Greener Pastures

Do you suffer from a people overload?

Do you suffer from an information overload?

Manage your people flow better with software.  How?  Use a CRM system.  'C'ustermer 'R'elationship 'M'anagement comes in a wide variety of shapes and sizes.  Outlook has a very good contact manager.  ACT! is a well known application in the Small Business Arena.  Quickbooks has added a CRM product that 'integrates' into Quickbooks.  Now, though, Microsoft has built a very good competitor for the CRM market in Small Business.

Are you looking for an enterprise grade product customized for Small Business?  Microsoft Dynamics recently released CRM 3.0 SBE.  This is a great CRM Solution, contact Larry Lentz for more detailed information.  Larry is a recognized leader in the Microsoft CRM community.

For those looking for an integrated solution that allows for Information Flow, but are trying to avoid the committment of the Microsoft CRM, there's Microsoft Business Contact Manager for Outlook.  This is a very good system for managing your business contacts and accounts and integrating information with your Small Business Accounting.  BCM allows you to prepare quotes, review financial information and work with SBA information in a controlled flow.  Do you have Sales associates who need to prepare quotres, but don't need to be able to look at the bank accounts?  This locks that out.  Do you have Cusinter Service Reps who need to track time and report time, but don't need direct access to the Accounting database?  BCM w/SBA does just that.

Oh, one thing to remember about both CRM 3.0 SBE and BCM, when done right, security is built in.  It's not so much about security, though, but privacy and protecting your contacts/customers/vendors and their information.  Leveraging your data means accessing the data in a responsible manner.  There are some applications, whose dedication to security is an after thought.  That may have been true even of Microsoft in the past, but these days, if you don't secure it, it's not because you can't.

So as you ask yourself, 'When's the last time I talked to Client X?', or 'Can I sell customer Y that $33,000 widget?' you can look in your contact manager and you'll be ready.

As with any solution, discuss it with your trusted advisor and make an informed decision.

You should. And to help you Microsoft offers a wide variety of applications to help you manage that money.  Now some small businesses start with Excel or some Access DB to manage cash flow.  Usually they also use these tools to manage projects or time or the production of widgets, etc.  We have seen some extremely elaborate spreadsheets in our time.  Others either graduate to or go straight to the green box.  Full disclosure here, Annabel Watters, PC is a Certified Pro Advisor for that company, and gets a fair amount of business supporting it.  Others may look at a fruit bearing solution from a wise old person.  Here too, we support and maintain a decent business doing so.  Moving up the food chain, there's Microsoft Small Business Financials.  For most small businesses a great solution, but for micro to small businesses, this is overkill.

For customers looking for an alternative to the green box or looking for integrated solutions, then there's Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting.  We can all go to the Office Small Business Accounting Page and get all the marketing we can handle.  I'll try to look at some of the functionality in terms of business flow and integration.  By the way, what do I mean when I say integration.  In it's simplest form I mean, eliminate double entry of data.  Make it so information flows from one application to another, from one user to another, from one process to the next.

So what seperates SBA from other applications in this space?  From an IT standpoint, that's simple, it is built on a Microsoft SQL DB engine.  Why is this important, and what about that sets it apart from others.  It is designed for multi-user.  Other applications may be built on SQL, other apps may say they are multi-user, but SBA truely delivers on a client-server based deployment.  Our internal test show between a 25% and 50%  improvement in performance when the DB is placed on SBS Premium 2003 (w/SQL) over when running locally.  Well other apps don't suffer that, perhaps not, but we are looking beyond today to the future.  Another thing that sets it apart it Data Analysis.  Out of the box it has Data Analysis tools built on Microsoft Office applications like Access and Excel.  Why is that important?  Well, perhaps you need to decide between buying  a new Truck for local delivery or repairing the existing one.  The pivot charts and tables allow you to look at data in a variety of ways to get a better view of your financial situation.  Larger firms pay huge dollars for this type of information flexibility.  Other players in this space require a third party application to perform this analysis.  Better yet, you could hire a CPA firm to do that for you. We can, but SBA offers it out of the box, so even if you do hire a CPA firm to perform some analysis, they can do it faster and with greater accuracy than with other applications in this space.  In regards to integration, SBA is designed to plug in with Business contact Manager for Microsoft Outlook.  I'll discuss BCM in another post, but basically it allows say sales and support people to enter time, communicate with clients, etc without going into the accounting application, yet still share a central DB of information.  A sales person can look at the financial history of a customer before agreeing to say a 90 day payment, or make sure that the customer is up to date before selling any new widgets to them.  A customer service person can look at the history of a customer to determine a course of action for a support issue.  A sales person can create an opportunity, convert it to a quote, then on to a sales order without entering the data into the accounting application. Once the order is fullfilled accounting can invoice the order and ship it.  Pretty simple and very little data entry is done along the way.  So you have a retail outlet?  SBA has an integration path with Microsoft Point of Sale.  Growing?  Microsoft SBA can go straight into Small Business Financials or Great Plains.

Small Business Accounting has a wide range of features, starting with strong Accounting principles built into the system.  It is built from the past, allowing you to migrate off the green box or up from Excel or Access.  It is built for now, to help you maximize productivity by eliminating double entry of data.  Further it is built for the future, by providing a clear upgrade path as you outgrow it, you can stay in the family.

I haven't even mentioned the price-point.  Extremely aggresive for the space, and cannot be ignored.  We recommend that SBA be installed/deployed as part of a larger effort to stremline operations.  As such, please consult a Microsoft Small Business Specialist about what it can do for you.  Always, no matter what the Accounting application, have your CPA set it up properly for you.  We do a pretty good business 'cleaning' people's databases while preparing tax returns.  People, until trained properly will mislabel things and cause their CPA tax prep bill to skyrocket, simply because they were not diligent on their day to day entry of data into the accounting system.

Are you looking for a way to harness and leverage information in your small business?  Here's a tip.  You may need some structure.  The Microsoft Small Business Stack is a great way to do just that.  I'll be looking, over the next few posts, at creating some structure for your data.

I'll start with the life blood of all Small Businesses: It's money.  Now maybe cash flow is good for you, maybe not, but for most of our Micro Business clients, cash flow is a concern.  Microsoft has several offerings in the Accounting space: Microsoft Office Access/Excel, Microsoft Money Small Business Edition, Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting, and Microsoft Small Business Financials.

Then we'll look at Contact/Customer Management.  Here too, there are a variety of offerings that, depending on your level of need and control may dictate the solution in this space.  Microsoft Offers Office Outlook, Outlook w/Business Contact Manager, and Microsoft CRM Small Business Edition.

Next we'll discuss some of the finer points of business process control or information flow and control, and the glue that binds it all together.  Some of this we know and use already, other parts may be a bit newer to you.  The first is a business essential for any Small Business these days: Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 Premium Edition.  As part of that is the Companyweb, Windows Sharepoint Services, a simple, but powerful portal solution that web enables your team.  Then there's a forms application, called Microsoft Office InfoPath, as well as the rest of the Microsoft Office suite.

Functionally many parts of this can be accomplished by a variety of other applications, from Accounting systems to Open Source Portals and word processors.  They key is the exceptional depth of functionality that can only be attained through integration of data and processes.  The Microsoft Small Business Stack is built on a core of products that provide an unequalled level of value for the Small Business owner as well as the Small Business Stakeholder.

I shall attempt as best I can to refrain from discussions of Line of Business Applications.  Some are great, others are good, and others still are, well...horrible.  I shall also refrain from discussions of security except as they directly relate to the main discussion.  It should go without saying that multi-layer firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam, and anti-spyware are all required peices to ANY solution.  Likewise, the ability of any information based business system to produce results is directly related to the level of committment to the effort of the people in the organization.  Executive as well as worker-bee buy-in is crucial to the success of any small business effort, and IT is no exception.

So, now, on with the show...