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SAP Business One Customer Newsletter

Welcome  to latest edition of the Sapphire Newsletter for SAP Business One Users.  

I would like to start by saying a big thank you to everyone that came along to the Sapphire SAP Business One User Day and helped make the event such a success.  Presentations from all of the sessions can be found on the Sapphire SAP Business One Support site:

 www.sapphiresystems.co.uk/sb1 (you do not need to log-in to view this section of the site). 

Those that participated in the event gave very positive feedback, including:

(Ratings are on a scale of 1 – 5, with 5 being the best)

• Overall rating of the event: 4.63

• The reception on the terrace following the conference: 4.67

• Success in meeting objectives: 4.17

• Presentation on SAP Business One 2007: 4.25

Some of the comments from the day:

“Good to have in your office.  Good to meet the service personnel and see where they work.”

“Really good day, lots of tips to take away from the day.  A good reminder of some of the functionality that had been forgotten.  It is good  to be able to put faces to names!!”

“Overall, an informative event.  Much benefit gained from meeting Sapphire personnel face to face”

“A really nice day, well looked after”

“The team from Sapphire that were on hand to answer questions and clarify issues were very helpful and professional, and certainly helped instil confidence in Sapphire from my point of view.”

Sapphire as an organisation continues to grow and the team is expanding in numbers accordingly.  Additions to the team include Matthew Greef who joins Ahsan Siddiqi and Steve Wood on the Support Desk.

I am always keen find out what you think of the Sapphire newsletter, as well as any feedback you may have on Sapphire’s service to you as a whole, so please email me your thoughts at ian.caswell@sapphiresystems.co.uk

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These webinars are free of charge to all our SAP Business One Customers and all that's required to participate is a phone line and an internet connection.  To enrol on any of the webinars listed below please visit:

www.sapphiresystems.co.uk/contact/customer.htm

We look forward to welcoming you!

5th September 2007:

MRP and Stock Re-ordering

How to use MRP to check stock levels and assist with management of reordering. 

26th September 2007:

Importing Documents into alternative Periods Using DTW

How to use DTW to generate recurring invoices or adjustment of postings.

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Latest Course Schedule Now Available!

We are pleased to announce that the latest Training Course are now available from the Sapphire Training team.  Please click here to request your copy. 

Alternatively you can call our Training Advisor Sharon Stevenson on 020 7684 2000 or email training@sapphiresystems.co.uk for more information.

The cost per delegate per course is £345 + VAT including lunch and course notes - receive 10% off when you book 3 or more people on the same course!

Design your own Vision Course on the topics of your choice:

Available at £925 + VAT per day at your office, or £1380 + VAT at Sapphire, for up to 6 people.  Training can be given on a copy of your own data at an extra charge if required.

Tailored training for your Finance Team will facilitate the production of even better and more meaningful management reports, helping you get the most from your solution and the best return on your solution and training investment.

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Private sector and public sector organisations are similarly driven to save costs and maximise service delivery. So improving an organisation's efficiency is a high priority. Experience shows that automating the ‘procure-to-pay' process is one of the easiest and most effective ways of driving significant benefits for an organisation, irrespective of whether it is a large public entity or a small trading company.

The traditional ‘procure-to-pay' process is extremely manually-intensive and costly as it involves the processing and distribution of large numbers of documents, for example, placing purchase orders, processing purchase invoices, gaining budget holder approval and paying suppliers. Printing information onto pre-printed stationery and posting paper documents has traditionally been the way to create and distribute purchase orders, remittance advices and cheques, but it is costly. Similarly, when purchase invoices arrive from suppliers, manually intensive and paper-based internal processes are involved when processing, approving and coding the relevant purchase invoice data. For all of these reasons, the cost of retrieval and document storage can quickly spiral, exacerbated by the requirement of HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) to store all relevant documents for seven years.

A completely automated e-Procurement solution may be considered ideal, but in practice this is difficult to achieve. However, electronic document management (EDM) technology can help organisations quickly realise efficiency gains in their ‘procure-to-pay' process, allowing them to bridge the divide between paper and electronic processes whilst reducing costs.

Employing EDM Solutions:

Commonly, there are four distinct phases of the procure-to-pay process, each involving different documents. The initial communication with suppliers involves purchase orders and remittance advices; data capture from supplier documents such as purchase invoices; authorisation and coding of internal documents and finally; making the payment using cheques. However, using EDM, organisations can generate significant savings from each of these stages in the process.

Supplier Communication

Moving away from pre-printed stationery is the first step in reducing document production costs. Desktop form publishing tools can be used to merge data from a finance system with a graphical overlay, providing plain paper laser printing. Complex business rules can also be employed, such as varying delivery details or terms and conditions, providing far greater levels of flexibility over and above traditional methods. Data look-up facilities to other business systems can also automatically merge relevant data, without the need for complex system integration.

Whilst plain paper gives the most cost effective print solution, even greater cost reductions can be gained through the electronic delivery of documents. Both automated fax and email delivery significantly reduce costs as well as reducing delivery times. An automated fax solution provides secure and reliable document delivery, as well as an audit report. Conducting business using email communication is now also accepted and provides the cheapest form of document delivery available. In addition to merging data into the body of the email, providing the document as a PDF attachment is becoming increasingly standard. Once the creation and distribution of documents has been automated, organisations can look to complementary messaging to deliver additional document copies at no cost to other business users – reducing the number of queries placed on the finance team.

For regulatory reasons, copies of these documents need to be retained for several years. However, with EDM available there is no need to print and file office copies or distribute internally. An exact image of the document produced can be stored electronically and made available to the appropriate users directly through a finance system or intranet.

Data Capture

Controlling documents generated in-house and the associated costs is only one part of the paper process. Typically, purchase invoices are sent to organisations in paper form and this represents its own challenges and costs for an organisation. The key difference here is data. With internal documents, a company already possesses the originating data, whereas with external supplier documents, it is totally reliant on inbound paper documents for the data it needs. In order to process this data, finance departments typically have to re-key the information into their own finance systems. This data re-keying is time consuming and expensive, so EDM can be used to facilitate automated data capture.

To automate this process, purchase invoices are scanned and converted into electronic images. Images are then passed through an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process and key data is captured and verified. Firstly, unique data such as the VAT or Company Registration Number is analysed to identify the supplier. Once the supplier is validated against the finance system, header and line-level data from the purchase invoice is extracted before being validated against purchase order data already held (if available). Once validated, the data can be presented to the user, alongside the purchase invoice image, for any final checks before the data is automatically loaded into a finance system for final processing.

The result is a dramatic reduction in manual keying effort, data automatically loaded into the finance system and an image of the purchase invoice available ‘on-tap' for electronic retrieval.

Internal Authorisation

Once a purchase invoice is processed by the finance operation, there is often a requirement for input from budget holders to approve the purchase invoice for payment and/or to add nominal ledger codes for budget allocation. Again, the typically manual process of photocopying the document, sending it out in the internal mail and waiting for a response is time consuming and extremely costly. EDM can be used to automate this process, using the document images already captured.

An electronic authorisation process can be triggered automatically, and an email sent to the appropriate user indicating they have a task to complete. By clicking on a link contained within the email, the user is presented with the purchase invoice image, a summary of the data and fields to add coding information, if required. A user can then accept, reject or query the entry as required. Multiple levels of authorisation can be configured, to handle multiple budget holders if appropriate. Once given final approval, the data entered can be automatically imported into a finance system, to update the purchase invoice status. Email reminders can be generated automatically, if no user response is detected within the allocated time period. The EDM keeps an audit trail of the users and their data and stores this as a permanent record against the purchase invoice for future reference and audit purposes.

For users who are frequently out of the office, modern smartphones give them the ability to access all these processes quickly and easily, regardless of their current location. For example, whilst waiting for his flight, a Financial Director could approve purchase invoices on his PDA.

Secure Payments

The purchase invoice transaction is now approved and coded on the finance system and awaiting payment to the supplier. Traditionally, payments were, and sometimes still are, made via manually written cheques. Some organisations use pre-printed cheque stationery with impact printers. The BACS-iP system is the most cost-effective method for making payment and maximises efficiency through secure electronic payments. Batches of payments are produced by the finance system, and the BACS-iP solution validates the data against known sort and account codes before requiring a digital signature to approve the payment run. The digital signature is provided by a secure chip-and-pin system. Reports are then made available electronically, so mistakes in supplier payment details can be quickly identified and rectified.

If electronic payments cannot be made, an EDM solution can still help with cheque payment efficiencies. By combining APACS approved MICR printers with secure, blank cheque stationery, an efficient laser printing cheque solution can be employed. In a similar manner to the purchase order documents, business rules can be used to automate the cheque production process, so one type of stationery can be used for multiple bank accounts, and data can be merged from other systems.

Benefits

As highlighted earlier, EDM can be used throughout the ‘procure-to-pay' process to support and image-enable manual procedures. Organisations are implementing this technology to realise savings, around;

• document production and distribution costs which are slashed when moving to electronic methods. (An organisation typically saves up to £1.00 per document when it is sent electronically rather than in the post).

• the electronic storage of documents in the EDM system resulting in negligible storage costs, retrieval costs and internal distribution costs.

• automated data capture which can save organisations in excess of £10 per purchase invoice processed when compared with manual keying.

• the electronic routing of documents for authorisation which removes all the costs associated with internal copying and distribution.

• automating secure payments (through BACS-iP or laser printed cheques) which maximises efficiency and cuts costs.

In addition to this, organisations that have implemented EDM to support procure-to-pay are also highlighting a range of other additional benefits, such as;

• more timely purchase invoice approval which enables supplier discounts to be achieved and late payments penalties to be avoided.

• improvements to audit processes as all the documentation can be made available electronically, rather than the traditional time-consuming trawl through paper archives.

• faster purchase invoice processing which results in more timely budget and financial data on which sound business decisions can be made.

• reduced requirements for document storage as documents stored electronically free up space occupied by filing cabinets and storage boxes. This space can then be used for additional desks and office facilities.

• establishing credentials around Corporate Social Responsibility, especially the environment. Paper use is significantly reduced when documents are delivered electronically, and EDM storage means there is no requirement to print off file copies. Energy use, and hence an organisation's carbon footprint, is also reduced due to less printing and copying of business documents.

• Improved levels of business continuity as electronically stored documents can be easily backed up and stored off-site for contingency planning.

• reduced levels of cheque fraud by moving to electronic payments and secure laser cheque printing.

 Conclusion

By implementing electronic document management (EDM) within a ‘procure-to-pay' process, cost savings become increasingly obvious across the organisation. From the simplest step of the electronic delivery of documents, through to image storage, automated data capture and electronic authorisation of documents, efficiency and productivity gains are quickly and easily achievable.

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Please note that the email address for the Support Team is: support@sapphiresystems.co.uk (the old address, "support@sapphire.org.uk" is no longer in use).

Sapphire’s dedicated SAP Business One Support site can be found at: www.sapphiresystems.co.uk/sb1.  You will need to log-in in order to view some of the content – if you require log-in details, or have forgotten your password please contact the Support Team who will be happy to help.

The Sapphire SAP Business One Support Site is a valuable customer resource including:

• Product Hints and Tips

• Hot News – the latest information regarding the solution

• Product and Release Information

• Support Call Log – view the status of any current support issues you may have

• Service Details

• Customer Presentations – from previous User Days and relevant seminars

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National Geographic Channel Europe (“NGCE”) is a world leader in factual television, showcasing diverse programming that explores the modern world through subjects including science, technology, real-life investigation, history and wildlife.

Darren Poynton, Finance Director, and his team at NGCE wanted to move from a partly outsourced accounting model to a fully integrated in-house financial management system.  This move meant that a new accounting system would need to be acquired.  NGCE required that the new system should be customised exactly to meet specifications of the current situation and accommodate the anticipated future growth of the business.

A comprehensive investigation into the financial accounting solutions market led Darren to SAP Business One from Sapphire - the leading UK reseller.  Darren commented “During the review process the team at Sapphire were very professional; giving us all the information we needed to make our decision and answering all queries promptly.  We were very impressed with the presentations they gave us and the products that they offered. This, combined with the endorsement of their customers in recommending Sapphire as a business partner, gave us added assurance in selecting them to manage the implementation of our finance solution.”

In making the final decision, Darren said “We chose SAP Business One as it allows integration with Sales and other operational functions, to provide for a complete business solution.  We felt that this approach would allow for greater flexibility moving forward.”

He goes on to say “The integration links that SAP Business One has with other systems really made it stand out from the crowd. We felt it to be a user-friendly solution that can easily be tailored to the individual requirements of an organisation, with the added benefit of SAP’s experience and reputation.”

During the implementation Darren observed “The team at Sapphire were happy to accommodate the deadlines we had set and gave us quick responses to queries we had during the design period.  The rollout phase took slightly longer than we had expected, as we were delayed getting a server in place at our end, and by the complexity of the sales database which we needed to integrate into our SAP Business One solution.”

Now that SAP Business One is in place Darren tells us “We have a good system which is tailor made for NGCE.  Although the implementation of the billings database took longer than anticipated, we are now in a position where we are saving money and the team is very happy with the usability of the system.  Sapphire’s support team is very good and deals with routine enquiries very quickly – though some of our more unusual queries may take slightly longer!  Overall, we find it easy to deal with Sapphire, as their business model ensures that there are no levels of hierarchy to contend with.”

SAP Business One has also been selected as the accounting system for National Geographic Channel Iberia in addition to NGCE in London and there are plans to further develop the solution for their Sales team.  Darren says “Sapphire have built us a tailored billing system for subscriptions so that we can upload the monthly subscriber numbers into the Sales Order Templates to automatically generate orders, and enable us to report accurately on subscriber figures and contracts - regardless of billing frequency.  We intend to integrate this fully with the sales department in the long-term.”

Sharing his experience Darren says “I would advise other companies changing their accounting and business solutions to ensure that the timetable has sufficient slack to accommodate delays that may occur.  Also, be prepared for the hard work which is to be expected when going through a period of change.  I would recommend Sapphire for their ability to understand the key drivers of the project as well as their personal approach through all the stages of the project.”

Ian Caswell, Managing Director at Sapphire, concludes “SAP Business One will seamlessly integrate virtually every aspect of an organisation’s financial, customer and supplier relationship management, sales data, inventory and operations.  For SMEs looking for more than just an accounting system, it is an ideal solution for comprehensive integrated business management.”

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Software solutions provider systems@work has implemented a new Carbon Footprint module in their flagship products time@work and expense@work. The new module allows the CO2 to be calculated for each individual employee, so when an employee fills in an expense claim form the software calculates and displays the amount of CO2 that each claim generates. For example when inputting a flight the system will ask the employee if the flight is short haul or long haul and will calculate the employees Carbon Footprint based on the amount of miles travelled by aeroplane.
 
Michael Sheehan, managing director of systems@work, said, “Our flagship products “expense@work” and “time@work” enable organisations to track employee and project related costs. Organisations throughout the world already use our solutions to calculate fees, costs and other expenses and this enables them to see the miles travelled and the number of flights, taxis or trains taken by staff. With the release of the Carbon Footprint module we are now giving our clients the ability to calculate the CO2 emissions for employees each month.”
 
Sheehan continues, ”Our research showed that there are a number of blunt Carbon Footprint Calculator tools available via the internet but our new module is far more granular and tracks the actual employee’s miles to generate a score as well as factoring in the type of vehicle when calculating carbon emissions.”
 
When inputting mileage travelled by car into an expense sheet the Carbon Footprint module tracks the type of car used. Generally with carbon emissions there are four classes of car: large vehicles such as Range Rovers, medium size cars such as a Ford Mondeo, small cars such as a Mini Cooper and hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius and other electric cars. Depending on the class of car and the number of miles travelled the system will calculate a score which is displayed on the expense form itself. The score will increase when more travel is entered as an expense and a value is calculated at the bottom of the form.
 
In the system there is the possibility for the employee to see their Carbon Footprint value at any point during the month or year and it can be viewed by month or by week indicating how much CO2 they have generated. Administrators, Managers, the HR department, or whoever is given permission, can run reports which show a league table of the best or worst offenders or the best or worst conservationists in the company depending on the way in which they wish to monitor and score staff.
 
Sheehan concludes, “Although software cannot save the environment by itself Behavioural scientists believe that feedback loops, which in this context are a CO2 score next to each employees expense claim, have a significant influence on behaviour. With increased pressure from Government organisations such as Corporate Responsibility (CORE) Coalition and with the recent European Parliament resolution entitled “Corporate Social Responsibility: a new partnership”, it is vital that organisations take their environmental reporting obligations seriously.”

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Dennis Keeling of BASDA assesses the impact of government financial regulations.

Over the last three years there has been a raft of new legislation that affects businesses and the systems that they use. This is at a time when the government is supposed to be ‘reducing the burden on business’ and undertaking its own internal restructuring and efficiency drive. The net effect, however, is a huge burden on everyone.

All of these changes will affect financial systems, order processing systems, tax systems and payroll systems in some way or another. In the main, these applications will need to be upgraded or in some cases replaced. Taxpayers will have the option of providing information online by re-keying the necessary data into the government’s websites – but that will only be practical for the smallest of companies.

The software industry has proved that submitting electronic returns automatically can be as simple as hitting the right menu option. It has been very effective with payroll yearend e-filing where over 500,000 companies now use business software to automate their e-filing.

Unfortunately, many businesses have not updated their financial systems for several years. Some may have had specialist software and interfaces written that preclude them from upgrading their business systems. Some scrooges still see no need to replace their old twin-floppy PC that has worked tirelessly for over 15 years, and they still use a dialup modem to send their emails – true!

BASDA has been working with the government to find a way of reducing the business risk of non-compliance with its extensive and complex tax legislation. We have jointly developed a BSI Kitemark which will ensure that a company’s financial software meets HMRC’s compliance requirements. It also provides users with a series of reports so they can self-audit their tax records and ensure that employees are meeting the tax recording requirements. This Kitemark will be formally launched in summer 2007 and, it is hoped, will reduce the need to have those frequent on-site VAT inspections which disrupt a business so much.

So have all the government’s internal reorganisation and its efficiency drives paid off yet? We have certainly seen over the last 12 months the benefits of the merger between Inland Revenue and Customs & Excise. There is a desire to improve their stakeholder relationships for the benefit of all sides. This has been particularly visible in the reform of the Construction Industry Scheme which kicked off on 6 April. The project was in dire trouble a couple of years ago but HMRC saw the problems and delayed its start. It will affect 280,000 contractors and 2 million subcontractors. Time will tell, but this major reform has been undertaken with everyone’s views listened to.

But of course some initiatives have yet to show any benefits. The much-heralded Gershon efficiency drive for e-procurement was met with a fanfare two years ago and went live last year. But it was a bit of a damp squib – the software industry was ready but suppliers to the government and to a large extent, government departments were slow to see the benefits.

Whilst the business software industry was prepared for Lord Carter’s e-filing recommendations, employers were not. It was the pressure from industry on HMRC that got the original Carter deadlines extended in the 2007 Budget; their internal systems just could not cope.

It’s fine for a large retailer to send a year-end PAYE return for all its employees, for example, but to send a P45/P46 within a short timescale for every new starter and leaver was an impossibility. Most of that information is held in branches while the central HR manages the monthly payroll – and trying to get those internal communications to work promptly is a nightmare.

The government has lost billions to carousel fraudsters, and legislation to stop such fraud has been cooking for the last year. Unfortunately EU derogation takes time on VAT matters and the final outcome has some major drawbacks. It seems that a huge number of law-abiding businesses are going to have some very burdensome changes imposed on them to hit a few fraudsters.

The Reverse Charge tax proposals on mobile phones and computer chips will affect about 25,000 UK businesses. It will mean that the tax treatment of these goods will be changed – as will their systems. It will also mean these businesses have to send in a Reverse Charge sales list each VAT period (similar to the EC sales list) for all their sales of these goods. No doubt the fraudsters have seen this legislation coming and are now perpetuating the fraud with different goods – and we are back to square one with a clunky stop-gap system that no-one wants!

There is no doubt that there will be even more government regulation affecting business systems over the next few years which will affect all organisations. Rather than spend an inordinate amount of time trying to understand the impact of this legislation on your business systems, it’s far easier to update them as this will automatically implement all the legal

challenges.

Most HR departments realise they have to update their payroll systems each year to keep up-to-date with legislative changes, and the same will happen to financial systems. The good news from this year’s Conspectus survey is that many companies are already starting to do just that.

Dennis Keeling is chief executive of BASDA, the Business Application Software Developers Association. Tel: +44 (0)1494 868030. Email: dennis.keeling@basda.org. Website www.basda.org.

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Extend the capabilities of SAP Business One

using iBOLT SE from Magic Software

iBOLT™ is Magic Software’s easy-to-use and cost-effective, GUI-based business integration suite.

iBOLT Special Edition (SE) for SAP® Business One extends SAP’s software development kit, while providing all required interfaces for SAP Business One.

Using an intuitive, wizard-based interface with SAP Business One, you can respond to a wide range of business process automation requirements that cannot be satisfied with the standalone ERP package.

As an end-to-end business integration solution, iBOLT SE assures seamless connection between SAP Business One and your customers and partners, legacy systems, CRM, ERP, and SCM systems. It can also be used to connect geographically separated trading partners.

With Magic Software’s iBOLT SE you can:

• Automate communication with trade partners

• Consolidate chart of accounts

• Synchronise data across multiple sites

• Enhance e-commerce sites

• Service requests via the Web

• Order submission via the Web

• EDI

• Log incoming email

• Share data across systems

For further information please speak to your Account Manager, or click here to view an online demonstration.

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Hint One: How to match the balance on the Stock Audit Report with the balance of the Stock general ledger account

Hint Two : You have copied a document to a target document using the Copy To or the Copy From functionality, but the Base Price for gross profit calculations has not updated with the latest item cost

Hint Three: Creating a Data Transfer Workbench Schedule

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