Bond Consulting Services

Five Ways to Turn Business Data Into Business Insight Part 4: Transform Big Data into Your Next Big Idea

This is the fourth post in our five-part series, Five Ways to Turn Business Data into Business Insight. We’ve previously looked at how dashboards can provide easy information access to your team members based on their specific roles, how self-service business intelligence (BI) and reporting can lighten the load on IT resources, and how mobile BI impacts users and IT. Today, we’ll discuss Big Data and its big implications on small and mid-sized business.

Transform Big Data into Your Next Big Idea

Is there a hotter topic or bigger buzzword than Big Data? The amount of data and the mind-blowing pace at which it’s being created is unprecedented, but without the tools that can make sense of it all, Big Data is just a lot of ones and zeroes. So how do you enrich your data with advanced analytics to create real insight and ideas?

With a business intelligence platform based entirely on the Microsoft stack including SQL Server, Office and SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics ERP gives every user the ability to analyze and manage a massive amount of data. This lets your team do real analysis on years of financial history, sales figures, cost structures, customer information, inventory levels and other business data and make sound projections about what you can expect in the weeks, months and years to come.

Taking analysis a step further, you can match your historical data with Bing’s maps and social search information, so you can take inventory price levels, for example, and match them against competitive prices, allowing you to analyze and plan more effectively. And with predictive analysis tools, you can identify your most profitable customers and products, allowing you to make valuable cross-sell and up-sell recommendations that improve both sales and customer satisfaction.

Your data is no good if it’s lying dormant on a server somewhere. Microsoft Dynamics lets you get at it and get into it, so you can create the big ideas that make Big Data such a big deal.

Don’t just take our word for it. Read how international learning organization, NCFE, makes sense of its data using Microsoft tools to create a 360-degree view of customer interactions.
Next time, we’ll make sense of the other tech buzzword—“the cloud”—to see how it applies to your BI and reporting. In the meantime, take a product test drive or learn more about buying and deploying a business solution from Microsoft.

by Bond Consulting Services

Five Ways to Turn Business Data into Business Intelligence Part 3: Get BI on the Fly.

This is the third post in our five-part series, Five Ways to Turn Business Data into Business Insight. We’ve previously looked at how dashboards can provide easy information access to your team members based on specific roles and how self-service business intelligence (BI) and reporting can lighten the load on IT resources. Today, we’ll discuss mobile BI and its impact on users and IT.

Get BI on the Fly.

Making everything mobile is the mantra of nearly every business and certainly every IT department. And why not? When you give users the same flexibility and functionality in their business systems that they get in their personal lives, they’re happier, they’re more productive and your business reaps the benefits. And when it comes to business insight and reporting, you can put the information team members need in the palms of their hands, anytime they need it, wherever they are.

How does it work? A business solution from Microsoft uses Office and Microsoft SharePoint as a platform for collaboration and distribution and extends access to key information and reports users working from their phones or tablets. And with Microsoft SharePoint or OneDrive, users can securely save reports to the cloud, access them from their personal devices, and easily share them with other members of the team.

This safe and easy way to share data and insight will reward you with increased productivity and a level of service that will be the envy of your peers—and your competition. In our next entry, we’ll talk about what Big Data really means for small and mid-sized businesses and how to make it work for your company.

In the meantime, learn more about Microsoft Dynamics and take a product test drive or learn more about buying and deploying a business solution from Microsoft.

Test Drive Dynamics GP

by Bond Consulting Services

Five Ways to Turn Business Data Into Business Insight Part 2: Take the Burden Out of Business Intelligence

This is the second post in our five-part series, Five Ways to Turn Business Data into Business Insight. In part one we looked at how dashboards can provide easy information access to your team members based on their specific roles. Today, we’ll discuss the push towards empowering users while lessening the business intelligence (BI) and reporting burden on IT.

Take the burden out of business intelligence with self-service reporting

If money were no object, you’d have a personal technology counselor for every employee. That’s why balancing the cost of IT “overhead” with the powerful benefits of your IT team is so tricky for every business. Just imagine if all your employees could manage, obtain and act on data on their own. Your people would have all the info they need, and your thinly resourced IT teams could focus on the bigger technology picture of your entire business.

The reporting and analytics tools within Microsoft Dynamics ERP help you answer your specific business questions quickly through high-impact reports, charts and simple analysis designed to be easy, usable and adaptable for everyone. Put another way: you don’t have to be an analytics power user or software developer to get the reports you need.

We’ve built hundreds of out-of-the-box standard reports. We’ve also given users the ability to tweak and adapt these standard reports—changing fields, adapting terminology and adding inputs from other data sources. All without calls to the helpdesk. With a reporting, collaboration and distribution platform based on Microsoft SQL Server, Office and SharePoint, you and your employees can take full advantage of your Microsoft investments and get the business insight you need. Again, without IT involvement.

Don’t just take our word for it. Learn how a high school project turned into a multi-million dollar business now powered by Microsoft Dynamics.

Put the power of BI and reporting in your team’s hands, and you’ll watch their productivity (and IT’s) skyrocket. In the next blog post, we’ll take this one step further, and show you how a business solution from Microsoft can make business intelligence as mobile as your team is.

Register for our April 14 webinar about this topic

by Bond Consulting Services

Five Ways to Turn Business Data into Business Insight Part 1: Get Better, Not Bigger Dashboards

When you’re running a business that’s growing, it can be hard to have a complete view of your financial picture and overall performance. As you grow and add customers, suppliers and product lines, you need access to the information that matters most to your business. And every member of your team needs an accurate, timely look at what’s most important for their unique role.

In this five-part series, we’ll tackle the often-illusive topic of business intelligence (or BI), diving into the principles that will ensure both you and your team are armed with the information you need to manage and grow a better business.

Get Better, Not Bigger, Dashboards.

Running a successful business depends on the ability to gain insight from business data and present information in a meaningful way. To be successful, your people need to transform data into actionable insight—no matter where they are located in the organization. Microsoft Dynamics ERP helps them make informed decisions as a natural part of their everyday work experience by making the tools on their desktop even more effective, such as:

Role Based Reporting: Monitor current activity and compare it to historical performance and growth targets, giving your people access to specific reports related to their task or role.

Easy Access to Charts and KPIs: View business performance at a glance and drill into more detail when trends are spotted and you need additional information.

Ad-hoc Query and Analysis: Robust analysis capabilities, especially with a familiar tool like Microsoft Office Excel, enable your team do ad-hoc queries on the fly without the help of IT. They can compare plans to actuals, analyze that information, make the necessary adjustments, and then take action.

With business intelligence capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics ERP, you and your team can also be notified when key thresholds are hit, either through emails in your inbox or messages on your homepage. For example, establish the parameters that make the most sense for your business and get alerts when sales drop below expectations, inventory levels rise, or cash flow is a potential concern.

When you have the right insight and can take quick action, you can make the types of decisions that save and make real money. Don’t just take our word for it. Read how Talking Rain, a consumer packaged goods distributor, used Microsoft Dynamics to get the right information into the hands of their employees for better decision-making. Then, take a product test drive or learn more about buying and deploying a business solution from Microsoft.

Next time, we’ll talk about how your team can take BI and reporting into their own hands without relying on IT.

Register for our upcoming webinar about this topic on April 14!

by Bond Consulting Services

Five Ways to Get a Quick Return on Your Paperless Solution Investment

As you start thinking about new projects to take on for 2015, those that will improve your processes while providing the highest return on investment will probably move to the top of your list. One such project you should start considering (if you haven’t already) is moving your paper documents to an electronic filing system. Typically document management solutions with AP integration will provide a return within 6-9 months – potentially sooner depending on your volume and current processes.

There are a few different ways a return on investment with document management can be calculated. For the most part those calculations come down to how much time is saved in processing documents and which costs will be cut by eliminating paper filing. Here are a few of those cost saving approaches you should be taking into consideration:

1. Eliminate Paper Storage Costs

Storing documents is expensive – especially if you’re using an off-site storage facility or an on-site filing room to house all those paper documents. In some cases, eliminating those off-site storage fees alone will more than pay for the paperless solution.

Another cost to consider is the paper itself. Think of how much paper you buy every month on top of how much you spend on ink, toner and filing supplies. If you start to add up those costs you might be surprised to find out how much you are really spending to maintain your paper filing system.

2. Save Time Filing Documents

The next cost you’ll want to consider is the amount of time spent by each employee each day to print, copy, file and search for documents. Take the employee wage multiplied by the amount of time spent each day and multiply that by 30 to look at a full month’s worth of costs.  Plus all that extra time can be re-purposed so that your team is focusing more on revenue-generating tasks or projects they can add more value to.

3. Minimize Mail and Courier Fees

Moving physical documents between offices can be expensive too. If you have remote office locations that are all collecting documents and shipping them to corporate on a regular basis, those costs are probably pretty significant. By going electronic, every employee could access the documents they need from their computer or mobile device regardless of which office they’re in. Also think about all of the invoices that get printed and mailed to your customers. Automating that process and sending them via email instead will save time and postage fees.

4. Simplify Auditing

Being audited is not fun for anyone involved, but if you’re in a situation where you can’t easily deliver the documents your auditors require you could also be facing some heavy penalties. The less time you have the auditors on site the better, so being able to provide them with quick, easy access to the documents they need electronically means your team can get back to work faster.

5. Ensure On-time Payments

One cost you may not often think about is the consequence of not being able to process invoices quickly and make payments. If you aren’t able to make your payments on time, you could be forced to pay late fees. Simplifying the workflow and approval processes will actually allow you to pay early and potentially take advantage of early-pay discounts – which makes the cost savings exponentially more significant.

These are just a few ideas for you to think about as you continue your 2015 planning. There are plenty more ways you can save by going paperless and we usually uncover those through our discovery process. To learn more, attend our next webinar.

*This is a guest blog post courtesy of our partner Altec.

by Bond Consulting Services

Do You Think You Don’t Owe Sales Tax? You Could Be Wrong

Think because you’re not a retailer you don’t have a sales tax obligation? Think again. Often, companies that don’t collect and remit sales tax actually have much more rigorous rules to follow for compliance. And when it comes to pleading your case to the state auditor, ignorance isn’t bliss.

Even if you don’t sell direct to consumers, you may still be part of the transaction through a supply chain. As such, it is your job to reassure the state that you are exempt from collecting tax. Not-for profit organizations and governments also need to prove exempt status. This proof is typically in the form of an Exemption Certificate, which can vary by type and requirements. Some certificates are limited to purchases of only certain items, others are limited to certain items used for the completion of a certain project; some certificates provide a fractional or percentage exemption, while others are date-sensitive.

Managing how your business handles exemption certificates, and understanding when you do and don’t owe sales or seller’s use tax, is critical to maintain compliance. It’s also incredibly difficult to do if you don’t have the right systems.

There are three primary pieces you need to properly manage exemption certificates:

1. Exemption Certificate Management Software
2. ERP System
3. Tax Decision Software

All three are critical for minimizing non-taxed transaction audit exposure, increasing staff productivity and improving the exempt customer purchase experience. These three systems play an important role at each step of the exemption certificate lifecycle:

Initiation of certificate process - The first step begins with the customer and the ERP software because this is where sales and invoices originate. When customers are exempt from sales tax the seller needs to collect an exemption certificate from them. However, often times customers do not know what documentation to provide and those taking the order do not have the certificate expertise to know which documentation they need.

Ensuring accurate collection - In the automated Exemption Certificate Lifecycle, these issues are solved with intelligent exemption certificate management (ECM) software. Customer data is passed to the ECM software and requests for certificates are automatically sent to customers. Intelligent ECM software will track the status of requests and help ensure customers provide only valid certificate information for their transactions. Intelligent ECM software can retrieve and provide copies of certificates to auditors. In addition, ECM software serves as the “source of truth” for certificates and will manage certificates, including tracking certificate expirations and certificates that have been deemed invalid. The management of all certificate data plays a critical role in the tax decision software.

Communication with tax decision software - The ERP software interacts with the tax decision software because it needs to know what tax amount, if any, it needs to apply to invoices for customers. If the tax decision software has accurate certificate data, then customers who are exempt from sales tax will be billed correctly. If not, then not only will exempt customers be billed incorrectly but the seller is also increasing its audit exposure and risk.

Depending on your business, you may be responsible for both issuing and collecting certificates. The proper application of each exemption to each sale is critical. Without proper documentation, auditors could determine that you understated or improperly exempted taxable sales and that could cost you.

Learn more about exemption certificates and common mistakes many businesses make, by watching the short video “Do You Make These 3 Errors on Tax-Exempt Sales?”

WATCH VIDEO

To learn more tips  please join us for our upcoming webinar on Tuesday, January 20 at 10:00AM: Get Back 11 Hours a Month with Sales Tax Automation

by Bond Consulting Services