can instantly share that information with your sales team for customer follow up.
• Your sales team can even make cost estimates based off most recent purchasing activity to ensure the information your accounting team sees is accurate.

Here are some other accounting tasks an ERP can automate so you can save time and free up your staff to focus on more pressing issues:

• Generate invoices
• Progress billing
• Subscription information
• Services rendered
• Purchase orders
• Close orders when products are delivered and payment received
• Stopping product delivery if there is a payment issue
• Set up and run recurring transactions based either on a timeline or specified amount

Multiple locations, multiple departments, multiple budgets

If your organization has multiple departments, it’s likely you have to manage and account for a variety of budget types. With an ERP, you can immediately access, track, and change budget-related information, not just departmentally, but even across multiple locations or entities within your operations. You can also use your ERP to plan for, manage, and maintain budgets for multiple product lines or business units within our organization — all within one platform.

Payment integrations

Tired of repeatedly inputting the same payment information into multiple systems within your company? A good ERP solution should also include fully integrated payment processing. Look for a solution that is PCI compliant for credit cards, debit cards, and ACH payment processing.

Reports and analytics

Whether you’re conducting an internal audit or you’re required to meet mandated compliance and regulation audits, ERP makes preparing for audits a breeze. Your ERP should help your team access the data you need quickly and generate reports and other analytics that make it easy for you to communicate information in a digestible format for all your key stakeholders. Your ERP should come with great out-of-the box reports, but also offer customizations that your team can configure to meet all of your key needs.

Increased visibility

Your ERP should be a true quote-to-cash solution that increases visibility into your organization’s financial health — from the big picture down to a granular level — so you can save time, reduce errors, and have accurate insight into the financial components of your operations at all times.

Are you ready to see how aACE’s ERP solution for accounting can help you with intuitive reporting, budget forecasting, sales tax calculation, payment processing and a whole lot more? Join us for an upcoming webinar to see aACE in action.

“[I would recommend aACE to] any company that needs a seemingly impossible-to-achieve customized accounting system that will take them from inputting a transaction to the general ledger." - Wendy Donenfield, CPA and Controller, M & R International

The larger your business grows — and the more customers you gain — the harder it can be to manage and maintain your inventory.

Whether you’re a small shop with all of your inventory on site or you’re a large operation with industrial warehouses, keeping track of everything coming in and going out is challenging. That can be even further complicated if you’re still using pen and paper or traditional spreadsheets to manage your inventory.

Efficient inventory management is key to fulfilling customer orders quickly and keeping your operations running smoothly. Inventory management software (IMS) can help you see the big picture, no matter how many individual parts and pieces that includes.

Did you know that on average, about a quarter of SMBs don't use an inventory tracking system? Of those that do, 15% track it within their accounting software, while another 14% use pen and paper, and 21% are building their inventory lists in a spreadsheet program. Companies that use an IMS report that they experienced an increase in productivity and also gained space within their facilities.

What’s inventory management software?

Inventory management software can help you manage all the moving parts of your inventory system, including integrations with your existing accounting, sales, and operations systems.

Let’s take a look at 5 ways inventory management can help you meet customer demand, keep your employees happy, and improve your overall operational efficiencies:

Material Resource Planning (MRP)

Managing inventory can sometimes feel like that game of cups. You know the one where a person drops a ball under a cup and shuffles it around while you’re left wondering where the ball will end up?

Inventory management without inventory software can be much the same, except it’s more like thousands and thousands of balls and hundreds of thousands of cups. Add that to the number of employees you have, magnified by the volume of locations within your operations, and before you know it, it’s easy to lose track of your most valuable resources.

Inventory management software can help you with Material Resource Planning (MRP).

MRP helps you plan for all of the resources you need for your manufacturing operations, including inventory and related financial issues. MRP will give you insight into the big picture of how much inventory you have and how much you actually need, based on real-time orders and historical analytics. This can minimize excess inventory you have on hand so you can maximize your storage space.

Ensuring you have just the right amount of inventory at the right time — and knowing where that inventory is and how to access it — means you can more efficiently respond to customer orders. Timely, accurate customer order fulfillment means happier — and more likely to return — customers for your business.

MRP can also help you forecast how much inventory you’re going to need in the near future based on your existing product orders and quotes. You can even ensure you’re ordering and getting additional inventory on time, based on those projections.

Inventory management software with MRP can facilitate more efficient planning for your inventory processes and ultimately cut down on waste and unnecessary spending.

Order management

If you’re manufacturing a product, keeping a close watch on your supply levels can be as challenging as managing product inventory.

How do you know which products to keep in stock when?

How do you know how much of each supply is needed to manufacture your product to meet consumer demand?

And how complicated are your processes when you need to place a new order for supply re-orders, product returns, and restocking?

Inventory management software can help you track changes within your inventory and supply systems and automatically fulfill a re-order request, like generating or modifying a purchase order in real-time based on your current needs.

Automated inventory analyses and re-order processes can also help decrease human errors that sometimes leave you with too little — or too much — inventory.

You can even use inventory management software to manage re-orders and backorders, too.

Automated cost updates

If you’re ordering a lot of supplies from a number of vendors — especially if multiple people within your organization are responsible for that — it can be easy to miss small prices increases until they’ve added up to big expenses over time.

Inventory management software can give you instant insight into your cost rates, based on your most recent purchase records. You can even set alerts to notify you when your profit margins are dropping below your target levels. That means if your costs start increasing upward, you won’t get caught off guard.

Inventory tracking

Inventory management software can help you keep track of all of your inventory by monitoring serial or lot numbers. When new inventory comes in or goes out, your team members can use a barcode reader to scan serial or lot numbers, or manually select numbers from a list in your inventory management software solution. This can give you clear insight into a specific lot of products or specific serial numbers at any time.

This inventory tracking feature is particularly helpful for product recalls and product returns.

Drop shipments

Sometimes companies just don’t have space for all of the products they sell or it doesn’t make sense financially to keep a specific product in stock at all times. So instead of keeping a specific product or supply on hand, they’ll place an order with a vendor on an as-needed basis.

Managing those one-off orders — and tracking where they are and where they are going — is challenging, especially if you’re doing it manually. Inventory management software can make drop-shipping and special order requests a breeze.

Inventory management software can help you automate those orders and easily facilitate shipping. You can even track when the orders are received, and if they’re coming to your location, do a quality control check before it’s off to your customers.

Insight, forecasts and accountability

Inventory management software, coupled with an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution, can help you streamline all the processes within your manufacturing and warehouse operations.

From inventory management to automated product selection and shipping, to order management, tracking, and scheduling, you can save time, money, and resources with software that facilitates and enhances your workflow automation.

Are you ready to see how inventory management software can improve your manufacturing and warehouse operations? Save your seat in an upcoming aACE webinar today. We have several planned that tackle everything from managing purchase orders to managing inventory and shipping. You won’t want to miss out.

"We were looking for a solution that gave us a solid core that we could customize rather easily to suit our unique business processes. As a custom fabricator, we also needed a solution that could give us several different options when it came to how we want to manage and track inventory, account for multi-level job-costing, and handle our unique design and estimation processes as well. Since implementation, we have found that aACE has not only helped us reinforce and automate many of our complex workflows, but it has also given us visibility into our data at both a high level and granular level like we have never had before." - Andrew Porter; ERP Manager, Gable

 

Whether you’re evaluating a new ERP, planning to implement one, or taking steps to improve your existing ERP processes, change management integration can guide your organization to ERP success and skyrocket your ERP solution to the next level.

First, what’s an ERP?

An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is a software solution that seamlessly integrates your core business operation systems — accounting, sales, and operations — into a single platform so you can automate many of your day-to-day processes and get more visibility into your overall operations.

What is change management?

Change management is a process to plan for, track, and implement changes that impact your business operations. It standardizes processes to encourage your team members to successfully adapt to and adopt changes that directly affect them and their workflows or related procedures, systems, or tasks.

Why is change management integration an important component of ERP success?

It’s no secret that without proper planning and support, including executive and team buy in, ERP implementations can fail.

As many as half of ERP implementations fail on the first attempt. For successful implementations, many take longer than expected and end up costing more than budgeted. Often, these issues are compounded by the lack of proper planning and not working closely with an ERP professional to select the best ERP solution for your specific needs.

Other times, a lack of proper planning to promote company-wide adoption and training — and ultimately a clear understanding of ERP benefits — means team members don’t get on board with using the product. They get stuck in their “old ways” of doing things and never realize the full potential of a great ERP system.

This is where change management comes in.

Change management helps your team members foresee, plan for, and tackle roadblocks for your ERP implementation, adoption, and usage. Change management helps you manage the “people” part of changes within your organization. It helps you break down barriers — from fear to lack of knowledge and lack of training — to promote buy-in and facilitate success.

Here are 4 reasons why you should integrate change management into your ERP strategy:

Planning Strategy

Change management should be integrated in your ERP processes from the beginning — when you’re evaluating the right ERP for your organization — through implementation, adoption, day-to-day usage, and later upgrades and improvements.

Change management begins before you select your ERP. It should start with a careful and thorough evaluation of all of your existing operational processes such as policies, procedures, and tasks for sales, operations, and accounting.

Here are some questions to consider:

• Which of our existing processes are critical for operations?
• What would happen if any of these processes fail or are inaccessible for a short time or extended time period?
• Which of our existing processes work great?
• Which of our existing processes need improvements?
• How can we make improvements to these processes?
• What would it look like if we standardized and automated these procedures?
• What are our greatest potential roadblocks (both for systems and for people)?
• How do we overcome each of these challenges?
• What are the top 10 benefits of adopting an ERP for our organization?
• How do we get executive buy-in for our ERP?
• How do we communicate that buy-in, and promote a company-wide culture that embraces and uses our ERP to make us more successful?

Integrating change management into your planning strategy will help team members foresee obstacles and plan to deal with them; build timelines; create communication strategies for all phases or your ERP success; determine who is affected by your ERP implementation; set roles for team members; outline team member responsibilities both short- and long-term; create strategies, plans, and schedules for education and training; and develop long-term support strategies, including future upgrades and process or product improvements.

Communication

Effective and carefully strategized communication plans are critical for ERP success.

Integrating change management into your communication strategies can help you build value for your ERP, successfully communicate that value to all of your team members, ensure team member buy-in for your ERP company culture, and facilitate a two-way loop on feedback about where problems exist and how you can make improvements.

Here are some ideas about how to build your ERP communication strategy with a change-management focus.

Begin with one-way communication to:

• Help your team members understand what an ERP is
• Educate your team members about how an ERP will help them do their jobs better, faster, and easier
• Help your team members understand that ERP automation helps standardize processes, decrease potential for human error, eliminate repetitive tasks, and ultimately make your organization more successful

Examples of one-way communication tools:

• Intranet
• Emails
• Newsletters
• Posters and hand-outs
• Live demonstrations
• Overview and instructional videos
• Frequently Asked Questions documents and digital counterparts

Next, focus on two-way communication:

• Don’t just tell your employees what your ERP is and how it works; solicit feedback
• Encourage everyone to ask questions, share concerns or hesitations
• Address those issues as quickly (and clearly) as possible to eliminate fear and encourage adoption
• Build a company culture that embraces the ERP and its benefits

Examples of two-way communication tools:

• Company-wide meetings
• Location-specific meetings
• Departmental meetings
• Executive and key stakeholder meetings
• Live question and answer sessions (either in person or online)
• Education and Training

Even if you select the best ERP system that most perfectly aligns with your company needs and you implement it on time and within your budget, your project can fail without employee buy-in and usage.

Implementing change management into your education and training processes can help you overcome this potential roadblock to not only get your employees excited about using your ERP, but create power users who use, promote, and encourage others to fully embrace your ERP.

Here are a few things to consider when building your training and education plans:

• ERP education is not just a one-and-done training session. It should be continuous and on-going.
• Give your employees routine refreshers
• Update them whenever you add new processes or make system improvements
• Educate employees on how these new processes will impact their day-to-day functions, but also how the ERP will make doing their jobs easier and faster
• Talk openly about the advantages and disadvantages of your ERP
• Make plans to address and rectify issues with the disadvantages and clearly communicate those plans to your team
• Clearly define and explain each team member’s role and their related responsibilities
• Encourage feedback
• Respond to feedback
• Make training and education fun so your team members will be enthusiastic about changes within your organization.

Return on Investment

Once you’ve selected your ERP, implemented it, trained your employees, and put the system to work, it’s still not quittin’ time.

Many employees dread audits, reviews, and reports. Your ERP will make this process less painful by pulling your core operations into a single platform, but that doesn’t mean employees won’t still be hesitant to adopt the processes you’ll need to determine your ERP's return-on-investment and short- and long-term success metrics.

Continue to integrate change management into your processes for creating metrics, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and other important business analytics. Show your employees how this knowledge helps them do their jobs better and will overall contribute to a more successful, sustainable company, now and in the future.

Do you need help getting started with change management processes for your ERP? Are you searching for the right ERP option for you? Join an aACE webinar today to learn more about how business management software can help you do business better, faster, and more efficiently.

For businesses of all sizes, positive customer experiences drive success.

Not only do exceptional customer experiences build brand loyalty — and ultimately help grow your bottom line — but customers with positive brand experiences are more likely to share those experiences with others.

The better customer experience you create, the more you feed into a loop of business growth. In a 2019 Salesforce survey, 84% of respondents indicated a good customer experience is as important as product quality or services. And in another survey by American Express, 90% of customers said customer service affects their decisions to do business with a company.

With these trends, it’s no secret that businesses are constantly on the hunt for great ways to build quality customer experiences.

Traditionally, building customer loyalty and brand relationships were time-consuming and tied up resources such as your team members. Whether the sales lead was a website click or in-store browsing, getting customer information and facilitating a lead to sale created challenges most often dependent on a person-to-person relationship.

But today, innovative technology is changing the way businesses build customer relationships and improve customer experiences. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools are increasingly crucial for creating and maintaining exceptional customer experiences — from sales lead to returning buyer.

If you haven’t already adopted one, now is the time to explore how a CRM will help you improve sales efficiencies, free up staff time, build a positive brand experience, and keep customers happy — and ultimately returning — to do business with you.

First, What’s a CRM?

A CRM solution is a technology-based tool that helps you manage all of your customer contact details — not just name, address, email, and telephone numbers, but also customer notes, purchase information, customer service issues, and where they are within your sales journey.

However, CRM is more than just technology. It’s also a philosophy of how you do business. How you treat your customers — your goals for exceptional customer experiences — are also important for CRM.

Now, let’s take a look at how this philosophy, supported by technology, will improve how you manage customer relationships:

Quality, Centralized Data

If you’ve been in sales awhile, you may remember when sales lead information lived either on a salesperson’s desk, in a hand-scrawled notebook, or on a personal computer.

Moving a sales lead from the salesperson to your core systems, like maybe a spreadsheet, meant your sales team member had to sit down at a desk and make a manual entry (when or if there was time), often creating a gap between initial customer contact and follow up.

Those manual entries also created opportunities for human error. One flipped number on a phone entry or misspelled name could result in immediate disengagement with your lead.

Today, a CRM eliminates a lot of those manual entries. By linking up with your existing systems — for example your website, customer service centers, brick-and-mortar stores, and marketing channels — you can quickly and more accurately obtain essential data from your customers as they engage with your company.

All of this data can then be stored in one central location — your CRM — where all team members can see how well your sales processes work and what’s needed to move a lead further through your buyer’s journey.

Good data means you have a great foundation to build your customer experiences.

Automated Communications

Your teams are busy and constantly on the go. If you have existing processes — for example, sending a free gift or discount to customers on their birthday — a CRM can automate this process for you so your employees don’t have to set manual calendar reminders to follow up.

Automation can also help you respond to customer inquiries quicker, giving them valuable information before you lose them to a competitor. According to a HubSpot survey, 90% of customers say an immediate response is important, and about 60% want an immediate response within 10 minutes or less.

A quality CRM should help your team use automation to quickly respond to common customer inquiries, whether that’s a first-touch point welcome or follow-up to a customer service need.

Personalized Communication

Have you ever received a marketing message from a company that clearly targets someone who’s not you? What a put-off!

Sending the wrong message to the wrong customer at the wrong time can damage your brand and move your customer further away from a purchase with you and toward a more attentive competitor.

CRMs can help you clear up messaging missteps by allowing you to segment your customer database to deliver accurate, timely, and relevant information to your customers.

Your CRM should also help you create and maintain personalized communications with your leads. Did you know that a personalized greeting, for example including your lead’s name from your CRM into an email, can increase your transaction rate nearly 6 times? Further, a simple inclusion of your contact’s name in an email subject line can increase your open rate by almost 30%.

CRMs can fuel personalized communications with your customers, making them feel valued, and building on a positive experience with your brand.

Brand-Focused, Approved Messaging

As we mentioned earlier, if you rely more on individuals to create and build customer experiences with your brand than a CRM, your sales process and related communications can get muddled. That means there are more chances for errors such as typos or comments that don’t align with your company goals.

Your CRM can help your team adopt and use standardized, brand-approved messaging.

For example, let’s say your company has a standard welcome package for all new customers. Instead of letting each individual sales member craft his or her own message before sending the welcome package, they can use your CRMs automated components to pull up a pre-approved message to ensure that touchpoint perfectly aligns with your brand’s customer experience.

You can even use automation to trigger sending that welcome package so your team doesn’t have to be involved. Want to know which of your customers have been sent that welcome package and when? Your CRM can track that data for you.

Feedback Loop

Giving your customers what they want, when they want it is an awesome brand-building experience your CRM can facilitate. But, maybe even more importantly, your CRM can also create a feedback loop where you’re not only communicating outwardly to your customers, but you’re also getting (and responding to) their feedback. Listening to your customers’ wants and responding to their needs will continue to build your customer experience in a positive way.

Sales Journey Insight

If you’re responsible for your sales’ team success, you know how frustrating disparate sales processes and systems can be. Without a CRM, you often have to track your sales team down or scroll through hundreds of fields on a spreadsheet to see your sales progress.

CRMs with reporting and analytics change everything. aACE’s CRM, for example, gives you instant insight into:

• Goals
• Customer activities
• Needed next steps
• Quotes sent
• Products purchased
• Deals closed
• Emails and attachments sent to every contact
• Rate cards, discounts, and markups without pricing confusing or mistakes caused by manual calculations
• Real-time sales information, including commissions

Contact Management on the Go

Have you ever been to a tradeshow or networking event and had someone hand you a card or give you his/her phone number or email to follow up with as a sales lead? How many of those contacts stay with you until you get back to the office or get followed up with in a timely manner?

Or have you ever been at an event or on your way to a meeting and not remembered your last communication or commitment to your potential customer? How do you prepare when you’re already on your way to a connection?

A CRM with a mobile component will help you keep your contacts up-to-date, even when you’re on the go. A mobile CRM app means you can create new contacts on the fly, update leads with new information, make notes, and move leads further along in your sales process, no matter where you are.

Mobile software even allows you to store updates even when you’re not connected to the internet. A simple click of the button syncs your updates as soon as you’re back online.

ERP Integration

CRMs aren’t designed to be islands that store and hold your data hostage. Quality CRMs should facilitate sharing information securely across all of your business operations. If you’re using an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool to manage your production and product delivery, your customer experiences can get even better with integration between your ERP and CRM.

Remember, the more quality data you have about your customers, and the more strategic, personalized way you engage with that information, the greater the likelihood that you’ll build a great customer experience for your brand.

Still on the fence about whether it's time to adopt a CRM? Check out our recent blog post about the Top 5 Reasons Your Company Needs a CRM.

Ready to see the aACE CRM platform in action so you can have a better understanding of how it can quickly change and improve the way you engage with your customers? Register today to reserve your spot in our next webinar.

"We have been using aACE since 2009 and are very impressed with the ease of use and customization options. We were struggling for years with an off-the-shelf CRM and accounts solution that just didn't suit our business. We then found aACE and spent time with the developers to customize it and make it work exactly how we wanted it. The customization and the migration of our data were seamless with lots of training offered to all our users." - Holly McLeish, Creative Director, Special EFX Ltd

Learn what aACE can do for your business in our February webinars. This month, we’ll be changing things up a little with two tracks of webinars! Those just getting to know aACE can join us on Tuesdays at 12 noon ET, when we’ll be kicking off a new cycle of webinars starting from the very beginning with aACE Basics. Those who are already familiar with aACE — or those who are just eager to skip ahead! — are welcome to join us on Thursdays at 12 noon ET, when we’ll be starting at the midpoint of our webinar cycle with Inventory Replenishment Management.

Worried about missing a presentation? Don’t be! Our webinar cycle will repeat on both tracks, so if you miss a webinar on a Tuesday you can catch it again on Thursday in just a few weeks.

Track 1

February 4th — aACE Basics

If you’re brand-new to aACE, this is the webinar for you! Learn how aACE’s system-wide conventions make it easy for new users to interact with the solution. Check out our video before the presentation to get a sneak peek at aACE’s user-friendly design.

February 11th — Managing Transactions / Purchase Orders

aACE makes it easy to track each step of a transaction, giving you the peace of mind that comes from having one solution manage every aspect of a sale or purchase. We’ll explore how users manage transactions in aACE using the Purchase Orders module as our example.

February 18th — Sales Leads and CRM App

Your sales team is moving fast to keep your customers and prospects engaged, and they need a solution that can keep up – even when they're on the go. See our CRM App in action and learn more about how sales leads move through aACE. Check out our sales leads and CRM App feature highlights for a sneak peek before the presentation.

February 25th — Sales Orders

See aACE's sales order, drop shipping, and special order workflows in action and learn how aACE makes each of those workflows a breeze. Before the webinar, check out our feature highlight for a preview of some of these topics.

Track 2

February 6th — Inventory Replenishment Management

Ensure you always have the right number of products at the right time with aACE's smart inventory replenishment tools. Whether you’re ordering products from a vendor or manufacturing them for stock, aACE can help ensure you always have enough to meet consumer demand. To get a sneak peek at one aspect of this powerful feature, check out our feature highlight on reorder management.

February 13th — Shipping and the aACE Pick App

Your customers depend on you to get them the right products at the right time. Learn how aACE streamlines the pick, pack, and ship process with our Pick App and shipping integrations, and take a sneak peek by checking out our feature highlight.

February 20th — Accounting Basics

Explore aACE’s GL Accounts module and learn how aACE makes it easy to print financial statements, navigate the general ledger, reconcile bank statements, and more. This webinar is very audience-driven, so come early and bring questions!

February 27th — A/R and A/P

Take a deeper dive into aACE’s accounts receivable and accounts payable features. We’ll review the tracking, delivery, and follow-up tools in the Invoices and Purchases modules. We’ll also explore customer and vendor payments, deposits, and scheduling recurring transactions.

We look forward to seeing you in our webinars! Register now to reserve your spot.

Change isn’t easy for a lot of people, and since companies like yours are made up of people, it’s likely your organization is resistant to change, too.

Think about when your company started. There was a small team that worked together to meet goals. Each person called on their own experience and knowledge to create processes to accomplish tasks. As your company grew, those processes got passed on to new hires, who adapted and changed as the company evolved. Eventually, those processes became a hodgepodge of approaches tied together by a common goal — to get the job done.

Over time, those adapted processes can miss important components and lack efficiencies, but if they work, and they keep your workflows going, few people take time to adjust and try new strategies.

Or worse yet, someone suggests a "new" or "improved" way to do something, only to have the new method ultimately cause headaches and more work for your team, thereby decreasing the receptiveness to future changes.

When something seems to work, even if it’s not at peak efficiency, who has time to focus on change and improvements? Your team should, and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Business Process Management (BPM) software can help.

ERP and BPM are game-changers for businesses of all sizes. That’s why there is a growing market for the technology — a market that’s expected to reach almost $80 billion by 2026.

ERP and BPM streamline and automate your work processes, and then align and integrate your key operational components into a single system — from sales and marketing, product planning and development, to billing and accounting, human resources, and much more.

Let’s look at some benefits of ERP and BMS, the behind-the-scenes tech that keep your business going:

1. Insight Into Your Big Picture for Business

If you’re managing your business operations with disparate systems, word-processing documents, and spreadsheets, you’re not able to quickly and accurately get instant insight into your comprehensive business picture. ERP and BMS can radically change how you make business decisions.

By integrating your core workflows and processes into a single platform, you can get instant visibility into all the core components of your operations so you can make better business decisions. In one study of small and medium size businesses (SMBs) that adopted an ERP solution, 48% said they had gained real-time visibility into all of their data.

Do you have audits or regulatory or compliance reporting mandates? ERP and BMS can help you quickly pull your needed information for review and analytics significantly faster than manual processes.

2. Increased Technical Security for Your Business

Disparate systems mean a lot of extra work for your IT and cybersecurity teams. Every software program and application needs to be assessed and protected for vulnerabilities. There are lots of product updates to do and related equipment to track. By using a single platform for business management, you remove some of the work from your IT team so they have fewer applications to manage and protect, which decreases your cybersecurity risks of hacking or exploitation overall.

You can further decrease your organization’s cyber risk by adopting a cloud-based ERP or BMS solution. Moving to the cloud reduces the number of on-premise requirements for your operational workflows and processes, further freeing up resources for your IT team.

3. Improved Efficiencies and Time Saved

Those hodgepodge processes your organization likely uses on a daily basis? They’re probably not that efficient. Oftentimes your team does repetitive manual tasks, like duplicating data into multiple systems or spreadsheets across your organizations. ERM and BMS software means you can enter data once and have it accessible across all of your work processes—from marketing to sales and from manufacturing to product delivery, billing, and payment management. This means improved efficiencies across your organization, time saved for your staff, and ultimately happier employees who don’t feel bogged down by unnecessary tasks.

In the ERP study we mentioned earlier, 77% said they were able to standardize their back-office processes compared to 22% without an ERP, and these businesses experienced almost a 40% decrease in the time it takes for them to make business decisions.

4. Workflows With Standard Operating Procedures

Most operations rely more on people than processes to get the job done. That comes with a lot of inefficiencies. The way one employee does a task on one shift may be completely different than the way another employee does the same task on a different shift. Add that up for all of your employees and all the tasks that have to be accomplished within your organization and before you know it, you have slow, inefficient processes that are prone to human error.

ERP and BMS software allows you to standardize processes — and in many cases automate them — based on your company’s best practices. Not only will that speed tasks up, but it also reduces the opportunity for humans to make errors, further making your processes more reliable and more efficient.

5. Cost savings

ERP and BMS platforms can create significant cost savings for your organization. We mentioned earlier that cloud-hosted platforms can improve your cybersecurity stature. Cloud solutions can also save you money, increase your organizational flexibility, and create opportunities for scalability as your organization grows and changes. Cloud solutions can also help you adopt more robust ERP and BMS platforms that your small teams may otherwise have difficulty maintaining.

But beyond the cloud, these systems can bring other cost saving measures to your organization by eliminating unnecessary software, freeing up staff time, and automating manual tasks. On average, organizations with an ERP can experience about 11% reduction in operational costs and are four times more likely to be able to forecast and plan for future demand.

6. Collaboration Across Departments

One often overlooked benefit of adopting an ERP or BMS solution is the unity it can bring to your workforce. Instead of having disparate systems that aren’t accessible by the masses, your BMS can give the right people the right insight into your operations, no matter where they are. This insight – especially those configurable dashboard and reports — give everyone a clear picture of how well your business is doing, where there are gaps, and where you can make improvements.

Are you ready to increase the speed and accuracy of your daily operations? Join an aACE webinar today to find out how you can seamlessly integrate your sales, operations, and accounting into one easy-to-use solution. Start promoting better collaboration across your entire organization, improve efficiencies and ultimately grow your bottom line.

Your relationships with your potential, current, past, and future customers are the foundation of your company’s success. How you engage with them along the buyer’s journey will form the relationships and loyalties you have over time, which ultimately influences your company’s success and bottom line.

Traditionally, customer relationship management (CRM) was driven exclusively by your sales team. A potential customer connected with your organization, and then a sales team member responded and worked hard to forge a relationship. Answered questions. Demoed products. Made call after call. Maybe even had a couple of meetings in person.

All the information exchanged during those engagements were likely stored somewhere between the sales person’s brain, his or her computer, notes on a desk, and maybe, eventually some type of sales system used by your organization.

Today, digital CRMs are changing the way companies do business. Gone are pen and paper tracking, contact lists stored on desks and computers, and lost emails and connections if a person is out sick or leaves your company.

A CRM handles all your contact information and related sales processes. It gives your team insight into where your customers are on their journey, who has communicated with them, what’s been communicated and how, and what’s needed next.

And while CRMs bring a lot of flexibility and scalability to your organization, your staff doesn’t always embrace them with open arms – and even those with the best intentions don’t always use the solutions to their full capacity.

Why? Well, because some CRMs can be difficult to use and it can be challenging to get your sales team to buy in to all the benefits. Here are 7 common mistakes organizations make when adopting a CRM system and why you should avoid these missteps so you can enjoy the full benefits for your organization:

1. Selecting a CRM off a sales pitch, not one that works for your business goals

If you’re in sales, marketing or organizational leadership, it’s likely you’re constantly targeted by ads and messaging about the next great CRM. Random emails show up in your inbox asking if you can take a call or if you have a few moments to watch a demo. If you’re frustrated by inefficiencies in your current sales processes, it’s easy to bite on all the flash and glamor.

This is a starting point for CRM failure. When evaluating a CRM, don’t just listen to what a vendor tells you it can do for you. Instead, think about what your company needs and ask if it can deliver.

• Can the system be customized for your business needs?
• Is it flexible and scalable?
• Is it easy to use?
• How will it make your existing sales processes stronger?
• What is the key purpose of adopting a CRM?
• Will you use it to drive sales?
• How will the CRM handle leads?
• What will you do with the data collected within your CRM?

Don’t just jump into a purchase off a sales pitch. Be sure to carefully evaluate your organizational and sales needs, and don’t hesitate to get the CRM vendor to carefully answer and explain all of your questions or concerns.

2. Selecting a CRM that's too difficult to use, so your team members won't adopt it

Your sales team is busy. CRMs should make their jobs easier. Need a standard email reply sent on an inquiry? Need a reminder to engage with a customer by phone or email to move them further along through your sales processes? Your CRM should make that easy.

Unfortunately, many CRMs are just difficult to use and some aren’t mobile friendly. Your sales team is always on the go. If they have to go to the office, or stop somewhere and pull out a laptop or log onto a computer to update information, that task is likely going to get pushed further down a priority list and eventually out of sight is out of mind.

Look for CRM options that are mobile friendly and enable your sales team, not discourage them. Many organizations never experience the full benefits of their CRM because the information needed never gets collected.

3. Not establishing system ownership

Even an easy-to-use CRM needs someone (or a team) of people to own and manage it. Are there updates? How do those updates affect your processes? Were new features added? Who reviews those and decides if they align with your business and sales goals?

Organizations often leave these important decisions up to their IT teams. While your IT team should be involved to make sure there are no technical issues or vulnerabilities that may put your organization at risk, they should not have sole ownership or responsibility because they do not have the same insight into your sales and marketing processes as other team members do.

Whoever you select as your CRM owner (and be sure to have backups with the same training) should fully understand your company and sales goals and objectives and be able to align the CRM to your processes.

4. Not aligning your CRM to your sales processes and buyer’s journey

If you’re an established company, you have sales processes that work. Your CRM should fine-tune those processes and automate as many as possible. Need an appointment reminder sent to your calendar? That’s an easy task for a CRM to do. Need to schedule a follow-up email or phone call? Your CRM should be able to handle that. Your CRM should be aligned with your business and sales processes, as well as all of the stages of your buyer’s journey. If you haven’t created a buyer’s journey or buyer’s personas for your sales processes, stop and plan that journey before implementing your CRM. Get started right out of the gate headed in the right direction.

5. Not training your team on how to use your CRM and not explaining how it makes workflows easier

Let’s say you’ve done due diligence in selecting your CRM. It’s easy to use and you’ve selected team owners. You’ve set it up and aligned it with your sales goals and business processes. You’ve even mapped your buyer’s journey and set up personas and related information into your CRM. Now it’s time to sit back and watch the magic happen, right?

Not so fast. Even the best established CRMs need team buy-in. That buy-in begins with education and training. You can’t just say watch this video or read this handout and get to work. You’ll need to invest time and resources in ensuring the people who use your CRM know how it works, and that they understand how it helps them do their jobs better.

Be sure to explain the benefits and efficiencies of your CRM. Show your team members how it makes their jobs easier and can speed up your sales processes and eliminate repetitive tasks. Once you get buy-in from key team members, make them ambassadors for your CRM. Have them help others and share knowledge about how it’s changing the way they handle and process sales. Sales people are often driven by that bottom line so be sure they understand how it can help them make more sales more quickly and possibly with less effort.

6. Not enough data, too much data, or bad data

While CRM failure can begin by not purchasing the right system, it can also happen because of data issues. CRMs can do wonderful things with data, but you need careful planning and execution to ensure that data is being inputted, handled, and used correctly.

If you set up your CRM and enable or require too many fields, your users may feel like it’s more burdensome to use than it is beneficial, so they won’t drop in your requirements. Or maybe your CRM allows individual users to change or rename fields. Before you know it you have six versions of Company Name, Business Name, Organization Name and on and on, and no one knows which field to use or what they mean.

CRMs can also fail because they have too much data. Need to send an email but see three email addresses for the same person? How do you know which one to use? Have to make a phone call, but you’re not sure if you’re speaking to Deb, Debbie, or Debra? You may not want to pick up the phone.

Send an email and it bounces back? Make a call and get a wrong number? Bad data can be just as harmful to your organization as too much data.

Be sure you’re collecting the right amount of data you need and that the fields are clear and easy to understand. Make sure your users can simply and easily input information needed and encourage your system owners to routinely review CRM data to keep it fresh and current.

7. Not integrating your CRM into other business systems

Even the best planned CRMs can fail if they’re not properly integrated into your existing sales processes. Here’s an example: Let’s say you’ve collected all the information you need about a potential customer. They’re ready to make a purchase. All their information is perfectly stored within your CRM. Now you need to complete an invoice and get the product ready to ship or implement. If the core information you need is stored in your CRM and it can’t integrate with your billing or shipping systems, then you’re going to further frustrate team members who will have to manually get that data out of your CRM and into other systems. Not only is it incredibly inefficient, it leaves lots of opportunities for potential errors and communication missteps.

Your CRM should integrate with your existing business systems, like your enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. These integrations can help you seamlessly move data along all of your business processes to happy customers, more sales, and a growing bottom line.

Benefits of CRMs

We just walked through some common missteps for CRM, but before we go, let’s look at some of the benefits.

• CRMs help you manage complex business relationships in easy-to-use dashboards where you can quickly visualize data about your customers’ needs.
• If you have a potential new customer, a CRM can help you quickly create quotes, track your engagements with that lead, plan for next steps, and follow you through closed deals.
• Rate card integrations for your CRM mean you’ll never have to guess on a quote again and will always have quick access to the right data to make sure you don’t make pricing mistakes.
• Sending emails with attachments or other marketing campaigns like newsletters? A good CRM helps you keep track of it all by carefully associating all related communications to your contacts.
• See your commissions in real time. A CRM lets sales teams see their commission rates based on percentages of sale, percentage or margins and other configurations.

Are you ready to simplify and streamline your sales processes with a CRM? Register for an aACE webinar and learn how you can start automating your sales processes and begin making more sales today!

If your business involves manufacturing and warehousing capabilities, you understand just how many individual parts must align at the right time in the right place to meet your peak operational efficiency goals and keep your customers happy.

One missed product order, one late shipment, or one missed invoice and your business can slow or come to a complete halt. Warehouse management automation through business management software (BMS) can decrease the likelihood of these errors and give you full insight into all your operations at any point in time.

Unfortunately, for many small and medium size businesses, many critical operational functions are still handled by disparate systems and sometimes even paper manifests facilitated by memory, paper calendar reminders, manual phone orders, and spreadsheets that are hundreds — or even thousands — of cells deep. Who can keep up?

These disparate and patchworked systems may work some of the time, but they’re time-consuming and often don’t provide complete or instant insight into your overall operations.

A BMS platform with shipping and receiving tools can remove the frustration and headaches of processes that have been hodge-podged together over time.

aACE’s shipping and receiving tools enable manufacturing and warehouse operators to improve efficiencies by managing all of their core operations in a single cross-platform solution. You can quickly get real-time insight into all of your inventory, fulfill orders, receive payments, and get alerts about all your processes from a single, easy-to-use solution.

Here are 5 ways aACE can help you streamline and automate tasks within your warehouse management system to improve operational efficiencies:

1. Inventory Management

If you’re still using manual processes for your manufacturing and warehousing operations, this might look familiar to you. A team member notices you’re running low on a product or supply. The employee logs in online or places a call for a reorder. You always get a specific number of that product and generally have a good idea of how long that will last you. The order is made and then sometime later a truck pulls up to your warehouse loaded with boxes of products or supplies.

When that shipment comes in, an employee receives the order. That employee may or may not know you’re expecting a delivery. Nonetheless, the driver and your employee exchange paperwork. The boxes are unloaded, and team members get busy counting and accounting for the shipment. Numbers and information are written down or put into a spreadsheet. Those boxes are then routed to another location in your facility where they’re stored until needed.

But what if the order was over-estimated and you have no room for all the extra goods that just came in? Or what if the employee who placed the order didn’t realize your team recently relocated that product to another section of your warehouse and you weren’t actually running low at all?

Now you have twice the product on the floor than you actually need and processes are slowed while everyone works together to try to figure out where to store the excess and how to manage the possible expenditure misstep.

This process is inefficient, tedious, and time-consuming. What if you could free up your employees resources here so their time could be put to use for more valuable tasks?

aACE’s built-in inventory management software (IMS) can speed up these processes with streamlined steps and automation, while supporting you with better insight and tracking.

For example, IMS gives you constant insight into your inventory. You can forecast inventory requirements based on your existing business processes and orders. It knows just how much inventory you need and when, and can help you save money with freight management tools.

2. Automated Shipments and Product Selection

Your warehouses are busy places. You have inventory constantly on the move. From supplies and products coming in to orders going out, if you’re using manual processes to track everything, it’s a juggling act — and it’s easy to drop the ball.

Automated shipping records will help your team always know which shipments are coming in and going out so no one is caught off guard.

You can even use aACE’s Pick App with barcode scanning to make sure that every product selected is the right one, every time.

3. eCommerce, Order Management, and Shipping

Product demand drives your inventory processes, so while you’re streamlining efficiencies within your warehouse, you can also streamline and automate many of your sales order processes.

An order management tool can help your team take orders from start to finish — while giving everyone complete insight into what’s happening without having to duplicate order entries in multiple places throughout your business.

aACE’s order management engine automates order entries, including full integrations with the industry’s most popular eCommerce tools. Your team members can easily take payments with point-of-sale payment processing and can even automate payments based on system events like when a deposit is needed, when goods are shipped, or other specifications tailored to your business processes.

The order management system can even automatically handle sales and use tax calculations, as well as credit management tools, and auto-generated purchase orders and invoices that are integrated with your regular accounting processes.

If a payment fails, aACE’s notification system will alert you via email and/or text messages before a product leaves your building — so you can easily follow-up and confirm payment before your shipment heads out the door.

And stop wasting time calling for couriers or waiting for an outgoing shipment pickup. With integrated NRG and ReadyShipper, you can streamline your packing and shipping processes, including support for major carriers like FedEx, USPS, UPS, and other LTL carriers.

4. Tracking and Statements

Remember that scenario we shared earlier with the tedious inventory management and manual supply tracking? Shipping and receiving software can eliminate some of that strain. With purchase order next-step tracking, you will always be aware of which supplies your team ordered and when those products will arrive. This means your team is always ready to receive new shipments.

Your purchasing and production team members can even receive instant notifications to let them know when incoming shipments have been received. That way they can speed up inspections, adjust for returns, and request re-shipments as needed. No more paper manifests and drowning in spreadsheets or repeating manual data entry across multiple work groups.

5. Calendar and Scheduling

The most efficient warehouse and manufacturing operations have comprehensive insight into all of the moving components of their operations.

Calendar and scheduling tools integrated into your business management software can help you get instant insight into everything happening across your operations. From leads, to purchase orders, to shipments and inventories, you can see calendar displays with all important related dates.

Best yet, those calendar events are linked to corresponding records, meaning you can drill down into more details with a single click within the calendar view, including insight into past events.

If your calendar is full, and we hope it is, you can filter your views by customer, job, teams, and resources — whatever you need to get a better picture of the important events that affect your operations. You can even color-code the events so you can easily see which events need immediate action and which are good to go.

The aACE+ DayBack calendar is also great for project management because you can switch to a Gantt-style view to see related events up to nine weeks out. And with drag-and-drop rescheduling, it’s easy to move things around to reschedule with related records.

Save Time, Money, and Resources with BSM

aACE clients say business management software saves them hundreds of hours of labor every month and the software is a critical to business success, including growth in annual revenue and more insight into business operational efficiencies.

Put down the paper and stop wasting time with tedious manual process. Register for an aACE webinar today to learn more about how its software can help you streamline your warehouse and manufacturing processes so you can focus more on tasks that improve customer service and add to your bottom line.

"I can say that using aACE actually helped us learn how to do business more professionally." - Jim Parker, President and Owner, Vacutherm Inc.

 

Have you made your New Year's resolutions yet? Whether you'd like to improve the way your sales team tracks leads, simplify your sales taxes, or document your custom workflows, our January webinars can help your business start 2020 off on the right foot. Last month we covered topics ranging from credit card purchasing to commissions and document management to beginning balances. Here's what we have in store for January:

January 6th – Sales Leads and the CRM App

Your sales team is moving fast to keep your customers and prospects engaged, and they need a solution that can keep up – even when they're on the go. See our CRM App in action and learn more about how sales leads move through aACE. Check out our sales leads and CRM App feature highlights for a sneak peek before the presentation.

January 8th – Tax Profiles and aACE+ AvaTax

Tax season isn’t anyone’s favorite time of year. Fortunately, aACE has you covered through our out-of-the-box tax management infrastructure as well as the aACE+ Avalara AvaTax integration. Learn how aACE takes the guesswork out of tax time.

January 22nd – aACE+ The BPR

Learn how The BPR can help you quickly, easily, and accurately document your company's unique workflows and customized features in this guest presentation from our friends at Optimum Output.

Register now to save your spot in these exciting presentations!