Earlier I have announced that the Trade development team was working on the new functionality to support drop shipments. This functionality is currently in controlled release, which means that a selective group of customers is piloting this new functionality and will provide us valuable feedback which we will evaluate before making it available for all Exact Online Trade customers.

As explained in my previous blog: drop shipment is the process whereby goods are delivered by your supplier straight to your customer without your intervention. Translated into functionality this means that from the sales order (or group of sales orders) you can initiate purchase orders (back to back ordering). If a sales order line is marked as to be drop shipped (a sales order line will be marked automatically based on business rules) then when generating the purchase order system will mark it as a drop shipment purchase order. The main difference between a drop shipment purchase order with a normal purchase order is the delivery address. Also sales order lines marked as to be drop shipped will not appear in your normal goods delivery screen neither will the drop shipment purchase order lines in the goods receipt screen. Instead a new screen for creating drop shipment deliveries by your supplier will take care of the movement of products from your supplier to the customer.

Some additional features:

• Quantity in drop shipment is visible on the stock positions overview
• On the cockpit on your To Do-list you will be notified when drop shipments are late for delivery
• Financially we will keep track of all in and out transactions on a separate ‘Goods in transit’ general ledger

Stay tuned for some more updates relating to Exact Online. If you have any questions or remarks, do not hesitate to post them!

Last year Exact released online solutions for trade and for professional services. This year, we will add a solution for Manufacturing. Our development is in full swing and we are now able to explain in more detail what this solution is about and how the release process is planned.

Exact Online Manufacturing is a member of the Exact Online family and is therefore a multitenant SaaS solution that will allow you anywhere, anytime access through the Internet. Subscriptions have a monthly fee that includes usage of the software, support, and upgrades. Exact Online Manufacturing includes the functionality for financials and logistics of Exact Online Trade.

Our target customer is the small manufacturer with either (or both) fabrication activities and assembly activities. These activities will be typically customer order driven. Amongst our customers we will find both job shops and makers of repetitive products. Noteworthy is that we have developed Exact Online Manufacturing in cooperation with our customers. From early on in this project we have invited customers with manufacturing activities for interviews about their business practice and their future needs. We have now reached the stage where we are showing our prototypes to this so called “innovation panel” for fine tuning.

Controlled release phase 1

Right in the summer we will start the controlled release with the job shop type customers. Typically we will find these in the metal, wood and plastic product industries. The emphasis will be on the process from quotation to delivery. The quotations are based on planned material use, cost of operations and subcontracted work. From a quotation/sales order we generate a shop order and purchase orders for materials and subcontractors. Visually attractive screens will assist in managing the jobs through the floor and in managing each individual operation. We will also be able to record the actual material use and cost, operation time and billing of the subcontractor. After calculation reports are available that that compare quote to actuals.

Controlled release phase 2

After the summer we start with the controlled release for the makers of repetitive products. These could be makers of machinery, electric equipment or so-called assembling wholesalers. The functionality that we focus on is based on a Bill-of-Materials (BOM) that describes the structure of the make product. From sales orders that contain such make products we can generate shop orders based on the BOM. All the functions that have been mentioned for phase 1 are of course already available.

Generally available

The full Exact Online Manufacturing offering is planned to become generally available by the end of 2012. Exact Online Manufacturing is planned for release in the Benelux.

Looking for controlled release customers

Exact is currently looking for controlled release customers. Interested parties may contact pieter.hamans@exact.com for more information.

Soon to be available for every Exact Online Trade customer is the functionality to purchase based on existing sales orders (back to back ordering). Once you have created a (number of) sales order(s), you can get a purchase order advice for selected order(s) and generate purchase orders.

As an extension to back to back orders we are now developing functionality to support the drop shipment process. For this purpose we therefore have visited customers from different sectors (varying from trading companies in medical needles, Christmas boxes to plastic waste and fertilizer) with a questionnaire to see whether our thoughts of the functionality match with the business needs of our clients. Overall I can conclude that we hads a pretty good idea of required functionality, but nevertheless the discussion with our customers had significant impact on the development and outline of the functionality.

What we try to achieve with drop shipment functionality is to keep the stock movements visible, but separate it from the normal stock in –and outflow. Also financially the plan is to account in a different way (making use of ‘Goods in transit’-account) and using the actual purchase price (instead of using cost prices) for drop shipments. If we also can create an overview that will give margin insight (difference between sales and purchase price) then I am sure that we will have a very powerful solution for all our trading customers. The functionality is to be expected in H1-2012!

Thanks and a happy 2012!

We are happy to announce that since last week, Exact Online Time & Billing is commercially available! You can take a trial subscription if you like. I’ve been involved with the development of Time & Billing since the very beginning, so I hope you will understand I consider this launch as an important one.
We aimed ourselves at small Consultancy companies who face these kind of challenges:

• Administrative burden
• Insufficient insight in actuals
• Time entry … who actually likes that?

So, we developed a Time & Billing solution, as part of Exact Online. Exact Online as a platform means hassle-free 24/7 access from anywhere to your administration, based on a monthly fee.
Time & Billing means:

• Consultants can enter their hours easily (via the Exact Online iPhone app or in Exact Online itself).
• The entrepreneur or an employee can process the hours into invoices that make sense and get insight in actuals that help in steering the company.
• Important to mention is that Time & Billing is fully integrated with a Financial administration (included in the proposition).

We developed this solution in close collaboration with over 20 pilot customers in the consultancy business, who gave their feedback and upon which we improved the solution even further.
Crucial to add is that we will keep on improving this solution in the coming year, so please, do let us know your opinion. And don’t forget to take a trial subscription.

Last Sunday we made a new Exact Online release available. This release contains a lot of new functionality - have a look at the announcement for some highlights. For accountants we introduced the Scanning service and some new overviews that I already blogged on in an earlier post. In this blog I want to explain an important change we implemented in the new release involving the collaboration connection between accountant and client.

The collaboration between accountants and clients is one of the cornerstones of Exact Online. Corporations that have their own Exact Online subscription can collaborate with their accountant by connecting to them within Exact Online. This will allow the accountant to have access to the client administrations to view and check the transactions. It also allows the accountant to perform certain tasks in the administrations, like creating and sending the VAT declaration.

Looking at the way the collaboration  between client and accountant is established and the feedback we received from accountants, it was clear that some changes had to be made to this functionality. The goals of these changes are to put the responsibility to perform certain tasks with the right users and to give the accountant more control over the process.

When a client defined the cooperation in the “Link to my accountant wizard” he used to get the page where he had to select one or more employees of the accountant that would get access to the administrations. Only the client could grant access to accountant users - the accountant always had to ask the client. This is not very efficient as there is little chance that the client actually knows the accountant employees and who should get access. Besides this, it is the accountant who in the end determines who should get access to a certain client administration. Depending on the agreement with the client it could be a financial or payroll administrator or a partner that needs access.

To make assigning users to administrations easier for both the client and the accountant we removed the step in the “Link to my accountant” wizard where accountant users are granted access to administrations. All accountant users with the ’maintain rights’ role are now given access to the administrations by default. These users are always informed of the new administration access by a request in their workflow. They can then further assign other users access rights to the client administrations. Because workflow requests are created, the user that establishes the accountant link should have the rights to create workflow requests.

We also introduced the option for the accountant to indicate a user as account manager for the client. The client will be able to see who is their account manager in the accountant cockpit.

Although we mentioned it in the release notes, it is not yet possible to validate a client before activating the collaboration. We are putting the finishing touches to this functionality and plan to make this available later this week. When it becomes available I will also write a post to explain the new functionality.

If you have any questions or remarks let us know in the comments or send me an e-mail (robert.huberts@exact.com)

Top image credit: buddawiggi

The last couple of years has seen the accountancy market in the Netherlands changing, accountants facing new changes and challenges. New government regulations, clients more critical of service pricing and wanting more insight into what their accountant actually – in other words, they want ‘more value’. As such, there’s an ongoing discussion among a group of accountants on how their business should change to make it more transparent and provide the extra value their clients are looking for (see TUACC, in Dutch).

Collaboration between accountants and clients is one of the foundations of Exact Online. The accountancy solution already contains a lot of functionality that helps the accountant work together with clients. However, to help accountants realise their goals, we need to provide even more tools to increase efficiency and add value. During discussions and workshops with accountants we have identified several areas where we can help even more. Having already released a new version of Exact Online with new options to promote further collaboration, further functionality to help accountants check the financial status of clients is also on the way…

Activating functionality in clients administrations

You work with a client in Exact Online, having access to their administrations. They have assets but do not want to do all the registration work, asking you to do it for them. With the new Accountancy version you can now activate the assets functionality in the client’s administration, allowing you to do the asset registration and processing. The functionality is only visible to you. The only thing the client will notice are the financial results.

You can activate payroll, budgeting and banking functionality in the same way. This functionality is currently available for accountants with the Exact Online Accountancy Advanced solution.

Archive administrations

Sometimes a client’s administration activities are stopped, but for legal reasons they still need to have access to the financial data. In November we will release the option to archive your administrations. This means that you cannot enter or change any of the data in the administration, but can still view it. Archived administrations are not free – when you archive an administration an archive administration will be added to your license in place of the previous fee due.

Scanning service

It is very common for clients to collect all their purchase invoices, receipts and other documents, put them in a shoe box and deliver it to the accountant. The accountant than has to make sure it is entered manually in the financial system so it can be processed. This involves a lot of work and is not very efficient. Fortunately technology has advanced in such a way that there is a better way to handle the documents. With the Scanning service in Exact Online it is no longer necessary to manually enter purchase invoices from the documents. The client can scan his invoices and upload them in Exact Online. The scans are sent to the scan service where the invoices are transformed to entry proposals. The only thing you have to do is check the proposal and press the button to create the entry. Even better, this functionality is also integrated in the Exact Online iPhone and Android apps! Simply take a picture of the invoice or receipt and upload it to Exact Online using the app (for more information or to download the app see the Apple app store or the Andriod market).

The scanning service is currently in controlled release, but we expect it to become generally available in the coming months. Feel free to join the controlled release program if you want to know more right now.

Administration overviews

Over the last couple of weeks the development team created three new overviews that will help you decide which of your clients needs attention based on their financial results. These overviews will become available in November.

The first overview will show all the clients and administrations you have access to in Exact Online with some key financial figures for a period (revenue, margin, DSO, etc). The overview also shows the difference between the reported period and the previous period. Administrations will be marked if there are big differences between the compared periods, so that you can quickly see which clients need your attention.

With the second overview you can easily compare the period results on general ledger account level for an administration with the results of another period. You have great flexibility which periods you want to compare, for example the overview has standard options to compare the period results with the same periods in the previous year or with the previous periods. This allows you to look for differences between comparable periods.

You see that revenue has dropped 30% compared to last period? It could be that the client has forgotten to book some invoices, or maybe sales were really down. In any case it is worth a call to your client.

The last overview shows in which journals general ledger accounts have been entered. This will allow you to easily spot entry mistakes that need to be corrected. For example when a bank account entered in a general journal is not something that you would expect to see.

I hope that with this functionality we will help you work more closely and more efficiently with your clients. But our work does not stop here, we have more plans and ideas that we will realize in future releases. We will keep you informed on these developments, so keep an eye out for more posts on this blog. If you have ideas for functionality in Exact Online that would further help you in your work let us know in the comments or send me an email (robert.huberts@exact.com).

Top image credit:  www.SeniorLiving.org

In Exact Online Trade you have many ways to manage your prices. Prices can be set for multiple sales units, can be customer specific and can be updated via a batch update function in our current commercial release. However we do want to give you more functionality and really offer price management functionality that is required in a trading environment.

Therefore we plan to introduce price lists in Exact Online for the next release. A price list is a collection of items (or item groups) with or without volume discount tables that can be linked to customers. To keep a simple model, you can link a single price list to a customer. Within a price list, you can define multiple date ranges that will allow you to define prices for a specific period.

Completely new in price management (which really excites me and is not present in any of our previous product lines) is the possibility to set a type when defining a date range. This allows you to make a distinction between a ‘Basic’ and a ‘Special offer’ period. The advantage of the distinction in types is that you can set up a normal date range for prices, valid for the whole year  (e.g. start date: 01-01-2011 end date: infinite or 31-12-2011) and create a ‘Special offer’ for a promotional period in the summer (e.g. start date: 01-07-2011 end date:  15-08-2011). Each date range can have its own set of items/item groups attached. Effectively you can link a limited set of items/item groups in (volume) discount for the promotional period if you like, while the excluded item prices are taken from the basic date range.

Click on the image for a larger view

To give you really an artist impression, you can have a look at the mockup screen above that is the basis of the new functionality to link an item to a price list. In this screen you can define how the sales unit relates to the standard unit of the item, how to setup the base price for the item in the price list (with the nice feature to take over the actual sales price and how to enter a volume discount able (buy > 100 at once and you will grant 2% discount).

I hope that this new functionality will be of great value in managing prices in Exact Online Trade. The functionality is planned to be available in November 2011.

It is not a yell you hear a lot. Maybe you have never heard it. But in some departments you can hear it…the payroll administrators who have to enter the new wages into the system.

It can be a lot of work. Search for the employee, open the payroll data, select the gross salary component, update the amount, save the changes and then start again with the next employee.

Of course we understand the payroll administrators, but we also know that employees like to get a salary increase. Therefore we created a tool to update the salaries quickly and easily. And not only changes in salaries, but also changes of manager, location and other payroll components like net allowances or bonuses.

In the mass update-tool, you can change employee data for all (or a selection of) employees in three clicks. First select the employees and the subject you want to update. But you can also select all employees, because you can exclude them for a change in the next step.

Here you see a percentage increase of the salary with 2,5% as from 01-09-2011. By the way, the amounts are rounded up to 0,50 cents.

In the next step, you can deselect some employees so the will not get a salary increase. You also can change the new amount manually. So when you have an increase without any logic, you can start with an increase of an amount of 0,00. In the grid, you can enter the new wages manually for all employees in one page.

Same logic is available for increasing (or decreasing) other payroll components. As said before, it is also possible to update your employee data, like manager or mail addresses.

So with this tool, I hope that everybody likes salary increases as from now!

In previous blogs What a wonderful world… and Don’t spend any more time on manual invoice entry  the new scanning functionality was introduced.  A beautiful way to save time. Time that you can now spend on your core business. So…what else do we have on the agenda to support your bookkeeping process?

We are working on a solution where you only have to enter financial basics like

• for who (customer/supplier),
• when (date) and
• what (subject and  total amount)

when a financial entry needs to be created. Exact Online does the rest!

How?
For often used financial entries it becomes possible to create templates. Known financial data like general ledger accounts, cost centers or cost units can be filled in. Further you can indicate how line amounts must be calculated.
Because essential data is already known at the moment a financial entry is created, using a template saves you time.
Furthermore, when the same financial entry occurs more then once, a template ensures that entries are created along the same line and reduces the likelihood of you making mistakes.

Where is it useful?
Let’s give a few examples where we think we can help you save time:

Imagine… you receive an invoice from the telephone company. You receive it every month, only the actual costs differ. The specification shows costs for subscriptions, actual phone costs, mobile phone costs, use of Internet etcetera. If the general ledger accounts are predefined per cost type and if the distribution of the costs is also known beforehand, entering the total amount will be sufficient to create the entire entry!

Imagine… you have a web shop and the invoicing is done by Visa. 2 % of each invoice goes to Visa, the rest considered turnover. 
When you can define this division as a fixed portion booked for Visa and the remainder as turnover beforehand, you’ll never have to divide the invoice up manually again.

Image… you have visited a gas station. You want to enter the bill directly into your Exact Online administration via your mobile phone app. You just have to enter which amount you have spent on what and where  (e.g. 100 euros for fuel at Shell) and the administration will do the rest!  

Can we make it easier still?
The new functionality will be introduced gradually in phases. Any feedback is welcome, just reply on this post.

In a recent post Emiel Romein explained the process of creating invoices for subscriptions, see Turning subscriptions into money. In this post I am going to explain the process of creating the invoices in more detail and give you some tips that may help you in using the functions more efficiently.

As Emiel already showed you, the process of invoicing subscriptions only contains a couple of steps. You create some subscriptions and then go to the Generate invoices function in the subscriptions menu. In this screen you will see a list of subscriptions that can be invoiced. Select the subscriptions you want to invoice and press the Generate button. The generated invoices are now available for final printing and processing.

The subscriptions you see in the Generate invoices screen are filtered based on the values in the filter section in the top of the screen. There are several filters available, but two of them are important for showing the subscriptions that need to be invoiced.

The Invoiced up to and including field in the subscription holds the date up to which the subscription is invoiced. So the corresponding filter in the screen controls which subscriptions are shown in the screen based on the date they need to be invoiced again. The second important filter is the Not yet invoiced filter, checking this filter will result in showing all invoices that have never been invoiced (and therefore have an empty Invoiced up to and including date in the subscription).

Some tips to make working with the Generate invoices function easier

• The invoice date in the screen is default set to the current date, however it can be changed if you want to. Keep in mind though that this date is only for planning the invoices, the actual invoice date is determined at the moment the invoices are printed.
• You can enter a general description for the invoices, but it is not mandatory. If you do not enter a description, the description from the subscription is copied to the invoice.
• The administration settings (subscription page) has a useful setting that will allow you to automatically add a number of days to the Invoiced up to and including date filter. So if you want to see all the subscriptions that need to be invoiced in the next 5 days, enter 5 in the setting.

• Different subscriptions for the same customer that are processed at the same time will be grouped together in one invoice. If the customer wants to have separate invoices you can disable the grouping in the customer’s account card.
• After you generated the invoices there is a confirmation message in the top of your screen. This message also contains a link to the Print invoices function, so you can go to printing the invoices in one click.

The invoice is not correct, can I still change it?

It can happen that you have generated invoices for a number of subscriptions, but when you check the invoices before printing you notice one or more are not correct. Maybe the customer has more subscriptions that need to be invoiced or something in the subscription is not correct. At this point you can still correct this by deleting the invoice. This will cause the Invoiced up to and until date in the original subscription to be reset to the value prior to generating the invoice. So you can make adjustments to the subscription and generate the invoice again.

If you already printed the invoice and you or the customer notices it is incorrect, you can only correct the invoice by creating a credit note. This credit note will be linked to the subscription. If you need to create a new invoice you will have to do that by manually entering it in the invoice solution, it cannot be generated from the subscription solution.

When do you send the invoice?

In the last months I have had meetings with a number of customers that use the subscription solution in Exact Online. One of the things I noticed is that quite a number of customers sent the invoices in advance of the subscription period. Although it is not something you can indicate in the subscription itself you can manage this when generating the invoices. You need to change the Start or Invoiced up to and until date filters to look further in the future.

I hope the above information will make using Exact Online a little easier for you. As always let me know if you have questions or remarks by leaving a comment.