Budgets and Accounting Out of Focus with Manual Systems

"Reliance on manual processes and systems that weren't integrated led to duplication of effort in some very important areas such as budgets, purchase orders, and month-end closing," says Tammy Sanders, operations manager at Photoflex. "Our budgets were created manually in Microsoft Excel and were not linked to financial statements in the accounting system. We had to print out financial statements, plug that data into Excel, and then print out the Excel data in order to compare our actual expenses with our budgets. With purchase orders, when we received shipments, we had to re-enter every purchase order and the related items into our accounting software. Month-end closing proved tedious, and it became critical that we find a solution that could automate this procedure and help us stay on top of order processing and invoicing."

Sage Accpac Provides a Clear Picture of Sales, Budgets and Inventory

An IT provider in our area suggested that we contact Vintage Business Solutions (VBS) to help us plan and implement an upgrade to our accounting software," says Sanders. "John Barrett, president of VBS, visited us and conducted an exhaustive needs analysis in order to design and plan the implementation of our upgraded accounting solution. He demonstrated Sage Accpac, which offered everything we needed. But we were still concerned about our reporting issues, so we gave John a stack of reports which we had been manually creating in Excel and asked him to duplicate those reports in Sage Accpac. After seeing that every one of those reports could be automated and easily modified in Sage Accpac, we knew that we had found the right solution." VBS installed Sage Accpac, along with Orchid Systems RMA and UniDevCo Sales Analysis and Ops Inquiry, a suite of reporting and inquiry tools to aid Photoflex in tracking on-hand inventory. Setting up the Sage Accpac database and the data conversion were completed in just a couple of days, enabling the company to quickly go live and resume shipping products.

Streamlined System Boosts Productivity

"With Sage Accpac, we now have instant access to all the information we need," says Sanders. "For example, with the Budget Comparison Report, we can compare our budgets against actual expenses, which used to be such a tedious process. Before we installed Sage Accpac, we had to create a backorder report manually in Excel. Now, we can always see the up-to-the-moment status of our inventory and create a backorder report with a simple click. Overall, creating reports is so much easier and more flexible than before. We're not stuck with canned reports; we can easily change the fields to meet our specifications."

In addition, order processing and shipping have been streamlined and customizing invoices for each product line is now fully automated. Security is improved and setting up users in groups is much easier to accomplish. In fact, setting up a new user now takes only 30 seconds instead of having to hire a consultant to do the job, as we had to do in the past.

"Overall, Sage Accpac has provided Photoflex with everything we wanted and the system has been very reliable," says Sharon Reeves, president at Photoflex. "Perhaps most important is the elimination of duplicate data entry, which had plagued us with our manual systems. With Sage Accpac providing real-time information ondemand, it's like looking at our business through a crystal-clear lens."