Business Systems
One of the largest investments for the agency and a subject of much disquiet by those on the front lines are business systems.
Lots to talk about, but there are two areas to focus around:
1. Do you need to change what you have?
A lot of businesses have enormous untapped potential in their systems. Make sure before you move onto a new and expensive one that you have exhausted the potential of the systems that you have.
Be clear about what you want from your systems:
1. Client and project profitability?
2. Staff utilisation reporting?
3. Staff scheduling?
4. Generation of invoices OR information about what to invoice?
How important are these areas in the running of your business.
Never be scared of looking for an old fashioned solution to a gap in your information systems. For example it may be easier to pull a report from system A, have someone run a task in Excel and then upload into system B rather than look for a complex system solution. Making sure that you step back and look at the “end” as much as the “means” is vital.
Where manual processes should be avoided is where you have the two way flow of information as this can rapidly grow into a nightmare!
For example, you may choose to capture time in a timesheet system and then upload it onto another system. Should be easy enough. Clean, check and then upload.
If however you were capturing expenses in one system, pushing them into your accounting system and then making adjustments to then bill in from the expenses system that could rapidly become a real nightmare.
Any kind of matching or exact reconciliation task should not be contemplated.
It also depends on your volumes – big volumes make integration more important!
2. We need to change…what next?
If you do decide to create something new, then there are many choices and lots of options around them.
Cloud vs hosted:
In my view this should not the key decision maker. Cloud solutions have been around a long time in our industry (see DDS) and have strengths and weaknesses.
The real value is where you have a small remote office in another location and want to be able to keep infrastructure to an absolute minimum.
Look and feel:
With the explosion of new systems there has never been so much choice. Lots of these systems have very attractive user interfaces and feel very nice for users.
This is where the users and the finance team will start to have different priorities.
If you have an integrated system, the finance team will be looking under the bonnet at how the more complex accounting is handled, how the system treats VAT or other fundamentals. They will be the ones who have to deliver the accounts after all!
Users may not be aware of the importance of some of these finance concerns and rightly be focused on getting a system that busy agency staff will not hate – it is unlikely they will love it!
Overall cost - factors to consider:
- Factor in staff time cost savings or increases.
- Can you pay monthly or is it one large one-off bill.
- If you are going to host yourself do you have the IT hardware and staff to make this work?
- What initial and ongoing training will the agency need?
- Will you need bespoke consultancy? The big danger here is that if the knowledge-holder disappears you are then exposed.
The Likely life is 3 – 5 years although some will last a lot longer.
Be careful of producing a wish list is that means you never get off the ground.
Hosted vs Standalone
Hosted means a software tool that sits on your servers.
You will need to have an IT function that is able to support this 24/7 and control access and apply fixes and software support.
Cloud software sits on someone else’s servers and is accessed by you from a web browser
Finally
Make sure that the system can be accessed by Macs!