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Learn how to set your business up for success this spring with our March webinars. Last month, we covered topics ranging from the basics of aACE to transactions and sales orders. Here's what we have in store for March:

Shipping and the aACE Pick App – March 2nd

Your customers depend on you to get them the right products at the right time. Learn how aACE streamlines the pick, pack, and ship process with our Pick App and shipping integrations, and take a sneak peek by checking out our feature highlight and demo video.

Templates, Campaigns, and Rate Cards – March 9th

Learn how to save time and prevent errors related to duplicate data entry with standardized orders, purchase orders, pricing, and more. Before the webinar, check out our feature highlights on rate cards and campaigns.

Production and the aACE Job Shop App – March 16th

Your production process has a lot of moving parts, and your business depends on keeping them all running smoothly. Learn how aACE can help save time and reduce data entry errors with our robust production tools, including the aACE Job Shop app. Before the webinar, check out our feature highlight and demo video to get an advance look at the app.

Commissions – March 23rd

Discover how aACE's comprehensive commissions tools can help you incentivize your sales team and reward your affiliates for referring new business.

Made to Stock Inventory – March 30th

If you build products to stock according to anticipated consumer demand, this is the webinar for you. Learn how aACE handles MTS inventory from replenishment to cost application and beyond.

Register now to save your spot! We look forward to seeing you in our webinars and hearing your questions during the presentations.

In 2021, customer satisfaction is no longer just about great customer service: it’s about the entire customer experience. And just when we thought we may have had a handle on exactly what we need to do — and when and how — to improve our customer experiences, along came the pandemic of 2020 and everything we thought we knew went right out the window.

If you’re like most businesses, the coronavirus has changed just about everything that once felt normal. Your offices or facilities may be vacant or at minimal capacity. Your Monday morning water cooler chats may have been replaced by Slack messages and Zoom calls. Your brick-and-mortar storefront likely sees fewer customers, and you’re probably looking for more technology solutions to facilitate sales and transactions while giving your clients more contactless services and product delivery.

In the era of COVID-19, how can you deliver exceptional customer service and improve customer experiences when it’s increasingly challenging to engage face-to-face? How do you make customers feel important — even essential — to your success? If you’re not already using customer relationship management software, or you're not using your existing CRM solution to its fullest capabilities, you’re likely already setting yourself up for a big challenge. That’s because many businesses don’t understand exactly what a CRM is or what it can do for you. Because of that, it can be difficult to know which core features you should look for in a CRM.

What’s a CRM?

A CRM is a customer relationship management tool. It’s primarily a software solution that enables you to automate and manage a number of customer-related functions, from management of your customer database to the ability to create and deliver customer-specific marketing and sales information such as emails, website messaging, social media targeted, call reminders, meeting scheduling, and much more.

Why do you need a CRM?

A CRM can give you insight that’s difficult to achieve with spreadsheets, calendar reminders, sticky notes, and disparate word processing tools, email clients, and contact lists. Think of it as a one-stop shop for all of your customer data and engagement tracking.

CRM Features to Improve Customer Experiences

Here’s a quick look at an example of how you might use a CRM to manage a customer engagement, highlighting some of the key features your CRM should include:

• A potential customer sees a targeted ad on social media, clicks the ad, and goes to your website.
• If your CRM uses tracking codes, you can track the potential customer’s engagement from the ad to your website.
• If your CRM is integrated with the CMS for your website, you can even track your potential customer’s journey through your website. Which pages did the person view? How long did the person engage with your website?
• As the customer clicks through your site, you can use your CMS and CRM integration to deliver a user-specific pop-up message. Because this is the first time this customers’ IP has been logged on your website, you assume it’s a first visit so you can deliver a message featuring a special savings — 15% off the first purchase or services.
• To get the savings, all the person has to do is enter an email address.
• Hopefully at this point, because the potential customer wants that coupon, you’ll get a real email address. Your CRM can now associate that email address with the customer’s engagement as a potential lead.
• Now it’s time to nurture that lead. What will it take to move that customer from a few clicks on your website to a purchase?
• As the customer engages with you more, (opens emails, clicks links, returns to your website) you can use your CRM to gather more data. For example, you could have the person provide you with additional contact information, such as name, address, and phone number. All of this data can be stored within your CRM. If the person moves to a sale, and your CRM is integrated with your invoicing and accounting systems, you can even use that data to help speed up form-filling to ensure you’ve got the right data in the right place to complete everything you need from payment to shipping.
• If your CRM has a lead-scoring feature, you can have it automatically score that person’s engagement with your company along the buyer’s journey. For example, which web pages were viewed, which emails were opened, which links were clicked, which forms were filled out? With a lead score, you can gather more information about how likely it may be that this person will move from a lead to an actual sale.
• Let’s say a person scores high on your lead-scoring metrics. If your CRM has automated reminders and task-setting, you can send an email or text alert to someone on your team to reach out to the potential customer to facilitate the buyer from consideration to purchase.
• With CRM integration into your ecommerce site and point-of-sale solution, once the person makes a purchase, you can update the buyer’s information in your CMS system and then use it to provide customer support, like help desks or FAQs. You can also generate a new email campaign to move the customer to another purchase, upsell, or get feedback about the experience.

One of the great things about using these CRM features and the ability to track your customers’ experiences with your company is that you have insight that otherwise would be difficult to get. For example, you can see which email and marketing campaigns generate the most leads and which campaigns generate the most new customers. This will help you fine-tune your engagements for future scaling.

And if your CRM has reporting and analytics, you can access the data you need when you need it, using easy-to-understand dashboards that help you communicate success and gaps to your team and upward to senior leadership and other key stakeholders.

You can even share data from your CRM across multiple teams enabling cross-departmental collaboration, for example with your marketing and sales teams.

CRMs are also great because with their power of automation, you can always engage your customers when they come to you, no matter what time, day or night. And, you can ensure the messages you’re delivering to their needs are tailored so they have a unique and memorable customer experience.

Are you considering a new CRM for your company or do you think you could benefit from one that has more features to meet your needs?

Here are some other features you might want to consider:

• Can act as a document repository: One of the important components of collaboration and organizational culture is making sure everyone speaks the same language and shares the same message. A CRM is a great place to house and share customer-focused documents, for example, an FAQ or pricing list, so others on your team can access that data and share as needed.
• Enables forecasting: Earlier we mentioned the benefits of reporting and analytics, which are critical, but you may also benefit from a CRM solution that enables forecasting based on that data (and other data integrated into your CRM).
• Ease of use
• Has the features you need now and as you grow
• Has a simplified pricing model that clearly explains user limits, maintenance fees, upgrade costs, licensing, and more
• Security: Data is king and data is valuable. Threat actors know that and they’ll do what they can to get to your data, so ensuring your CRM meets all of your legal, regulatory, and compliance standards for data security and privacy is a must.

Interested in learning more about how a CRM can make your business more efficient? Register now to save your seat in one of our upcoming webinars!

Because of the pandemic, we may never return to the business-as-usual we used to know. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. With social distancing mandates and government-set lock downs, many businesses have broken through innovation barriers at an unprecedented pace, especially when it comes to more rapidly selecting, implementing, and adopting technologies that save time and money and improve operational efficiencies.

But if you’re a small-to-medium sized business (SMB), you may wonder just exactly where you should target your investments. Everyone these days seems to have a solution for a work process. Departments and employees often make so many recommendations to senior leadership that it gets too hard to weed through them all, especially if you have a limited budget.

Salesforce’s Small and Medium Business Trends report, for example, points out that SMBs that embrace technology and that are “digital-forward” may be a key differentiator in dealing with market volatility, and technology plays an important role in influencing successful operations.

Here are a few highlights:

• 51% of respondents said technology drives customer interactions, which is important to note because almost half of respondents (48%) also said that due to the pandemic, contactless service options (i.e. digital commerce, mobile orders, etc.) are now areas of focus
• 46% say technology influences an SMB’s ability to stay open and operational
• 42% say tech drives customer growth
• 40% say it drives employee productivity
• 32% say it drives collaboration

But having technology at hand doesn’t necessarily contribute to operational resiliency. It’s about having the right technology to meet your organization’s unique needs — and ensuring that it can scale with you as you face new challenges and grow your services and offerings.

Unfortunately, as small businesses evolve into mid-size, and mid-size businesses grow into large enterprises, those technology stacks can grow larger and often increasingly disparate.

This leads to data that is siloed within one department, location, or sometimes, even with just a single employee.

The good news is, however, that an increasing number of businesses and their leaders are seeing the value of cutting the cord on so many disparate systems and instead unifying the operational core with a single solution that integrates cross-business functions.

According to that Salesforce survey, 72% of SMB leaders think a centralized application that tackles all core operations is helpful – and a growing number of businesses are actually decreasing the total number of applications they’re using as they move toward more technology consolidation. In March 2019, for example, the report estimates that on average an SMB used 5.2 applications for operations, compared to 4.6 in August 2020.

That push for consolidation goes hand-in-hand with the pandemic-push for technological efficiencies, where at least a quarter of SMB leaders are making more investments in tech.

When it comes to narrowing that technology stack, here are some of the key things the survey respondents said they were looking for when they’re considering a new technology:

• 74% Ease of use
• 73% Vendor trust
• 71% Price
• 67% Customer experience impact
• 66% Easy to maintain

And here are some of the many ways SMBs are using technology to streamline operations for customer relationship management (CRM):

• Email marketing
• Customer service
• Project management
• E-commerce
• Marketing automation

If you’re an SMB and you’re on your journey to streamline technological efficiencies without increasing the number of systems and software you need, where do you start? You may be surprised to know there’s one tool out there that can handle all of your needs — an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution.

An ERP is software that your business can use to manage operations, from inventory and production, to back-office tasks like customer management, billing, human resources, accounting, and more. And ERPs are no longer just for big enterprises. There are an increasing number of advantages and cost savings for SMBs who put an ERP to work for them.

Here are a few benefits of investing in an ERP:

• Task and workflow automation that removes the need for manual, repetitive data entry across multiple applications
• Decreased human errors and increased data integrity
• Confidence that your ERP follows approved processes and procedures
• Elimination of data silos across your organization so the right people can access the data they need, when they need it, in near real-time to make better data-driven business decisions
• Increased efficiencies by letting the system automation handle certain workflows so your people can focus on more important tasks
• Increased visibility into your sales process, from marketing lead to customer
• Better inventory and product management
• Streamlined invoicing, billing, and accounting processes
• Faster order processing
• Timely and accurate budgets and sales forecasts
• Improved tracking of benchmarks and KPIs, and customizable reports to ensure you always know how you’re doing and where you need improvements
• Insight to forecast potential issues, for example supply chain disruptions or product back-order, before a problem compounds
• Happier customers with improved customer experiences
• Simplified integration across a variety of systems and applications

These are some of the many benefits of using an ERP for your SMB. If you’re a small or mid-sized business and you’re not sure if now is the right time to invest in an ERP, register for an aACE webinar today and we’ll show you how an ERP can transform your business, save you money, and improve efficiencies.

aACE can help you streamline your operations and set your business up for success – learn how in our February webinars. Here's what we have in store:

February 2nd - aACE Basics

If you’re brand-new to aACE, this is the webinar for you! Learn how aACE’s system-wide conventions make it easy for new users to interact with the solution. Check out our video before the presentation to get a sneak peek at aACE’s user-friendly design.

February 9th – Managing Transactions

aACE makes it easy to track each step of a transaction, giving you the peace of mind that comes from having one solution manage every aspect of a sale or purchase. We’ll explore how users manage transactions in aACE using the Purchase Orders module as our example.

February 16th – Sales Leads and the aACE CRM App

Your sales team is moving fast to keep your customers and prospects engaged, and they need a solution that can keep up – even when they're on the go. See our CRM App in action and learn more about how sales leads move through aACE. Check out our sales leads and CRM App feature highlights for a sneak peek before the presentation.

February 23rd – Sales Orders

See aACE's sales order, drop shipping, and special order workflows in action and learn how aACE makes each of those workflows a breeze. Before the webinar, check out our feature highlight for a preview of some of these topics.

We look forward to seeing you in our webinars and answering your questions in real time during each presentation! Register now to save your spot.

Vetting new technology is challenging:

• Do you find the “best” solution on the market and make it work for you?
• Do you find out what’s best for your organization and then invest countless hours scouring vendors, exploring features, watching demos, getting quotes, and then short-listing them?
• How many solutions should you take for a test drive before making a decision?
• How do you find the most budget-appropriate solution that meets your most critical needs?
• When do you need a business impact analysis?
• Does this software facilitate the need to do a risk assessment? 

The list can go on and on.

That’s why, unfortunately, many organizations will forego this process altogether just to not have to worry about the hassle and frustrations, and keep using their old systems and software, regardless of how inefficient or esoteric they may be.

If you’re a small business and you’ve been using the same accounting software for a long time or you have a hodge-podge of manual, people-based accounting processes, the list above represents some of the many reasons why you might be hesitant to begin the journey for a replacement or upgrade. But, when it comes to keeping all the numbers crunched for operational resiliency, it might be time to turn off the adding machines, roll up the ticker tape, and close down those spreadsheets.

BMS for Accounting

Before you begin your journey to choose a solution, let’s take a quick look at some of the many reasons why a business management solution (BMS) may be right for your accounting needs:

• An integrated BMS accounting solution can give you insight like you’ve never had before — comprehensive visibility from sales lead to satisfied customer.
• You can decrease the chance of human error by eliminating duplicate, repetitive data entry. With an integrated BMS, you can enter customer information in your customer relationship management (CRM) solution and share that data across all of your connected operational systems like invoicing and billing, with everything feeding into your accounting solution in real time.
• You’ll always have an accurate picture of your organization’s financials, right in an easy-to-understand dashboard, without having to track down someone to have them update a spreadsheet or print out a ledger.
• You can share key information across teams. For example, how many sales are in the pipeline, who has been billed, who has paid, and whose accounts need follow-up.
• You can quickly pull reports and other data as needed for compliance and audits.
• Have multiple offices or locations? You can manage all of your accounting needs for all of them right in one solution and with a cloud-hosted option, you can ensure team members have access to the workflows they need, no matter where they are. 
• You can quickly calculate related taxes and costs and always be aware of what you need to collect and what you’re required to remit.
• You can align your current expenditures with your budget so you always know how well you’re doing and when and if you need to make adjustments.
• Have recurring processes or transactions? A BMS accounting solution will enable you to automate recurring transactions, like routine scheduled payments, so you always know they're taken care of accurately and on time.

Sounds great, right? Much easier than using a spreadsheet or other software. Now that you know why a BMS accounting solution is a good idea, how do you know which one is best for you?

Here are a few suggestions:

• First, do a business impact analysis (BIA) to determine exactly what you need your accounting software to do, not just right now, but as it aligns to plans to scale and grow.
• You may find it helpful, depending on the size of your organization and scale of your accounting department and needs, to find an executive sponsor — someone who can champion this project on an executive level to facilitate the resources you’ll need to select and implement, and also ensure buy-in and adoption across your organization.
• Determine if you need an on-premises solution, a cloud-hosted solution, or a hybrid solution that includes components of both. If you want an on-prem solution, you’ll need to understand all of the hardware and software requirements for set up and installation, so on the next step, when you’re budgeting, remember you’ll need to include those in your costs, too.
• Once you understand what you need your accounting software to do, set your budget. Don’t forget: with many software solutions, additional costs can quickly add up. Even software as a service where there are no hardware or software installations needed may have additional fees for set up, users, data storage and retention, licensing, and more. Look for vendors with clearly defined features and easy-to-understand pricing models. Seek vendors that offer services that can scale and change with your organization, without piling on astronomical costs as you grow with them. Some solutions come with a range of features, but not all of them are always clearly defined from a cost perspective. Ensure that if a vendor is upselling features, you understand all costs related to them.
• Next, seek out vendors whose platforms meet all of your needs. Don’t fall into a trap of being lured in by flashy marketing messages with bells and whistles you don’t need. Refer back to that BIA and your list of needs and requirements.

Here are some key features you may want to include:

• Ability to forecast, track, manage, and update budgets, not just for your organization as a whole, but down to a granular level like department or project-based
• User-friendly, including training and support for your users
• Billing and invoicing options with enterprise resource planning (ERP) integration for streamlined efficiencies like inventory management, reorders, and payments
• Streamlined integration with your point of sale systems
• Customizable reports with a range of options from the big picture, down to a granular level
• Ability to quickly pull required data and documents for audits and assessments
• Both cloud-hosted options as well as mobile access
• Ability to add and remove users and limit user access as needed
• Support for compliance and regulatory mandates
• Ability to automate manual tasks
• Integrations that help you manage sales taxes permits, collection, and remittance
• Simple integration and API access that links your accounting system to other systems and applications
• Security and privacy functionality to protect sensitive data
• Frequent and reliable data back-ups and simplified recovery processes

Once you have a better idea of what you need and how much you're able to spend:

• Short-list vendors that are within your budget and that meet your requirements
• Ask to see product demos
• Ask to speak to existing customers
• Look for solutions that offer reliable customer service (beyond standard business hours) through a variety of communication methods like email, chat, phone calls, and more
• Work with vendors who will let you “try-before-you-buy” so you can get a feel for the software and its core features before you commit
• Consider working with a partner or advisor who understands the complexities of a BMS accounting solution and have them help your team with your BIA, risk assessments, needs lists, and more
  
  

Need help starting your accounting software journey, or are you ready to replace software that no longer meets all of your needs? Register for an upcoming webinar today to see our solution in action for yourself.

There are a number of factors that contribute to how organizations manage their inventory processes. Smaller companies with a single location may find it simple enough to have one employee do a manual check and keep track of updates with pen and paper, or maybe even a simple spreadsheet. While that may “work” for small companies, it’s hardly efficient and, like the old adage of putting all your eggs in one basket, it’s not good business to rely solely on one person to manage all the parts and supplies that keep your company moving.

This can be even more complicated for larger companies, especially those with many locations and where inventory storage spans multiple sites — sometimes across states, countries, or around the globe.

And when we’re talking about inventory, we’re not just referring to your products and the related supplies to produce them, but to everything your company needs in order to do business on a daily basis. That could include everything from paper and ink, to cleaning supplies, to products and more.

So how do you keep track of it all? How can you ensure you always have insight into your inventory — no matter where it’s stored or who is responsible for tracking it — at all times? How can you make sure you have everything you need, both short and longer term, to keep your company resilient?

As we’ve seen with the coronavirus outbreak, we never know when an unexpected supply chain disruption could happen, and we always need to be on top of where our supplies are—and who they’re coming from and when—so we can circumvent issues that could cause stoppages or delays.

Here are 7 tips to help you streamline and automate all of your inventory processes to ensure operational resiliency and improved efficiencies:

1. Toss the spreadsheets: Adopt and implement inventory management software that enables you to track, monitor, re-order, and process all of your inventory from within a single solution.
2. Inventory your inventory: One of the biggest challenges for most organizations is no real insight into what inventory you have, what you need, and where it’s all stored. Begin with doing an inventory of your inventory. But this isn’t just a list of the who/what/where. You should also categorize all of your inventory for simplified management. Here are some of the areas you could consider:
   1. Item criticality: How critical is this item to your operations? What is the impact on operations if you run low or run out of this item? If this item is a critical item for resiliency, you should categorize it to reflect that.
   2. Cost and usage: You could also categorize your inventory based on cost and usage level. For example, one category could be lower-cost items that you use frequently and require routine or frequent re-orders. Another category could be items that are mid-level in costs, that need re-orders but not as frequently as the first category. A third category could be those high-priced items that you need, but do not have to frequently reorder (and which also may require a different level of review and approval.)
3. Track your inventory: Once you’ve identified and classified all of your inventory, now it’s time to track it. There are a number of efficient ways you can do this, but you may find it beneficial to include the following information for each item for tracking:
   1. Product name
   2. Product type
   3. Lot and/or serial number
   4. Barcodes or near-field communication chips
   5. SKUs
   6. Vendor name, location, and contact information
   7. Location of inventory storage
   8. How/where item is used within your operations
   9. Responsible party
   10. Last order date
4. Routinely re-inventory your inventory: How often you check your inventory levels may depend on a number of factors. While some organizations do it once a year, or once a quarter, you may find more routine re-checks to be more beneficial, for example, at the end of each month. With inventory management software, especially one that integrates with an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, you should always have insight into all of your inventory in near-real time. This makes inventory audits a breeze, and you can even create and share reports about inventory status at any time for more insight.
5. Understand your sales lifecycle: Managing inventory only works well if you know how much you need at a given time to meet customer demands, including when to anticipate peaks and valleys. Take time to get to know your company’s sales lifecycle, including company and industry trends for sales and lead times. You can also improve inventory management by integrating your inventory management software with your customer relationship management tool, that way you’ll be able to make better data-driven business decisions and ensure the inventory you need is always available when you need it.
6. Evaluate your suppliers: While many companies have good risk analysis strategies for their core functions, few remember to include suppliers in their risk evaluations. Each time you’re looking for a new vendor – or when you’re renewing or extending contracts with existing ones – you should do a risk analysis of each supplier. Just as you earlier determined which of your inventory is critical for operations, you’ll need to understand who supplies those critical parts, what risks those suppliers face for delivery, how they’re mitigating risks, and whether they meet all of your compliance and regulatory standards. If any of the vendors in your supply chain exceed the level of risk deemed acceptable by your company, you should replace that vendor with one with a more acceptable level of risk.
7. Automate reorders: It’s frustrating, and sometimes downright confusing, to check your inventory and wonder why you have so much of a product you rarely use and so little of a product that you need most often. That’s often a result of people-managed inventory, where there’s incomplete or inaccurate communication about needs and objectives, or sometimes even just a missed entry on reorder. By adopting an integrated inventory management solution, you can eliminate the possibility of human error by configuring your inventory reorder parameters within the software and then letting the system notify you when it’s time to do a reorder — all based on preset conditions you can modify or update at any time. You should also use a solution that can alert you when products are on backorder so you can quickly adapt and use a different supplier as needed.

There are a lot more benefits of using an inventory management solution to take control of your inventory management tasks. From improving efficiencies, to saving you money, and reducing errors, you can always ensure you have the right products you need when you need them, and reduce overspending and overstocking for good.

Do you need help managing your inventory or would you like to know more about how you can integrate inventory management with your other critical business operations? Register now to save your seat in one of our upcoming webinars.