October 14, 2011
The latest video from CPA, VeraSage Fellow and professional comedian, Greg Kyte, makes a brilliant point about how risky it is to pay your attorney, CPA or technology consultant by the hour. You might as well be buying lottery tickets at the local convenience store.
Tired of playing the lottery with your technology projects? If so, then we can show you what it’s like to work with a Firm of The Future…forget about the lottery and work with certainty.
June 23, 2011
Sage is holding their annual conference, Summit, in Washington, DC this July. For the first time ever, the traditionally separate conferences for Sage customers and partners has been combined into one conference. All of the Sage partners are looking forward to joining Sage as co-hosts for our customers.
I am presenting a session at the conference for other Sage partners who have attended Ed Kless’ Sage Consulting Academy (SCA). Ed conducts the SCA several times a year to assist partners with becoming better consultants and project managers. It is a fantastic program that, to my knowledge, has no equal in the world of software publishers.
While every attendee I have talked with feels that they received valuable knowledge from SCA that has made them better consultants, the one comment that Ed and I hear on a regular basis is “we really want to implement these new ideas at our firm but we can’t quite figure out how to do it.” With that thought in mind, my goal for this session is to provide several real world examples of how we have implemented SCA processes into our business. Specifically, my focus will be on how to use the project management tools from SCA.
I’m bringing examples of the following tools from several of our projects:
And examples of additional tools that we have developed including:
Since this session in an interactive one, I’m encouraging dialog from the group about how you have used knowledge from SCA in your organization. How has SCA helped you move from a firm of the past to a Firm of The Future? Please feel free to bring sample project management documents (it doesn’t matter if they are for small projects or large ones) to share with the group. If you would like, you can e-mail copies of them to me at jshaver@ariestech.com so we can present them to the group.
I’m also open to talk through any aspect of SCA that may be of interest. Please share those ideas via the comments on this article.
I’m looking forward to seeing all of you on Tuesday, July 12th at 10am!
March 7, 2011
This week we are focusing the spotlight on a guest author, Michelle Golden. Michelle is President of Golden Practices, Inc. Her primary focus is on assisting accounting firms transform their businesses into Firms of the Future. As a Certified Professional Facilitator, she facilitates meetings and retreats across the U.S.
For her thought-leadership, she’s named one of the Ten Most Powerful Women In Accounting in Accounting Today & WebCPA (Oct, 2009) and is one of the Top 100 Most Influential People In Accounting by Accounting Today (Sep, 2010).
Our relationship with Michelle is through the VeraSage Institute, where she is a senior fellow. As a friend and colleague, Michelle continues to help us improve our business by increasing our social media, pricing and marketing skills. This past January, she did a fantastic job of facilitating the annual VeraSage conference in Napa, CA. I learned more in the 2 1/2 days of that conference than I have in every other business conference I’ve attended, combined.
Michelle recently published her first book, Social Media Strategies for Professionals and Their Firms. Even though her book is geared towards professional firms, her wealth of knowledge about social media and marketing can be applied to pretty much any type of business. I highly recommend it.
Michelle’s book and her blog article below got me thinking about our strategy with Facebook. We have been having conversations about whether to expand our Facebook presence or scale it back or completely change our approach. Facebook definitely changes the entire dynamic of the relationships and boundaries between our personal and business lives. Often very “unnatural” conversations (not necessarily a bad “unnatural” but one that could never have happened without Facebook) occur that are unexpected. For example, you post a political article which elicits comments from business colleagues, customers, your cousin and a childhood friend you last saw in third grade. All of a sudden those completely unrelated friends are having a conversation.
My intent is not to frighten anyone away from social media and Facebook but to make the point that everyone in business should really put some mental effort into developing a well thought out strategy for social media. As Michelle points out below, staying away from Facebook, ignoring it or trying too hard to keep personal and business separate could very well leave you in the cold as you continue to grow and develop your business in the future.
I’m witnessing an increase in the number of people creating “extra” accounts on Facebook to help them manage (separate) business and private personas.
This might seem like a good way to manage privacy such as protecting kiddos or allowing you to let your hair down among close friends and family while maintaining your professional decorum among business associates or even strangers who want to know you, even if you don’t know them.
Others do it not so much for privacy concerns, but to avoid sending business-y messages and links to family and “old” friends who aren’t into your business. That’s thoughtful for sure, but there are other ways to manage this.
Having multiple Facebook accounts is a bad idea for several reasons, one of which is that it violates Facebook’s Terms of Use (see 4.2)
In the FAQs, they more thoroughly explain,
If I already have a user profile, can I create a business account?
Maintaining multiple accounts, regardless of the purpose, is a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Use. If you already have a personal account, then we cannot allow you to create business accounts for any reason.
Facebook instead wants you to create a “Page” for your business presence rather than a separate personal profile. So, even if you have a company page (like mine) they would prefer that I set up a “Michelle Golden” business person page.
This is what Facebook “likes”!
They describe in the FAQ that you can manage all your Pages (and ads) that you create from your personal account. And if you don’t want people clicking into your personal life, they won’t. Facebook explains:
Please keep in mind that the fans of any of the Pages you administer will not have visibility or access to your personal account or profile. Any actions that you take as a Page administrator on your Page will show the Page’s name as the [poster] and not your personal name. To create a Page, simply click on the “Create a Page” link under the Sign Up section of www.facebook.com.
This is actually really cool because people can “like” and share your business page and posts so your content can go a lot further than just among your circle of approved “friends.” Also, with a “Page” you can see (aggregated) statistics that tell you if you are engaging well with others, or are having your post stream hidden by others! (gasp)
But let’s talk about the other reasons you might not want to divide your “friends” between two accounts in the first place.
1) MISSING OUT.
When you divide your feed, and “depersonalize” your interaction to the business peeps, you miss out on the whole purpose of using social media for business development! (more below)
2) MANAGING CONTENT RELEVANCE.
By creating “friend lists,” you can designate content you DO want to go to certain people or DON’T want to go to certain people. In other words, if you don’t want to burden “family” or “jr high friends” with your business posts, create a group for them and when you write the business post, simply set the post to exclude viewing by that group.
3) MANAGING PRIVACY.
Take advantage of Facebook’s incredibly rich privacy settings. Avoid sharing your vacation photos (or any other content or links) with your business peeps by placing photos in a special album just for lists of “family” and “close friends.”
REMEMBER, ENGAGING IS WHAT MAKES FACEBOOK VALUABLE AS A BUSINESS TOOL
Facebook is not for broadcasting! (No social media are for broadcasting.) It’s for interacting.
Bottom line is that the much of the point and purpose of using social media in business is for people to become closer. As in friends. As in learning what they have in common and stuff.
I have some Facebook friends who only “do Facebook” for business and it shows. There is no personal engagement. No relationship building. No point (at least for me). It’s dry. It’s boring. It’s a broadcast. No thanks.
REAL RESULTS
Yet there are other Facebook business people that I hardly knew or totally didn’t know before friending on Facebook. Yet we got closer through Facebook. And these people actually constitute the largest percent of people that have hired me or referred business to me as a result of getting to know one another via ANY FORM of social media. More than LinkedIn and more than Twitter.
From personal experience (I haven’t conducted a formal survey, but maybe I should) I attribute this to the fact that I am fairly personal (aka “myself”) on Facebook. And they seem to be, as well. I share and they share. And we get to know each other. We mutually participate and banter. I congratulate them on their marathons, “like” their family photos and song posts, commiserate when they have a rough go, wish them well when they are ill. And I mean it. And they do the same. And it results in building our relationships.
HOW TO GET YOURSELF HIDDEN
People who only feed their Tweets, blog posts, and Foursquare without otherwise engaging others are completely missing out on the benefits of the relationship development aspect of Facebook. Typical user behavior is to “hide” the posts of these people.
There are also some people who, when others comment or congratulate, ignore the messages. Typical user behavior is to stop commenting on these people’s posts. No one likes to be ignored. Sometimes hiding the posts of these people or even unfriending them is a next step.
Again, Facebook is not for broadcasting. It’s not one way. Even brands that merely broadcast, and fail to engage, get “hidden” from user feeds.
WHAT NEXT?
So, instead of creating a separate business presence, first try the friend lists feature to control privacy and/or content distribution.
If that doesn’t suit your needs, create a “Page” for yourself as a professional (even if your company has its own page…you can cross link the pages). But if you go the Page route, be sure that you still engage, and still show some of your personality there. If you want relationships to develop, that is
March 2, 2011
This year, for the first time ever, Sage is combining its traditionally separate annual 
conferences into one big conference. In the past, Sage Summit (which is for users of Sage software) took place in the Summer and was a completely separate event from Sage Insights (which was for Sage partners).
The partner-focused part of Summit runs from Sunday, July 10th through Tuesday, July 12th. Beginning on the afternoon of the 12th and running through Friday, July 15th, the conference switches gears and becomes completely focused on customers. The best part of this arrangement is that Sage and partners (like us) will jointly welcome and host the customers.
It provides a fantastic opportunity for you to not only spend time with Sage executives and educators but to work one-on-one with your Sage partner to improve your knowledge of Sage products and to hone your project management skills to make you an invaluable team member for your company.
Here is a guide to all of the General and Breakout sessions along with prices for attending the conference. Summit is being held in the Washington, DC area at the Gaylord National.
It’s a great location for bringing the family along as well. All 3 of us are going this year, which I’m definitely looking forward to. There is a Metro station close by and a water taxi that runs the Potomac from National Harbor to Georgetown, Old Town Alexandria and Mount Vernon.
I’ll see all of you there!
February 28, 2011
Have you ever wondered where you can go to get answers to your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS) software questions?
The folks at 90Minds (of which we are proud members) teamed together to create Ask90Minds. A free resource for questions regarding:
Why would you use Ask90Minds instead of the software publishers’ knowledgebases? Because you want the real answers from real technology consultants who have years of in the field experience with companies just like yours.
90Minds is a network of 27 independent technology consultants who work everyday with a variety of business management software applications. These consultants provide assistance with advanced technical questions.
In addition to technical support questions, you will find a rich and constantly expanding library of how-to articles, common mistakes and issues encountered with new software versions.
All of these articles are written in clear, easy to understand language that is unbiased by software publishers.
Give it a try and let us know what you think.
January 25, 2011
AccuForce Staffing Services, LLC, a staffing company in Kingsport, TN has been a Sage MAS 200 user for the past few years. Although technically a customer of Aries, the management team at AccuForce had not used our services for quite some time, preferring to perform all of the accounting setup in MAS 200 themselves. However, in December of 2010, their new CFO, Sarah Fleenor, contacted us inquiring how they might accomplish several goals with their MAS 200 system. Though Sarah initially contacted us simply because she was told by Sage that Aries was their “MAS reseller”, it quickly became a closer, more positive and strategic relationship as it became evident that the Aries business model would be a good fit for their company. They understood the value of Aries’ fixed, upfront, money-back guarantee pricing approach to projects. “I like the fixed price model and am all about planning and testing before going live,” commented Sarah about the Aries model.
AccuForce and Aries team members worked collaboratively to scope the projects, breaking them into smaller projects to fit their budget and timeline. Our first project was to redesign the General Ledger chart of accounts. Due to many of the accounts being set up incorrectly from the start, financial statements were not accurate. We provided AccuForce with a fixed, budgetable price for the project and agreed on a timeline for completion of the project to coincide with their producing year-end financial statements.
Future projects include providing ongoing technical support, a MAS 200 upgrade which will allow them to take advantage of new features such as PositivePay for Bank Reconciliation, and eliminating manual entry of payroll transactions by using MAS 200′s Visual Integrator module to automatically import those transactions. These projects will allow AccuForce to run their business more effectively and efficiently.
“AccuForce Staffing Services, LLC is a world-class, technology-forward staffing company committed to helping individuals find the careers they desire and assisting companies find the kind of employees to make their business a success by concentrating on talent and fit.”
January 17, 2011
This week we are focusing the spotlight on a guest author, Ed Kless. Ed is the Senior Director of Partner Development and Strategy for Sage North America. He continues to be an invaluable mentor and friend.
Most business leaders are asking the wrong question when it comes to developing their business strategy. Ed points out what we should really be asking ourselves.
Although the original audience for Ed’s article is the Sage partner community, I believe that every business can benefit from his insights into business strategy.
In my last workshop that I conducted for Sage partners on developing business strategy in small- and medium-sized businesses, I believe I have stumbled across the Mother of All Business Strategy Questions – MOASBQ.
Most strategy sessions begin with the following premise: How much revenue do we need to make (in the time period for the plan) and how are we going to achieve it?
The MOASBQ shifts the question to: How much value are we going to create for our customers (in the period) and how are we going to do that?
For the past 6 months I have been delivering these workshops all across the United States. There is nothing like teaching a subject over a sustained period of time to help you clarify your thoughts.
I believe this is the case because of the number of times I have been challenged by the participants in these workshops. So, to those of you who challenged me, thank you!
To read more of Ed’s articles, please visit his blog.
December 31, 2010
The procedures for processing your first MAS 90 or MAS 200 payroll in 2011 have changed due to the social security tax rate decrease that goes into effect on January 1, 2011.
The social security tax rate is being reduced from 6.2% to 4.2% for employees (the employer portion is still 6.2%) for 2011. The social security tax wage base limit also remains unchanged at $106,800. Both the employee and employer Medicare tax rates remain unchanged at 1.45%. For more details, click here. According to the IRS, employers technically have until January 31, 2011 to implement the new rate. However, I doubt many employees will want to wait that long. By using the procedures detailed below, you can start using the new tax tables on your first 2011 payroll.
In the past, MAS payroll users have simply copied their live payroll company to a backup company and closed the year in the live company to start processing payroll for the new year. The new tax tables were not installed until after the W-2′s were printed. The reason behind not installing the new tables until after W-2 printing is that MAS 90 and MAS 200 use global tax tables. In other words, all companies within MAS share the same tax tables. Installing the new tax tables before printing W-2′s would change the social security tax wage base limit for employees who exceeded the limit resulting in incorrect Social Security wages on the W-2′s.
Since the social security tax rate has changed, you can no longer wait to install the new tax tables. Regina Gutcher, a Sage Customer Support Specialist, has outlined the steps for running a 2011 payroll before printing the 2010 W-2′s:
If you need assistance with these steps, please contact either Amy (ashaver@ariestech.com) or John (jshaver@ariestech.com).
July 20, 2010
How can your small- to mid-sized business drastically reduce Information Technology (IT) costs and minimize the stresses of dealing with IT? The answer is in the clouds.
Almost a year ago we completely eliminated our Exchange and Sharepoint servers. Those two applications managed our e-mails and documents.
What replaced them? Google Apps. We quickly and easily moved all of our e-mail, documents, spreadsheets, images and presentations up to Google’s servers in the cloud.
My favorite part of Google Apps is a component called Google Sites. Google Sites gives us the ability to setup a site for every project and share that site with our customers and business partners. Sites make collaborating with the project team more effective by providing a real-time project management tool.
Let’s say that your design team and distribution center is in the Unites States and your manufacturing plant is in Mexico. A Site could be created each time your company creates a new design. Everyone on your project team would have the appropriate access to project scope documents, design images and the issues list. Since these documents are maintained in real-time on the Site, management would have constant access regarding whether or not the project is staying on track.
So, how exactly does Google Apps reduce costs and stress?
Using Google Apps eliminates license fees for software such as Exchange and Sharepoint and it eliminates the need to pay IT costs to support and upgrade these applications.
There are two versions of Google Apps: Standard and Premier. The Standard version is free. We elected to go with the Premier version at $50/user/year. The Premier version provides us with additional storage space (25GB as opposed to 7.4GB) and includes spam filtering and virus scanning.
Because you are able to leverage Google’s virtual servers, you no longer have to worry about technical issues with servers at your site. We were able to get rid of all but one server (and our goal is to get rid of it as well). Not having to deal with servers was a huge reduction in stress for our company.
Are there downsides? Of course. We have experienced occasional periods of sluggish performance. And without internet access it is a little tough to connect to the cloud.
If you are a real Excel power-user you may be disappointed in the functionality of the Google Apps spreadsheet.
However, here is the beauty of these types of Apps: they are constantly being upgraded (sometimes daily). The upgrades happen without any effort on your part and they are included in the annual price.
Will they eventually catch up to the functionality level of Microsoft Office? Yes they will. And I think they will surpass that functionality in the not too distant future.
Is your company using Google Apps? If so, what has been your experience?
If not, why not?
May 13, 2010
The HIRE Act (Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment), enacted March 18, 2010, is a plan to create jobs by providing a temporary tax break to companies that hire workers who were previously unemployed or worked part time. Two new tax benefits are available to employers:
Visit the IRS website for more detailed information and check with your tax adviser on whether the new HIRE act applies to your company.
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