It is very tempting to look at financial systems and try to bring everything back to core simplicity: money owed, money owing, money made. The fundamentals of business are hardly going to change, so accounts software is always going to be a key part of any business system and how hard can it be?
Sales, purchases, profit and loss are core records, whether gathered and calculated by hand/brain or computer. Balance sheets, annual accounts, taxation and so on will always be essential to comply with the laws of the land and the accounting rules and conventions of the day, which can be incorporated in the software. So that’s about it, really, isn’t it?
Well, no actually. Financial software has continued to mature—and is certainly long past that simple notion of electronic bookkeeping. That ancient view of the financial function saw it principally as the recording of history, with computers just adding speed and accuracy of calculation to reduce the human clerical overhead. Sometimes, analysis of past business offered pattern or insights to help plan next year’s forecasts and budgets, so computerised reports were definitely A Good Thing.
Today, financial systems are much more like cockpit displays, giving a real time view of the business for direction, control and seeing and dealing with problems before they escalate. Pushing that analogy just a little further, financial applications, because they are so
integral to management and control, also look after the many elements that can be automated in today’s business administration. Sell a pair of shoes, and your stock position immediately goes down a pair of size fives. Swipe a credit/debit card at the point of sale
and a whole series of automated events click into place that (eventually) takes money from the punter’s account and puts it in yours while simultaneously feeding into daily sales totals by branch or POS, adjusting stock levels and perhaps triggering re-order, etc.
The point is that we require all sorts of systems to be integrated if we are to gain the productivity and costs savings always promised and, not least because they are common to every transaction, financial systems also offer the nervous system that communicates,
triggers, etc.
‘What is happening in financial software now is all about integration, typically with disparate systems that may not have been designed to work together,’ said Noel Shannon, managing director of Dublin firm ProStrategy, which has a broad view of the market as it handles Microsoft Axapta and Navision, Sybiz and Pastel. ‘There is an escalating demand for greater technical performance in financial systems, such as providing for mobile or teleworking access, Web enablement and e-business, of course, and more and more the
ability to fit directly into the specific requirements of a particular type of business.’
Shannon sees a healthy level of market demand which probably arises in part from organisations that last invested seriously in such systems for Y2K and the Euro and are now looking to upgrade because they recognise that to some degree they may have fallen
behind. Interestingly, his view is that ‘compliance’—whether forced by Sarbanes-Oxley, international accounting standards, or some of the highly regulated sectors in which firms participate—is much in the air and being pushed by vendors, but is actually not visible as a
significant factor in the market.
Integration is pointed out as the key issue also by Charles Alken, director of Quantum Business Systems (Pegasus Opera II reseller) who also suggests that with many businesses on their third, fourth cycle of systems renewal (or even more) there is a high level of
awareness of what they need and what today’s systems can be expected to do. ‘Almost all assume seamless integration with Microsoft Office products, notably Excel,’ he said, ‘and there is simply a huge range of speciality third-party products, whether industry specific or containing new technology, from which data intake must be automated.’ He cites hotels and the hospitality industry, where reservations are a significant transaction type in the sector, or equipment like weighing machines/weighbridges or laboratory analysis systems or handheld devices of many kinds. ‘One area that is just in its infancy is automated reporting 24 /7—set your system to deliver the MD’s reports by e-mail every Monday at
8.00am via e-mail, alert Purchasing about products that require re-ordering or the sales manager if an order being processed will yield a margin below a set threshold. Almost any such reporting or notification can be set up easily and directly by users with the obvious productivity gains.’
Sage Ireland has the strongest market position with products for micro-businesses (Instant Accounts, TAS Books) and all the way up to its enterprise level Sage Line 500 and new MMS suites. ‘Integration is certainly a customer theme but in fact it’s more a question of wanting more of everything for less investment!’ says Glynis Elrington, sales director. ‘The point is that they are all experienced, savvy users and in every sector business has moved on rapidly. So they take for granted that a financial system will integrate with Excel—or other smart reporting tools—and that it will cope with any form of e-business they start to use. That can range from credit card acquisition to electronic banking—Sage systems can now work with AIB, BoI and Ulster—and, of course, all of the back-office functionality like stock and re-ordering, applying credit limits, etc.’ The other broad area of demand, she says, is for speed and automation—effectively real time reporting: ‘Almost every business places a huge emphasis on cash flow and credit management, so Days Outstanding is top of the list when it comes to reports from the debtors ledger.’
Another way of looking at the business requirement for integration is that it shows clearly how every company is different. ‘There really is no such thing as a standard financial package any more,’ says Mairéad Dooley-fFrench, Oracle’s business development manager
for Applications. ‘For a start, a much wider proportion of staff will be at least occasional users of aspects of the system. Sales people looking up customer accounts is perhaps the most common. But for example HR data—time sheets and hours worked—may be input
from the field and then feed all the way through to client invoices. Others may keep payroll totally separate but allow individuals to make purchases directly according to company rules, from office supplies to major components drawn down through a supply chain
system.’ These distributed applications and thousands more will usually require to be set up on a LAN or Intranet so that users only see and use what is appropriate to their authority and responsibility. Behind the simple front end each user sees, often these days
just web browser-based and intuitive to use, there is an increasingly complex set of financial systems running the interactions and transactions automatically. The complexity arises principally from the application of the specific organisation’s rules and business processes—and being able to change smoothly and easily when they change and evolve.
Yes, the core tasks of ‘keeping the books’ are easy. But financial systems have long since extended their reach into all aspects of the enterprise—for command and control, for automated business processes and above all for a single, integrated, view of the business NOW.
Site Report: Maxol
Oil retailer goes for future-proof accounts
The Maxol Group is one of the largest and oldest family businesses in Ireland, founded in 1920 and with three McMullan brothers on the board today. It is ranked No. 3 in Ireland and is the leading independent oil company in Europe with turnover of over €450
million. With a staff of just over 100, Maxol operates six oil and petroleum distribution depots on the island serving its own 80 petrol stations and over 300 other outlets North and South. ‘We wanted reliable, smart technology on which to build a future-proof accounts and distribution system for the Group that suited our ways of working,’ explained Garry Boggan, group IT manager. The chosen system is Integra e-Financials from iB Solutions (formerly McKeown Software and Torex), which is the direct descendant of the Integra accounts software that the Group has been using for nearly a decade. Today’s integrated solution is built on proven client-server architecture with a Java-based front end Web client featuring familiar Windows interface. Maxol uses a Citrix thin client architecture, so that data and applications are essentially server-based and centralised over a WAN that does not require high bandwidth. The system eliminates the duplication of financial data at local level, reduces reliance on paper records and encourages direct
data input, self-service and authorisations online. Currently the system has about 50 Maxol users.
‘Sales orders and deliveries are the core of our business,’ says Garry Boggan. ‘We are integrating online order entry with our existing bespoke system for bulk and tanker stock. We have ideas and plans to further web-enable interaction with the system, bringing the
advantages and efficiencies of our IT investment out to users and customers throughout the country.’
Site Report: Irish Equine Centre
Opera links to lab production system
The Irish Equine Centre is the independent organisation that provides laboratory services for the diagnosis, management and prevention of diseases of horses. Founded in 1984, it is also involved in veterinary education and ongoing research. IEC is under the aegis of Horse Racing Ireland and is funded through its own fee income plus grants and fund allocations from the organisations with which it works, such as the Turf Club, Weatherbys Ireland and HRI.
The centre has two main business functions, explains Mark Sherry, head of finance and CEO: its main through line is a diagnostic analysis service for the horse industry through over 600 individual vets throughout the country, which processes an annual total of over 55,000 samples. The second service is quite different, involving large batch, high throughput testing for meat plants (BSE, the Scrapie Genotyping, antibiotic residues, etc.). This involves rapid turnaround (samples arrive 6.00pm and results are required by 6.00am) because a negative result could affect an entire shift’s production. Similarly, in the event of a disease outbreak, confirmation is needed speedily because Horse Racing Ireland and the Dept. of Agriculture might have major decisions to make in a short time, such as prohibition of animal movement.
‘Up to mid-2003 we were high tech on the scientific side—we even had robotics in the labs —but were essentially a generation behind in ICT. Immediate drivers were our upturn in business and increasingly onerous financial and statistical reporting requirements from Horse Racing Ireland and from clients.’ The IEC’s financial management systems since early 2004 are based on Pegasus Opera II with XRL links both to various existing laboratory systems and to inject results into Excel for reports. Mark Sherry says that longstanding system supplier Datapac and Pegasus distributor Quantum Business
Solutions ‘.. got really stuck in and we all accomplished a great deal in a relatively short time span.’ The Sysmed lab software is effectively the IEC production system, which has to be linked to Opera II for invoicing and costs, statistical analysis and administration some of the smart tools is now makes available. Test results, for example, can be automatically faxed to vets when they are available. Similarly, vets who so wish can have SMS messages
sent to their mobile phones when test results have been faxed. Early in 2005 a self-service portal will allow vets to draw down their own results securely over the Web.
Indaver Minchem
Operating since 1977 as MinChem and acquired by the Belgian Indaver Group in 1999, this waste management company specialises in hazardous and other highly regulated waste and serves the pharmachem, healthcare and other specialist sectors as well as general industry and the public sector. It has had a Sybiz Vision accounting system for some years, installed by Dublin specialists ProStrategy, which has seven users and is the essential management information tool. At the same time there is a 50-user production system tracking the collection and movement of waste which is the engine of the business and specially developed over time for its own needs. ‘Tracker’ is based on SQL Server and is
confidently asserted by IT manager Rory Murphy to be superior in performance to anything comparable on the market. ‘We have always invested in IT and allocate a good budget every year to make further progress.’
Interfacing Vision accounts with Tracker and other systems is crucial. Invoices are generated by Tracker, for example, for historical reasons and because they require details of waste content, EPA and other licences, etc. Now the invoices are imported into the financial system, which then treats them as if they were ‘native’ to Vision. Similarly, financial information from the 1,400 paper invoices per month from suppliers (mainly hauliers) are brought in through the Adest document imaging and OCR system. Financial controller Rob Reid says that the Indaver Minchem Accounts Department has reduced staff and overheads by over 20% in an expanding business as a result of investment in better systems. ‘We are looking to new developments that can take advantage of the
capabilities of our systems, such as a secure layer of our web site where customers could check on the movement of their material or use self-service mechanisms for reports, disposal confirmations and certificates and so on.’ The company’s systems now provide a
clear audit trail and documentation through all transactions and activities, an increasingly essential requirement in an industry that must ensure compliance on many fronts for a range of regulatory authorities.
13/12/04
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