Dear Clients,
I recently asked the question in this space, “What’s Your Rev-Limiter?” and received feedback from several clients all saying: Qualified Staff.
Follow-up discussion revealed that a bigger problem than finding new employees for expanding the business is the loss of current long-term employees—taking firsthand business experience out the door that will take years to rebuild. Whether the employee is retiring or has buried their Thanos-decapitating enchanted axe and left on a journey of self-discovery, the business challenge is the same—how not to lose that institutional knowledge?
Typically, you have weeks/months/years of notice for the departure of retiring employees (since they want to make sure you get the retirement party planned!) but sometimes you don’t get even two weeks notice—queue the classic phrase “hit by a bus”…
Another phrase that’s gotten popular in the last few years is to “future proof your business.” But since loss of expertise can happen at any time with such short notice we need to be even more concerned about “present proofing your business“—and with the waves of The Great Resignation over the past year this has only risen in importance.
The first and simplest step to take is to get current employees to document their processes—yes, in writing. Good options include an MS-Word document where screenshots can be included, or even short videos of more complex processes. If you don’t have a good handle on this part right now, then please make it a top priority.
Side/sad story: An employee at a client recently gave her two weeks notice. The company was able to scramble and get a temp agency employee to overlap with the departing employee for her last week at the company—but very little was physically documented in that week… That became a problem when, after that one week of overlap, the temp employee didn’t return the following week. OUCH! Moral of the story: If it’s not written down in great detail, then the knowledge isn’t truly captured.
The second step is to then streamline and automate processes where possible to make them “less manual” and thus “less dependent on personnel.” We’re continually extolling this for benefits like scalability of the operation— but even if you’re not focused on expanding the business, this is critical for business survivability.
While The Great Resignation was primarily driven by the departure of employees aged 30 to 45 and we can’t predict the future behavior of such a wide and varied group, it’s a statistical certainty we’re continuing to see the retirement of more than 10,000 Baby Boomers per day—among the most valued and skilled employees of any company—so preserving institutional knowledge and automating processes will remain a critical business priority for the foreseeable future.
Always standing by in the cornfields to assist you in this effort!
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More than 99% of our services are performed remotely, so we’ve never met the majority of you. But we’re not too shy to show our faces and share a few amusing details about our staff on our recently updated Meet the Team page. And, yes, those alternate email addresses actually work! <grin>
Regards,
Kevin E. Stroud
kestrou@nexlan.com
NexLAN, LLC
https://nexlan.com
New Ebook: Succession Planning Strategies
Would you like a helpful guide for your team’s discussions about succession planning for your company owners, or for your cross-training and workflow documentation plan for employees?
Succession Planning Strategies: An Adaptable 4-Step Process for Business and Industry Executives is an ebook that outlines the considerations and best practices for building a formal plan.
This playbook from Acumatica covers:
- Succession planning benefits
- Industry-specific succession planning concerns
- Four steps to successful transitions
- “How Prepared Are You?” self-assessment readiness checklist
- How to find a successor
- Strategies and tips to improve your chances for a positive transition
View or download Succession Planning Strategies.
If you have questions about how to leverage your system to add automations, workflows, or documentation to make any ownership or staff transition and training much easier—hit us with an email, or call.
AccountMate Webinars Are Now Quicker to Access
You no longer need a user account or have to log in to see a list of upcoming live AccountMate webinars, register for webinars, or watch recorded webinars. These are now available to everyone from AccountMate’s main website. And you can of course still access them from the user portal as always.
To get to these via the Education page on accountmate.com, under Services in the menu click Education. Then scroll down to the Webcasts on Demand for Visitors section for links to upcoming and recorded webinars.
AccountMate Classes This Fall
1. Payroll Module: September 12-16, 2022
Registration is now open.
This class is offered once per year. If someone in your company wants to add to their AccountMate Payroll skills, this excellent and comprehensive class is the best way, so get on the list. (The Payroll class isn’t eligible for the free class seats that come with Lifecycle Maintenance.)
2. Core AccountMate Modules: October 6 – November 10, 2022
Registration is not yet open. This 6-week online class has 2 sessions per week and covers nearly a dozen core modules. See the Course Overview page for details about free class seats that come with Lifecycle Maintenance.
Please send us an email with any questions or to register.
New: Blanket Sales Orders in Acumatica
This year’s 2022 R1 release of Acumatica introduced the ability to create blanket sales orders to make it easy to manage long-term sales agreements with your customers. It’s tough to manage blanket sales orders manually, so automations in this complex area are very handy!
In Acumatica, blanket sales orders are a different order type that doesn’t affect item availability and quantities in your warehouse like regular sales orders do. Instead, you issue child sales orders from the blanket order either manually, or automated according to scheduled dates.
When quantities of an item need to be delivered to your customer at multiple ship-to locations, you can create “line splits” to generate separate child sales orders for each location. The system applies sales order grouping rules for line splits when items have the same scheduled order date, customer order number, currency, ship-to location, tax zone, shipping terms, ship via, FOB and shipping zone.
It’s easy to manage your blanket sales orders
- You can set an expiration date for each blanket sales order. After the expiration date, if there are any open quantities , warning alerts will be displayed for allocations, links to purchase orders, and payment applications. You can either cancel the expired blanket order or extend the expiration date. Blanket sales orders can be set to close automatically if there are no open items on the expiration date.
- You get visibility into upcoming demand so you can optimize your purchasing or automatically trigger purchase orders to ensure that items are in hand when you’ll need to ship them – so you don’t have to pay for and store items too far in advance.
- You can accept payments and prepayments against the blanket order, and invoice the parent account even if items are being shipped to different locations. You can review your blanket sales orders to see all the expiration dates, check open unshipped quantities, and more—and click to drill down to details in linked POs, payments, and orders.
Want to learn more?
This 18-minute Acumatica Blanket Sales Orders video gives a thorough overview with screen shots. And the Order Management: Sales with Blanket Sales Orders article in Acumatica’s help wiki walks through all the details of how it works (log in or create a free account, then do a search for Blanket Sales Orders). As always, don’t be shy about emailing NexLAN a question.
AccountMate Tech Note: Monitoring Customized Kit Item Transactions
A kit item may be customized to meet a specific customer requirement. A customized kit item retains the item number it used prior to customization. The only means to distinguish a customized kit item from another is through its kit formula.
If you receive many orders for customizations, then you need effective reporting tools to manage this type of transaction. This week, we publish Article #1147: Monitoring Customized Kit Item Transactions. This Technical Note presents the most useful reports that you can use to monitor customized kit item transactions.
AccountMate Tech Note: Scheduling and Processing Batch Period-End Closing and Transfer Data to GL
Month-end and year-end closing periods are the busiest time of the year for the finance or accounting department. Timely and accurate financial statements must be generated for management, auditors, and government agencies; therefore, ease in generating these reports is important to users. AccountMate’s Batch Period-End Closing and Batch Transfer to GL features can help to expedite the period or year-end closing process; thus, enabling the finance or accounting personnel to devote more time to verify and review the financial information accuracy.
Article #1274: Scheduling and Processing Batch Period-End Closing and Transfer Data to GL discusses the procedures necessary for setting up batch period-end closing and batch transfer data to GL processes. This document also enumerates the conditions that must be met and validations that are performed in these processes.
AccountMate Technical Tips
Versions: AM12 for SQL, Express, and LAN
AM11 for SQL and Express
AM10 for SQL, Express, and LAN
AM9 for LAN
Module: AR
Q: Why is there a default freight when I create or import an AR invoice?
A: A default freight code is assigned to AR invoice transactions if a freight code is entered in the AR Module Setup ► General (1) ► Invoice Transaction ► Freight Code field. Remove the assigned freight code if you do not want to have a default value or change the value if you want to assign a different freight code.
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Versions: AM12 for SQL, Express, and LAN
AM11 for SQL and Express
AM10 for SQL, Express, and LAN
AM9 for LAN
Module: GL
Q: I want to run the Period-End Closing function in the middle of a working day. Must everyone close AccountMate while I do this task?
A: Everyone doesn’t have to close AccountMate, but they have to “not be in the company that you’re closing” as the Period-End Closing process requires exclusive access to the company. Those who are accessing another company may continue using AccountMate.
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Versions: AM12 for SQL, Express, and LAN
AM11 for SQL and Express
AM10 for SQL, Express, and LAN
Modules: AR, SO
Q: I used the Paste from Excel feature to enter a line item in Create Invoice and Create Sales Order. I copied both Item # and Description. The item description in the Excel file is different from the item description in AccountMate; however, it always uses the item description in AccountMate. Why?
A: This happens if the inventory item is not set up to allow overwrite on the item description. Verify the setting in the Inventory Maintenance ► Settings (1) ► Allow Overwrite ► Description checkbox. If you want AccountMate to use the Description from the Excel file, then this checkbox must be marked.
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Versions: AM12 for SQL and Express
AM11 for SQL and Express
AM10 for SQL and Express
Module: PO
Q: I want the freight cost to appear in the Purchase Order; however, I also want the same freight cost to be added to the item’s unit cost. How can I do this in AccountMate?
A: Enter the freight cost in Create Purchase Order; however, you must zero out the freight when you receive the PO in Receive Goods and instead post the freight using the Accrue Landed Cost function.
Subscription Information
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