Use Your Business Systems to Ensure Business Continuity
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The COVID-19 pandemic introduced economic and occupational challenges to many of our clients. As importantly, it taught us an important lesson: Be prepared. While we cannot predict the future, the pandemic made us aware of some very important precautions we can take to reduce the impact of future events that could otherwise cripple our businesses.
Here are some ways you can ensure your company is best utilizing your business systems to prepare for whatever comes next.Â
Automate Your Accounting Processes
Creating electronic workflows for purchase approvals, invoice coding, batch payments, and more will streamline work and reduce human error in your already defined accounting processes. Automation can also make it much easier to transition your accounting processes to other locations should the need arise. Here are some helpful resources for specific ways you can automate key processes:
- Adjusting workflows for daily accounting processes
- Maintaining cash flow during a crisis
- Using Account Schedules to create cash flow statements
ACH and Going Paperless
Setting up ACH payments provides the ability to make and receive payments without paper checks, trips to the bank, or the dreaded printer problems. During the COVID-19 crisis, this was a serious problem for many businesses, as they could not print checks from locations outside of the office. In addition, the time required for the postal service to get payments from one point to the other is increased, while ACH is immediate. If you haven’t moved to ACH yet, now is the time. Here are resources to help you with the move:
Are you interested in other paperless options, like electronically capturing purchase orders and attaching to sales orders, to have an electronic ‘paper’ trail? ArcherPoint can help you find the right solution for your Microsoft Dynamics NAV or Business Central implementation.
Training and Support for Your ERP Users
When business slows, you might invest in user training, but what about when business is booming? ArcherPoint support plans offer ad hoc training in addition to traditional break-fix support services at a fixed monthly fee, so you can train new users, or existing users on new functionality. Options include:
- A resource dedicated to your account
- Annual onsite or virtual visits
- Annual server health checks
- 24/7 support
Empower your employees to get the help they need when they need it by subscribing to one of our support plans for NAV/BC and Azure/Microsoft 365.
Benefits of Moving to the Cloud
Microsoft cloud computing tools can help you mitigate risks, provide flexibility, increase collaboration, and allow your employees to work from anywhere.Â
- Utilizing Azure can help protect your organization from losing data by securely replicating your ERP data to the cloud, providing a key component in your disaster recovery plan, whether natural disaster or due to cyberattack.
- Moving to Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) and Teams improves collaboration amongst employees, allows them to work from anywhere, and provides automatic updates to keep your company current with minimal IT overhead
Learn more about what the Microsoft Azure Cloud and Microsoft 365 have to offer. ArcherPoint can also help you get Teams up and running for your team.
Lowering Upgrade Costs
You have a window of opportunity to get current and stay current on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central at a fixed price and a slower pace. With the language change of C/AL in Dynamics NAV/Navision to AL in Business Central, upgrade costs had gone up. However, with Microsoft allowing both languages and base application modifications in Business Central, some of these costs could be put off until later versions. We are now at the point where the current version of Business Central only allows for modifications in the AL language – no more hybrid language installations moving forward. Ultimately, this is great, because your future upgrade costs will be very low compared to historically lengthy, costly, and complicated upgrades.
The last version that allows both AL and C/AL modifications (both company customizations and ISV add-on solutions) is Business Central 14. This version is slated to no longer be available when BC 16 is released in September 2020.
The future of upgrades is very bright for Dynamics 365 Business Central users – but you need to get there first. Enter ArcherPoint’s Get Current, Stay Current plan. Check out our blogs explaining more about moving to BC 14 while you still can:
- Upgrade Now While It’s Still Cheap
- Should You Upgrade Now or Wait?
- Save Money, Reduce Risk, Upgrade Now
The first step to planning your upgrade is to budget for it. Get your free upgrade quote from ArcherPoint today.
Power BI and Reporting
Keeping a pulse on cash flow, sales trends, and inventory levels are key to successfully navigating slowdowns. Tracking the proper KPIs, and effectively reporting on them is essential.Â
Learn why Power BI is a no-brainer for Microsoft NAV/Business Central users, and create your plan of attack for deploying Power BI in your organization.
In good times and bad, your ArcherPoint team is here to help you navigate the challenges you are facing.Â
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