Oates and Company Blog

We see signs and commercials of companies Going Green all the time; do you wonder what you can do to help? As we get fastened in our perplexed routine way of completing our jobs, we tend to forget to step back, and look outside the box, and ask ourselves; is there an easier more proficient way to do this. Normally the answer is yes, and usually staring us in the face.

Do you print, scan, save, and email printed documents out of Sage 100 ERP (Formerly Sage MAS 90 and MAS 200) to your vendors, clients, or associates? Do you print Registers and Journals, and keep them tucked away, just in case you may or may not ever need them again? Are those filing cabinets filling up quicker and quicker every year? Do you print a report to just later throw it away? If so, there is a more proficient way in handling, the storage, viewing, printing, faxing, and emailing of documents, forms, reports, journals and registers through Sage 100 ERP using the Paperless Office module.

Paperless Office provides you with a PDF storage/viewer, of forms, reports, journals and registers. Setups can be module specific, or document specific.

Contact Lisa Brewer (lisa@oatesco.com) to schedule your Review/Setup/Testing/Training of Paperless Office, and begin the first stages of your company, Going Green.

(The Paperless Office module is a standard, included module with those versions 4.3 PU18 and above)

The introduction of Sage Exchange changes the way that credit card transactions are processed in Sage 500 ERP beginning with Version 2013, which was released in November of last year.  Sage Exchange is cloud-based technology that provides the integration, or bridge, between Sage 500 ERP and the Sage Payments Gateway. It all adds up to new features and improvements in credit card processing that we think you’ll like.  Here’s a closer look.

The Components of Sage Exchange

As mentioned, Sage Exchange provides the integration between your accounting system and the Sage Payments Gateway. It’s made up of two components which we’ll take a look at here:

Sage Exchange Portal - this configurable dashboard consolidates all of your credit card and payment activity into a single web portal that can be accessed from a tablet or PC. From the portal, you can connect Sage 500 to your payment devices, administer users and control employee access, create customer coupons and push them out to your point-of-sale terminals, and much more.

Sage Exchange Vault - this secure, cloud-based vault stores sensitive credit card information online and processes transactions outside of your Sage 500 ERP system.  By doing so, it reduces your PCI compliance burden, allowing you to more easily comply with credit card processing laws. For added cardholder security, Sage 500 ERP 2013 will also allow a “one-time use” credit card for payment transactions without saving credit card information.

If you’re migrating from previous versions of the software, you can easily move customer credit card information from the current Sage 500 database location into the secure Sage Exchange Vault.

New Payment Options, Including Mobile

What is CRM and why should a company implement it? CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, focuses on improving customer retention, increasing revenues and profitability, and ensuring continuity for the customer through any staff changes.  At its best, it becomes a key part of corporate strategy that everyone is involved in, not just salespeople. The idea behind it is to provide a tool where every stakeholder in the company records interactions with customers so that everyone is on the same page. How many times have you experienced a salesperson making a sales call to a customer and the salesperson did not know that there was a major customer service issue the week before?  It makes the salesperson, and the company, look bad that this information is not shared.

One of the major advantages of utilizing CRM software is to eliminate the silos of information.  In most organizations that have not adopted CRM, the customer experience looks something like this:

• The salespeople manage their calendars in either Outlook, or even worse in a day planner. 

• Management and customer service has no visibility into any of this information. 

• All of the emails that the salespeople or customer service has with a customer is in a silo of that individual’s email or in their head. 

• If any interaction does need to occur between sales and customer service, it is usually done by phone or by email again. 

This creates a lot of inefficient time for everyone and does nothing to improve the customer’s experience.  If CRM software is utilized, company-wide, then the salespeople can log on before they go on a sale call and see all of the activity that has occurred since the last visit and be better prepared to deal with the customer.  Likewise, the customer service representatives can see what the salespeople have done and be better prepared when the customer calls in with an issue.

The second advantage of utilizing CRM software is protection of your customers.  Let’s say you have a star salesperson that becomes disgruntled.  If they manage their relationships in Excel, Outlook, or by day planner, then if they leave you lose all those interactions and very possibly the client too.  By having all interactions recorded in the CRM software, management or the next salesperson can quickly get up to speed of what the salesperson has done and proactively communicate with the customer to retain them.

If you would like to reduce the silos of information in your organization and protect your customers, please visit us at john@oatesco.com or visit us at www.oatesco.com.

Customers participating in Sage 500 ERP Version 2013 beta testing earlier this year were unanimous in giving a thumbs up to the new Visual Process Flows feature. These graphical workflow diagrams provide a visual representation of your business processes, helping you navigate the system more easily, perform daily tasks more quickly, and serve as a nice refresher during procedures that are preformed infrequently like year-end processing.  Let’s take a look at the new Visual Process Flows.

What Are Visual Process Flows?

The newest addition to an arsenal of Sage 500 built-in self-help tools, Visual Process Flows are interactive HTML pages that not only demonstrate the steps of a process in visual terms, but also   include links to the various tasks along the way.  So, they can serve as both a visual diagram and a launching point for the steps and tasks in the   process. The 2013 release includes a number of key pre-built processes as well as an easy to use tool that allows you to design your own custom workflows that reflect your unique processes.

Improving Your ERP Experience

The primary goal of the new Visual Process Flows is to allow you to quickly identify your tasks and launch screens without searching through the giant tree of menu items and icons within Sage 500.  Even though you can customize the tree of icons to limit what a user can see based on his or her role, usability studies conducted by Sage revealed that customers were still spending quite a bit of time searching for the correct screen to launch for a given task. Process Flows also make it easier to visualize how individual tasks relate to the overall business process. So in this case, a picture is worth a thousand hours of productivity.

See It In Action

Visual Process Flows are ... well, a visual thing.  So you might want to check out this Visual Process Flows overview video on YouTube to see exactly how it works.  Even though the video is using Sage ERP X3 as the demo system, it’s the same Visual Process Flow engine that’s built in to Sage 500 ERP.

RETIRED VERSIONS REMINDER - Sage 500 ERP (formerly “MAS 500”) versions 6.3 and 7.0 are now retired. Product updates (including year end) and telephone support are no longer provided by Sage. However if you’re on a current maintenance plan, you still have access to the online knowledgebase with articles and support documents covering retired versions.  Please don’t hesitate to Contact Us if you need assistance.