In 2004, ACCPAC announced it's biggest release ever of the increasingly popular and powerful Pro Series Accounting System.  This new version brought together over 200 features that were designed based primarily on client and reseller feedback.  And ACCPAC scored big, receiving the highest award of five stars from CPA Software News.  Most important, our customers are loving it. 

Pro 7.3 brings long requested features like advanced bank reconciliation functions, credit card processing, and item forecasting by group.  Usability enhancements such as an ACCPAC desktop to store all your favorites, user-specific lookup lists, and even stronger data-driller functionality are included.  National accounts allows you to group customers together under a corporate umbrella yet retain branch specific information such as credit limits, open invoices.  Cash receipts can even be disbursed across multiple branch offices.  And intercompany transactions allow you to disburse journal entries across multiple companies.

What has been a joy for us at G&A is to be able to demonstrate to our users that ACCPAC is finally listening to their users.  Accountants like the new flexible payment terms, Hyperlinks to websites, pictures of inventory items, a strong link to Sage CRM (more about that below) attaching  document links to customers, vendors or inventory items, overflow printing on AP checks (no more using checks simply for displaying invoices on stubs).  The salespeople like the ability to check pricing and margins with the push of a single button from the data-entry screen, printing directly from the SO and PO, drill-down that allows superior customer support, and the intelligent faxing and emailing of documents directly to your customer or vendor without leaving their desks.

Now we mentioned the 200 features in 7.3.  This doesn't count what 7.2, 7.1, 6.5 (etc.) brought to the table.  Obviously we can't list all these features in this newsletter.  So if you're not on 7.3, check out all the features at our document library -  Pro 7.3 Documents. If you like what you see, and want a demonstration of how this powerful software can help your company achieve new levels of efficiency, give Earl Hunt a call at our offices to arrange an on-site or on-line demonstration of these features. 

Gilbert & Associates has long preached the usefulness and importance of contact managers or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems.  This genre of business applications is gaining entrance into more and more companies as they realize the significance integrating front office operations with back office systems. 

Several years ago ACCPAC introduced their browser based CRM system. This has been recently upgraded and re-branded as Sage CRM, and is making incredible waves in the industry with its functionality, ease of deployment and remote access capabilities.  We'd like to begin featuring this new product line in the next few issues of this newsletter.  With this issue, we'll re-introduce the concept of CRM and how Sage CRM tackles the major issues confronting sales and customer service in today's marketplace.

The Sage CRM system will provide a number of important capabilities for your business:

• Empowers your staff with enterprise-wide access to vital customer, partner, and prospect information.
• Allows you to build long-lasting customer loyalty and generate repeat sales from your best customers.
• Integration with your existing AccPac Pro Series system for efficient access to customer, partner and transactional data.
• The ability to identify, execute and replicate effective marketing campaign activities, and measure the effectiveness of every campaign.
• Easily track and respond to customer service issues with automatic workflow and email responses.

The system has three major functionality components, Sales Force Automation, Marketing Automation, and Customer Care Automation. Access to the system is through a standard web-browser, wireless PDA, or cell phone.

Sales Force Automation provides a wealth of tools to manage your sales pipeline, allowing sales teams to effectively manage, forecast, and report on all phases of your sales cycle. Automatically distribute and track sales leads and pinpoint delays in the sales cycle. Point-and-click reporting and graphs help to maximize your sales efforts.

Marketing Automation provides a single source of customer information to better manage marketing efforts. Target the right customer and the right time, and eliminate the guesswork to put your company's marketing resources to the best use.

Customer Care Automation empowers your organization with critical information to build and support long-term customer satisfaction and loyalty. To provide the professional level of support your customers expect, the system provides real-time access to relevant customer data, including purchases, call and escalation history, interactions, multiple contacts, support cases, e-mail and documents sent and received, and outstanding sales opportunities.

Call us today to schedule a meeting to discuss how the Sage CRM solution might improve your business. Monthly webinar demonstrations of the product are also available. The next two webinars are scheduled for Thursday, August 11^th at 10:00 am and Wednesday, August 17^th at noon. The webinars last about an hour. Register for a webinar by clicking CRM Webinars.

New Era Contract Sales

We are proud to announce that one of our customers, New Era Contract Sales (New Era) was recently chosen by AccPac for one of their Customer Success Stories.  New Era is a distributor to the Department of Defense (DOD) and other large industrial companies, such as Boeing.

New Era had been struggling with the specific requirements surrounding the processing of orders for the DOD, as well as the inefficiencies of operating several disparate information systems. We were able to work with them to understand their business processes and customize their AccPac Pro Series system to exactly match those processes. The result has been a reduction in the sales order process from six minutes to two, saving over 100 hours per week.

They also utilize ProAlert, an AccPac Add-On product, to track critical system events, particularly in the tracking of purchase orders and vendors. If a purchase order acknowledgement is not received from the vendor when expected, ProAlert automatically sends and email to the Purchasing Agent for follow up. ProAlert does the same follow up with shipping from vendors to insure that they are shipping according to schedule. As a result, late shipments and the associated drop in customer services levels are a thing of the past!

See the full Success Story at the following website link:

http://www.accpac.com/Success/NewEra.asp