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!
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.”
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?
April 30, 2010
Sage is holding their annual partner conference, Insights, in Denver, CO in May. I am presenting a session at the conference entitled Using Google Apps for Project Management and Customer Collaboration (GEN43) on Monday, May 17th at 2:30pm.
Although this conference is only available to Sage partners, I will be conducting a webinar on this subject later in May. Everyone is invited to attend that webinar. We will be sending out the details (date, time and GoToWebinar invitation) via our newsletter, blog and Facebook fan page. The webinar will include an introduction to Google Apps, how it can dramatically reduce your IT costs, how it has changed our company and why cloud-based apps are the wave of the future.
I have invited the Sage partners who have registered for this session to comment on this article to encourage the sharing of ideas, opinions and questions about Google Apps (and cloud computing in general). My goal is to make the session a collaborative one and to make sure we cover the topics of the most interest to the group. Here is the abstract from the Insights website:
Google Apps are a low-cost, easy-to-use and effective tool for managing projects of all sizes. With Google Apps you can manage e-mail, documents, spreadsheets, presentations and collaborate with customers and colleagues.
So far, my proposed agenda is to cover these topics:
My intention is to make this session as interactive as possible. The apps themselves are not complex and I am pretty sure none of us wants to go through a long demo of exactly how to create a document or a spreadsheet. So, I am emphasizing how Google Apps in particular are changing our world.
Dialog about the project management aspects of Google Apps is also a main component of the session. I believe that every project (no matter the size or complexity) can be managed through Google Sites using the tools from the Sage Consulting Academy. And I will be going through real-world examples of how we are using those tools.
To date, there are 31 people signed up! I am really looking forward to hearing from many different perspectives within the Sage community. Partners who work with pretty much every Sage product (I think the only exceptions may be Timeberline and MasterBuilder) are attending this session.
Please let me know what you think about the proposed agenda and if there are some other topics you would like to talk about.
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