Keeping it simple

I recently upgraded to Microsoft Office 2007 and in Word there is an option to blog directly to my typepad blogging service. This is my first attempt to try it out. Has anyone else tried using Word 2007 directly as your copy creation source?

 

Flash Drives vs. Hard Disk Drives

I guess like so many things, there were incremental improvements which I never thought much about.  The pocket flash drives, made by people like Sandisk and Kingston, have been getting bigger and bigger (i.e. 16 and 32GB).  These flash drives have NO moving parts, which is often the reason a regular hard drive fails.  So maybe we need to rethink how we use these flash drives.  I am going to purchase a couple large flash drives and start using them as backup sources for my critical files.  The flash drive will then be on my person, so I know at all times where the critical data is located.  (P.S. I will take advantage of encrypting the saved data).

Better Solomon Reporting through Longer Sub Accounts

One  of our clients had the problem that their Solomon General Ledger Sub account was initially set to only 2 characters.  While this short sub account met the initial reporting requirements, it became a major problem as the business grew and their needs grew for more flexible financial reporting groups.  I initially thought that this was one of those decisions which clients had to live with.   Using a tip I got from another Solomon consultant, I found that this short sub account was not an irreversible decision.   It took me about 2 hours to figure out that going from to 2 digits to say 6 or more was easily accomplished.   Depending on which version of Solomon you are licensed for, the max length of the sub account field can be 6 or 24 characters.   In this particular case, their 2 digit sub account was set up in the Flex Definition table as left justified.   By building the sub accounts to the right (i.e. positions 3 to 6), I was able to expand both the number of characters in the sub account and the number of segments.   I needed to first use SQL query analyzer to modify certain fields in the flexdef table.   The fields I reviewed and modified were:  maxfieldlen, maxsegments, numbersegments, and Seglenth00, and seglenth01.  Since I am not trying to make this a training session in SQL query analyzer, I encourage you to discuss this with your local Solomon reseller, who already understands Sql commands.  The good news is that this client was able to create a new sub account structure that now allows them to track: division, department, and event codes within their new sub account structure.

 

Conflicting views -- but basically lack of trust

In today’s Wall Street Journal I read an editorial by Lee Gomes called ‘The real world needs “net” taxes’.   The premise of this article was that it is time to rethink charging sales taxes on internet goods.   Basically since most internet stores sell into areas where the business has no nexus, there is no sales tax charge by the business but the onus in on the buyer to self claim the sales tax.  Unfortunately, most buyers don’t pay their sales taxes.   I was originally leaning towards favoring this argument.  In my state, California, we have major revenue shortfalls (literally billions are spent more than collected in the current year). 

I guess my real issue is once the government has the moneys will I agree with how the funds are spent.  I feel like my state legislators have deceived us.  It seems like we are constantly asked to vote for approving money for things like: road improvements, parks, police and fire staffing, which are all good causes.  My sense is that once the money gets approved and into the general funds, that the intended original use of the funds gets superseded by some other area.    I specifically remember voting to self tax ourselves in our county, Santa Clara County, for road improvements.  Somehow the amount of money collected on these taxes does not seem be coming 100% back to the people who paid for the tax.  Similarly we are self taxing ourselves with a local sales tax for our county, Santa Clara County, which is approximately 0.5%.  Yet our county government is struggling with financial cutbacks due to lack of funds.

Is it possible that the problem we have with tax revenues is that whatever is collected is always spent, and setting funds aside for reserves is a lost discipline?   I think that for a specific period of time, (say 5 years), we should require that the all state and local governments only can spend what they collect.  If the spending exceeds revenues, then cuts in staffing in the government automatically kicks in. (i.e. staffing of our legislators, state workers, county and city employees); then maybe people would spend our tax revenues wiser.    In science, there is a principle called the Oppenheimer affect, which loosely stated is: the observation of a task will always impact the performance of this task.    Maybe if government employees saw that there job was dependent on not overspending, then we would see more fiscally responsible acts. 

Once we see responsible actions by our government officials, and then let’s talk about tax increases, including taxes on “internet “sales.  But until we have trust back in our government proper handling of taxes collected, I vote: no new taxes.

Standards tightening with XBRL financial reports:

I suspect few of my readers will be forced to issue their financials using the Extensible
Business Reporting Language (XBRL), since the Dec 15th 2008 rule for requiring this
reporting standard only affects the Fortune 500 type companies and their SEC reporting.
We are all familiar with pdf files and how you need a pdf reader to open and search for
data in the pdf file.   The XBRL standards are a similar situation, where the banking and
SEC industry wants to automate reading and searching financials and allow an easier
processing of financial information.   Look for these types of reporting standards to start
being required for smaller businesses by your banks and government agencies.  By using XBRL
viewers, similar to pdf viewers, these digital financial documents can be opened, read and
searched.  I see this eventually being a tool for all investors who need to compare
financial results between companies and industries. 

If you are looking to upgrade or replace your back office accounting system, I recommend
you make sure they are quickly export the financials reports (i.e. Balance Sheets & Profit
and Loss Statements) to this new standard.  Like the old boy scout slogan, be prepared.

Dynamics SL starts showing off Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services

Yesterday I watched a webinar put on by Brian Lloyd, Plumbline Solutions, on Dynamics SL and Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS).  For some time owners of Microsoft GP and SL have had a hidden pearl on their price list for clients to MOSS.  Moss is a supercharged version of Windows SharePoint services and there are some very powerful add incapability’s with Moss.   It is interest to see how many of our larger customers seem to be using or at least experimenting with Moss.  I am expecting with this lower price point for Moss clients, when working with Dynamics SL and GP, will be picking up shortly.

One of the new things coming with the Feature Pack for 7.0 Dynamics SL was the ability to publish selective documents to the Moss web portal.  The portal can be customized for the needs of a Dynamics SL employee, a customer or a vendor.   Examples of published documents from the back office include: draft or final project invoices for the Project managers to view, order confirmation and order invoice documents for customers.  All of these published documents flow seamlessly from the ERP system to the web portal and greatly enhance the customer service level for all viewers.

Getting information to people in a timely and efficient manner has always been a key goal for ERP systems. It is really exciting to see the merging of the Microsoft stack of technologies (ie Moss, SL, SQL etc) as we see more and more info coming via these web portals. The day when these options were only open to fortune 100 customers are definitely being left behind.  I see this movement being used by any size company who values keeping employees, vendors, and customer informed with 24/7 access to their data.

What do you think about the future of web portals at your company?  Have you experimented with Moss or Windows SharePoint Services 3.0?

Gridlock in our California State Legislation:

In 2003 and 2006 state elections, here in California, less than 1% of incumbents lost their elected seats in our state legislature.   With such entrenchment of incumbents it is no wonder that we are constantly in gridlock for resolving real issues.  As a taxpayer and voter, I am really frustrated at our state government.  Our state spending exceeds its income by billions of dollars, the potholes in our highway system are getting bigger and deeper every month, our high schools are struggling with high dropout rates; and our colleges are pricing tuition through the roofs.    The list of problems just seems to go on endlessly.  Unfortunately, creativity is not coming forth by our leaders in the legislative branches; or at least real change.

I was excited this past weekend when reading a Wall Street editorial by Stephan Moore.  His article, “Mississippi Tort Reform Triumph”, told the story about their state legislation taking on this problem:  “We were America’s No 1 judicial hellhole for jackpot jury verdicts”.  No wonder for years Mississippi was seeing businesses leave by the droves as well as people leaving.  These two statistics are related.   In 2003, a new governor and a courageous legislature decided to address tort reform.   There were a series of laws passed which basically created dollar limits for jury awards.   Almost overnight the economic health of that state started turning around.  Businesses were thriving, doctors were seeing mal practice insurance policies going down, and new businesses were starting to migrate to Mississippi.   In four years over new 60000 jobs were added; not bad when you realize total employment is just over 1.3 million.  That’s almost a 5% growth. 

Our state must take a hard look at the reasons it is stagnating.   I strongly believe our entrenched legislature with its ability to draft voting district boundaries is one key explanation. 

What thoughts do you see that need to be addressed to reverse improve the business climate. What should our legislatures and voters be doing to break the gridlock and get things moving?  My mind is swimming with ideas, and I look forward to sharing them with you.  I also look forward to your thoughts.

When Quickbooks has lost its Quick....

First off, I want to say Quickbooks, by Intuit, is a great product.  At its price point and feature set, it is a strong choice for new businesses or small businesses.   The challenge is when to get off this software and move on to other better suited software.   I recently spoke with a CFO of a publicly traded company who was trying to run their business on Quickbooks and do multi currency consolidation of five sets of books. There closing cycle was at best 45 days; and  way too many excel spreadsheets.  As a public company the thought of impending SOX compliance with Quickbooks was frightening, hence they were looking at their software options.

Recently it came to my attention that this software company, Wizard Productivity Systems (www.wizardx4.com) had taken the concepts of a software installation wizard and applied it to the Quickbooks user who wanted to migrate to Microsoft Dynamics GP.   This wizard migrated both static files and dynamic files from the old accounting software to the new Dynamics GP software.   In a series of English based questions, they gather information as to how you would like to run your business and translated these answers into setup setting, and processes in the GP software.  This company boasts that they can get users converted on a fixed price schedule of consulting support ( 20 to 30 hours) to get you up in running for the financials, purchasing, and sales modules. 

I guess it is makes sense to see the tools for installing software starting to show up for migrating data and doing complex implementations. 

I like the idea of automating the complex setup decisions for new accounting systems, but when I read the information on their web site, I sense that they forgot to remind people that the value of migrating off of Quickbooks was to get better flexibility and reporting.  It will still take, in my opinion, some mixture of identifying key business needs, creative thinking, training and consulting help to get to this end.   

Is there a future "wizard" in your life?