Tag Archives: Microsoft Excel

Tech Talk: Circuit Maker Automates Accounting Processes

PLX Technology, of Sunnyvale, Calif., designs and makes integrated circuits for customers in the computer server, storage, communications, industrial, and consumer electronics industries. Arthur Whipple, chief financial officer of PLX, tells IncTechnology.com that upgrading to new financial software helps the publically-traded company ensure the proper internal controls that allow him to produce high quality financial statements. Elizabeth Wasserman: Tell us about your business. Arthur Whipple: We’re a high tech Silicon Valley company that builds integrated circuits, which are in an area of connectivity that goes into enterprise class electronics. Our major customers include Cisco, IBM, Huawei, Dell, and various customers that make big servers and big backbone systems. We make devices that stitch together components such as the microprocessor and memory to get them to talk to each other. We’re the glue in these systems. Wasserman: Why did you need new financial software? Whipple: We decided to go with BlackLine Systems. I’ve installed this twice now. First, at my previous company, Silicon Storage Technology. The issue here was initially about account reconciliations. In order to have reliable financial statements, you have to look at each account in the financial system and make sure each agrees with reality. If you have a petty cash box, you need to count it and make sure it’s there. You have to make sure somebody actually counted and made sure the receipts are there. If you have a bank statement, the bank doesn’t know about the checks you’ve written that haven’t been cashed yet. You have to do a reconciliation from outside to the general ledger. You’re looking for an external confirmation for an internal number. Wasserman: Why is this important? Is it just because you’re a public company? Whipple: What you are trying to do is make sure that the financial statements you put out there are correct. A lot of judgment goes into financial statements. You want to make sure you don’t have mistakes in your financial statements. The reputational risk with poor financial statements can be a real problem. You can lose credibility with your shareholders and that creates huge opportunities for attorneys and other people to come in and make claims when people make mistakes in financial statements. Wasserman: What was behind the timing of the change? Whipple: People have been doing account reconciliations forever. But up until 20 years ago they were done with pencil and paper. They made lists of numbers and added them up and reconciled them to bank statements. Over the last 20 years, people have started to use spreadsheet technology, of which Excel is the most popular. But the programming is done by amateurs. In most financial systems, the code is done by professionals, and locked up, so that you can’t change the code without someone checking it thoroughly. With Excel, an accountant can decide to make a formula change and that can throw off all your numbers. Academics have done tests and found that up to 80 percent of the Excel spreadsheets out there have some error in them. We were able to get rid of all our Excel based reconciliations and move to a program that was hard-coded by people who know what they’re doing and locked down so people can’t make errors. BlackLine automates the entire process, virtually eliminating manual errors. The other side of this is that we are also tracking tasks. We’re making sure that the things that need to get done actually get done. It’s a glorified to-do list. There are dozens or hundreds of things that have to happen and aren’t reflected as a balance in the financial statement. You have to check with the transfer agent to make sure equity is properly stated. You have to make sure you know the number of checks that are outstanding. The analyses in 10Ks or 10Qs need to be done reliably, and you need to have a history of what you did. In this case, if I write a memo to file regarding a fixed asset impairment, that impairment letter or memo can be stored for people who need access to it and it doesn’t get lost as you have with paper documents. Once we have uploaded the file, it’s protected from loss. Wasserman: What have the results been? Whipple: The results have been excellent. There are a couple of things you don’t know for many years. We haven’t had any issues at all in terms of account reconciliations not being done. I have a dashboard I can look at and I know that all the reconciliations and tasks have been completed and, if not, I know who to go to. When we get to filing SEC documents, everything that needs to be done has been done before I sign my certification that the financial statements have been properly done. CFOs and CEOs are now personally on the hook for the accuracy of those statements under Sarbanes Oxley. I am now confident that all the things required to be done have actually been done in these financial statements.

The Right Touch: Touch-Screen PCs

Touch-screen technology can be found in all the latest smartphones — with products such as the Apple iPhone, BlackBerry Storm, HTC Touch Diamond, and Samsung Instinct, to name a few. But whether or not this trend will extend to business computers is subject to opinion, and application. Certain types of small businesses, for example, might thrive with the help of touch-screen computers. In the food or retail industry, access to a touch-screen to quickly place food orders or view merchandise information provides an intuitive interface for customers and employees alike. HP has just launched its Touch Smart tx2, a convertible tablet/laptop hybrid with a multi-touch screen technology not unlike the iPhone. Users can pinch, swipe, or draw with a finger or two to write on the display, browse the Web, and control media. A feel-good interface On how to decide if touch-screen PCs are right for you and your business, here’s what the experts advise. “Touchscreen PCs are like dirty martinis: they’re right for some, not right for others,” begins Steve Hilton, vice president of enterprise and small and mid-sized business research at the Boston-based Yankee Group. For a small or mid-sized business accounting manager, for example, “a touch-screen PC is probably not so helpful because you spend most of your time on Microsoft Excel or some kind of accounting application,” says Hilton. “But if you’re a graphic designer, Web developer, or other creative type, a touch-screen PC can be a cool idea.” Hilton says Yankee Group has a test panel, a group of executives from small and mid-sized businesses, which tests new technologies for the market research firm. “One group is an online game developer and the designers at that studio simply love the idea of touch-screen computers,” explains Hilton. “So this technology fits a relevant niche in the market.” “Businesses have shown interest in having touch technology — this is untapped to date,” says Anneliese Olson, director of worldwide product marketing for business desktops at HP. “There is a need for easy-to-use, customized touch applications in vertical markets… especially designed for use in kiosks, customer-facing compute spaces, education and training, conference rooms, front desk and lobby areas, and even general office use.” A touchy subject But not everyone is sold on touch-screen PCs. “Even though we’re seeing touch devices coming to market and Microsoft supporting touch in the future versions of Windows, at the end of the day a lot of this functionality is more gratuitous than anything else,” believes Michael Gartenberg, vice president of mobile strategy for the Jupitermedia research group in New York City. PC operating systems weren’t designed with touch in mind. “Unless you’re CNN that needs touch-screen devices to show information during an election, you’re better off saving the money you’d spend on a touch-screen and buy better smartphones or a better class of machine with more memory or better components,” adds Gartenberg. “There just isn’t a lot of functionality in touch for most users,” he says. “The value of these screens is more in mobile devices than personal computers.”

The Right Touch: Touch-Screen PCs

Tech Talk: Tablet PCs Save Construction Time

Suffolk Construction, a privately-held building contractor based in Boston with branch offices around the U.S., was looking for a way to streamline its field processes during the construction of hotels, hospitals, schools, etc. John Gillis, a project superintendent, tells IncTechnology how tablet PCs helped improve accuracy and save time fostering communications back to the central office. Elizabeth Wasserman: Why did you decide to invest in tablet PCs? John Gillis: During our construction projects, we have superintendents or engineers in the field go room to room to identify all the problems. They identify anything deficient that needs to be fixed. They put this list together – it’s called the “punch list.” Typically, we would do this on paper and assign numbers to each room and then bring this back to the main office and enter it into an Excel spreadsheet. We would sort it by the room or trade that needs to be doing the work – like plumbers or mechanical contractors or carpenters – and print it out and hand it over to them. It used to take a lot of time. Wasserman: So what did you decide to do? Gillis: We started using the tablets on some of our projects. The project I worked on was the Liberty Hotel in Boston. It has 300 guest rooms. We used multiple tablet PC’s from Motion outfitted with Vela Systems’ software. At the Liberty Hotel, we were able to use it to create mobile punch lists and work lists. We would create lists out in the field on the computer and not have to write them down or enter them into Excel. We would do it all in the field on a tablet and automatically sync up with the Vela Systems server and distribute all the information we recorded in real time to everyone who needed it. With the tablet, we could minimize the amount of time spent in each room. Wasserman: How does it work? Gillis: The tablet PC comes with a stylus pen. If you want to tag an item for repair, you can write it with the pen and it will convert your handwriting into text. But for most of the stuff that we use it for, we had already created a list of construction codes. We utilized a drop down list in Vela’s program for repair codes and repair items. You can customize that list in the field to add and modify repair codes at your convenience. Wasserman: Did you see any measurable results? Gillis: There is a lot more accuracy in the location of the items that need to be repaired. The software program also has a viewer program that allows you to work with a PDF picture of the room while you’re walking through it. You tag the items by putting down a digital thumb tack in the precise location, say there is a scratch on the window. Then you just go to the drop down list and tap on “scratch on window.” You can keep using the same PDF as you go from room to room. It is similar to writing on a clear overlay of a drawing for each separate room only it is recorded digitally. So there is a lot more accuracy. It also saves a lot of time. It’s typically saving two or three hours per day for each person, given the time they would have had to spend double entering it – once in the field and once back at the office. They can also pull up the construction plans for the job on the tablet, rather than have to go running back to the office. We’re using the system now on eight different projects. There are usually multiple tablets on each job site, depending on the size of the job.

Tech Talk: Moving Business Applications Online

Elizabeth Wasserman: Why did you need new business applications? Andrew Bartels: When I first came to the firm in 2004, there was Microsoft Excel and paper. It was a company that had done little with technology probably for the past five to 10 years. We were confronted with an opportunity to overhaul the entire infrastructure, which we did. In a medium-sized business, I needed to focus my dedicated support staff on supporting our primary applications. And yet we had so many different parts of the business that could benefit from new applications. We employ a lot of people and we’re always recruiting and hiring. We have a full time recruiter. At first, she was attempting to track all of the resumes and all of the follow up using paper. She was actually hauling around a legal style file briefcase. By implementing an HR Web application from QuickBase, we allowed her to eliminate that paper and to work out of anywhere and have access — from home, one of our branches, or Starbucks if that’s where she happened to be. Wasserman: Why did you opt to use Web-hosted applications? Bartels: We wanted these applications to be actually separate from our core system. Like many companies, we’re very focused on security and the security of our customer information. The fewer people that have access to that information from outside of our corporate network infrastructure, the better. One of the main reasons, as well, was we wanted something that was easy to get up and running and had a back end that was administered by somebody other than our support staff. We wanted our support staff focused on our core customer-facing systems.

Software to Help You Set Prices

It was make or break time for Ranuko Godfrey. Two years ago, his fledgling software company, Project Locker, of Atlanta, had the two things that should spell success for any business. Godfrey, A founding partner and vice president of technology, had a roster of paying customers and a line of quality products and services they were happy to buy. And yet, Project Locker was barely hanging on. The pricing trap The problem was in the pricing. “Our quoting process was totally broken,” says Godfrey who admits to being too timid at the time to charge clients full price. “We would sit down with our pricing sheets and say to ourselves, ‘We can’t charge them this,’ and then we’d slash our estimates by sometimes as much as 60 percent.” What happened to Godfrey is a perfect example of the pricing trap many entrepreneurs fall into and most never escape. “They tend to not have training in pricing strategies,” says Reuben Swartz, a pricing consultant from Austin, Texas, “and typically undervalue their time.” Swartz, who authors the popular blog Dollars and Sense: The Pricing Blog, offers his clients not only consulting advice, but a line of Web-based pricing analytics software, as well, through his company Mimiran. A new killer app Pricing software is an ill-defined area of the business application market. “It’s not an obvious niche like accounting,” says Swartz. And, yet, it’s increasingly seen as the fast track to profitability. In a recent report, Robert Desisto, Gartner’s vice president of research, wrote, “Through 2009, price optimization technology will have the greatest impact on improving the top line revenue and profitability of any business application.” In addition to Mimiran, other software companies in the pricing analytics field include Oracle, Zilliant, Vendavo, and Vistaar. Most of these firms primarily market to big-ticket clients, although some do scale down for small and mid-size businesses. Modest-size businesses that find pricing software worth the hefty tab are typically juggling a wide variety of products, high volume sales, or a volatile pricing market. Pricing software typically offers the following features to address those challenges: Analytics – This is good way to learn from past mistakes, as well as head off trouble in the works. A good software solution will generate reports that track price waterfalls, profit/loss analysis, sales trends, along with break even charts and forecasting models, experts say. Optimization – These are typically tools that allow managers to play with the numbers — revenues, surplus, the cost of acquiring each customer, the lifetime value of that customer and the number of sales — to determine the sweet spot for maximum profits. Deal Manager – It’s not just the value of the data generated that counts. Perhaps just as important is its availability in real time. What good is a blizzard of pricing models or pie charts illustrating sales volume variations at the end of the quarter? Good pricing software provides pricing perimeters, on-the-fly price changing capabilities, fast track approvals for estimates, as well as manages pricing formulas and client-specific contractual obligations. Finding a pricing program that works It was, in fact, Mimiran’s software that made all the difference for Project Locker. “I can’t over emphasize the impact it had on our business,” Godfrey says. “When we saw that 90 percent of our profits were coming from only a quarter of our clients, we realized we had to stop slashing our prices just to close a deal and set our prices according to our true value.” Profits have been up by 50 percent ever since, with the major increase coming from the only two-thirds of the firm’s customers. While it may seem that entrepreneurs and small business owners are a natural market for price setting software, the problem is, well, the price. Most price setting software solutions start in the tens of thousands of dollars. Mimiran’s packages for small businesses start at about $25,000. For the company that can’t get past the sticker shock that comes with all those bells and whistles, there is a way to stick that first proverbial toe in the pool — for free. Microsoft Excel offers a feature called “Solver” that can be used as a crude price optimization tool. Simply click on “tools,” then “add-ins” and check the “solver” box. Click on “tools” again and you’ll find “solver” on the list. With “solver,” business owners can play with the different numbers that determine price elasticity. There’s a pretty good tutorial on how to use the feature on the Microsoft website. Simply search for “solver.”

Software to Help You Set Prices

Inc. 500 Interview: NetSuite

Founded in 1998, NetSuite is the leading provider of CRM (customer relationship management) and ERP (enterprise resource planning) software for small and medium-sized businesses — all packed into one application. Unlike the SAPs and Oracles of the world, the NetSuite offering is an on-demand Internet model. We spoke with NetSuite’s chief executive, Zach Nelson, about how managing your company well involves technology (like his, perhaps) — and some organizational savvy. Inc. Technology: How can a company manage itself efficiently — aside from using software? Zach Nelson: I think you need to organize and rally your team around a key set of metrics so that everyone is pulling in the same direction. How you measure your progress against those objectives is, of course, up to each individual company. You can use a white board, a company meeting, an Excel spreadsheet, or a business application. A system like NetSuite just makes it easier to keep everyone focused on these metrics, in real-time, and ensures that the data comprising those metrics is actually accurate. Inc. Technology: You’ve been quoted as saying it can be more difficult running a smaller company than a larger one. What did you mean by that? Nelson: Small companies face many of the same challenges as larger companies, but without the resources — money and people — to address those issues. Many of these challenges are technology challenges, including: * Larger suppliers wanting to do business electronically with smaller companies; * Smaller companies having to take advantage of global economies of scale to be competitive; * Customers want a seamless experience with your company, regardless of the “channel” that they approach you through — the Web, on the phone, or in person. There are also inherent risks associated with being a smaller company. A $50,000 investment in technology, marketing, or sales could destroy a small business. In a large company, it’s a rounding error. So before you make such bets, you want to make sure you have all the information you need to make it pay off. It’s useful to have more than a gut feel when betting the farm (perhaps literally) on a new initiative.

New Relief for Road Warriors

Technology Forhealth Technologies Inc. understands efficiency. The medical device maker’s new $600,000 hospital robot, the PARxD IV, accurately fills 300 syringes per hour — a feat unmatched by man or machine. Too bad the Daytona Beach, Fla., company didn’t have a similarly clever robot for its accounts payable department. Instead, the 23-person company had relied on a single human being to process manually some 60 expense reports a month. First, she’d print out Excel spreadsheets that had been e-mailed to her from the company’s traveling personnel. Then, she’d rekey each entry into the company’s computer system, kicking back any reports that lacked the necessary managerial approval. Sometimes managers responded quickly. Sometimes they didn’t, and what should have been an hours-long process became a days-long ordeal. But late last year, ForHealth got the shot in the arm it needed — a new Web-based expense-reporting system, OneMindConnect’s ExpensAble. Now, not only do ForHealth’s 15 business travelers get reimbursed more quickly — in fewer than five days instead of more than a week — but the firm’s sole accountant has time for other, more important tasks. The entire system cost $3,500 to install and $500 in monthly service charges and has already paid for itself. Without it, says Spence Lloyd, chief financial officer, “we would have had to hire another person.” Keeping track of travel and entertainment expenses has long been one of the more onerous of executive chores. After all, who wants to sift through stacks of tiny, crumpled receipts, trying to remember what you had for breakfast in Omaha that morning three weeks ago? It’s no wonder that many traveling executives regularly fall behind, creating untold headaches for accounting departments. A growing number of Web-based expense-reporting systems — including those created by Concur Technologies, Gelco Information Network, Extensity, and more than a half-dozen others — promise to change all that. Such services allow business travelers to log on to their company’s intranet from the road and record expenses as they go. Some systems go even further, automatically filling out expense reports each time a corporate credit card is swiped in a restaurant or hotel. Sure, it’s convenient. But such systems can also boost the bottom line. With Web-based services, execs can file a report in just 18 minutes, compared with about 35 minutes manually, and the time and labor costs per report drop from $48 to $18, according to Aberdeen Group. Who wants to sift through stacks of receipts, trying to recall what you had for breakfast in Omaha?

Working Smarter With Microsoft Office

A decade ago, it was very difficult to complete a mail merge between applications from different vendors’ software packages. Don’t miss out on one of the most compelling benefits of Microsoft’s stronghold over desktop office automation software. Be sure to take advantage of the tight integration across Microsoft products. Don’t Retype It. Merge It! What are some easy ways you can begin putting this integration to use? Two examples immediately come to mind: mail merge and financial statement tables. Do you need to create automatically, some customized mailing labels, envelopes or form letters, but often end up settling for some low-tech, tedious, scissors-and-glue approach? The Mail Merge Helper wizard in Microsoft Word makes it very easy to pull in address lists, or similar data, from such programs as Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Access. Don’t even think about having your clerical staff retype the information! Preparing Tables: Just Say No to Spaces and Tabs Another small-business redundancy has to do with preparing financial statements within documents. In most companies, a CFO, accounting manger or controller prepares various financial statements in Microsoft Excel, and then passes the information over to an executive assistant to incorporate into regulatory documents, lender and investor updates, and annual reports. Make sure your company isn’t falling into this huge productivity trap. Be sure your executive assistant, or whomever is charged with pulling together these documents in Microsoft Word, is aware of simple, enormous timesaving shortcuts such as the Paste Special command on the Edit menu and the Object command on the Insert menu. All too often, I see the executive assistant retyping these financial statements from scratch in Microsoft Word, either by using the Insert Table feature or, even worse, by aligning text by using spaces and tabs. Ouch! Be Diplomatic and Tread Gently at First Not all companies will suffer from these same redundancies. But someone needs to take the time to go on a fact-finding mission in your organization to spot and remedy at least some of these inefficiencies. Because of the sensitive nature of this, you may be better off leaning on your accountants or auditors for this task. In other cases, there’s no reason a PC savvy office manager, controller or CFO can’t preclude or successfully manage this exploratory work. Discussion Points Do you have a hunch that employees are retyping the same information over and over again? Do your administrative staff members know how to fully exploit the mail merge features in the Microsoft Office suite? Does your financial and publications staff understand how to easily take data prepared in Microsoft Excel and seamlessly place it into Microsoft Word documents? Is there anyone in your company who’s in a natural position to spend some time with each department or job function and look for opportunities to streamline workloads through more efficient use of Microsoft Office applications? Joshua Feinberg (joshua@smallbiztechtalk.com) helps small businesses save money on computer support costs. His latest book, What Your Computer Consultant Doesn’t Want You to Know ($19.99, Small Biz Tech Talk Press), exposes 101 money-saving secrets of expensive techies. To order Joshua’s new book, visit www.SmallBizTechTalk.com or call 866-TECH-EXPERT (866-832-4397). Â© Copyright 2002, Joshua Feinberg Small Biz Tech Talk is a registered trademark of KISTech Communications

Tag Archives: Microsoft Excel

Tech Talk: Circuit Maker Automates Accounting Processes

The Right Touch: Touch-Screen PCs

The Right Touch: Touch-Screen PCs

Tech Talk: Tablet PCs Save Construction Time

Tech Talk: Moving Business Applications Online

Software to Help You Set Prices

Software to Help You Set Prices

Inc. 500 Interview: NetSuite

New Relief for Road Warriors

Working Smarter With Microsoft Office

Twitter Updates

CHANNELS

Tag Archives: Microsoft Excel

Popular Posts

CHANNELS