Equipment Management (a nearly forgotten module)

How often does an owner or manager ask his accountant (or him- or her-self) “how much does that truck or piece of equipment cost us?” How often is the response to this question “we don’t know!?" Is your investment in heavy equipment, shop equipment, or vehicles a significant cost of your operation? Is the cost of owning and operating this equipment being consistently and accurately charged to jobs based on a measure of use, like miles, tons, hours, days, weeks or months? Are you recovering enough equipment ownership and operating costs in your job costing and estimating assumptions?

The Equipment Management module is designed specifically to collect and organize the cost of owning and operating equipment, and then recover that cost by charging out to jobs the estimated cost of owning and operating that equipment using estimated cost recovery rates per measure of use (i.e. per mile, per hour, per day, etc.) With the module, a thoughtful and creative implementation, and diligent bookkeeping, users no longer have to hear the answer “we don’t know!”

If you want to learn more about using the Equipment Module, give us a call at 480-471-5305.

Current Version Information

On February 18, 2016, Sage released Sage 100 Contractor Version 19.7.52.  This update includes all payroll tax table revisions known to date, and more importantly, fixes a problem created in version 19.7.43 with the Reconcile Credit Card Statement function.  I strongly encourage users to consider installing this update.

Current Version Information

Sage released the first 2016 Payroll Tax Table update on December 17, 2015. Version 19.7.28 contains all federal and state payroll tax table data available as of that date that are effective in 2016. It also contains a few enhancements and fixes related to payroll processing.

On January 21, 2016, Sage released the January 2016 payroll tax update, Version 19.7.43.  It contains revised payroll tax tables for states that were late in publishing their 2016 tax tables, including Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and the District of Columbia. It also includes a few more enhancements and fixes related to payroll processing.  However, Sage has since advised that this update has caused a problem with the Reconcile Credit Card Statement process.  If you have payroll in the affected states, you should consider installing Version 19.7.43 so that your payroll tax withholding is correct, knowing that you may have challenges with your credit card reconciliations.  Otherwise, defer installing this latest version until Sage publishes a revision or later update.

How Do You Know What You Don’t Know?

One of my favorite clients sent me an email this morning that asked for my assistance with the following:

“One of my goals is to find out from you what is in [Sage 100 Contractor] that we can use for more effective results for this next year.  I don’t know what I don’t know.  I am familiar with what I use all the time but I believe there is more available that I am not aware of.  We will experience great growth this year.  We will be hiring additional staff but I want to make sure we are effective and efficient with the tools we have in hand to maximize our results.”

This client has used the program for decades and might be described as a “power user,” but she has a nagging suspicion that there may be more functionality in the program than what they are currently using.  This is a pervasive problem with many of the users that I come across.  This is often understandable since initial implementations are often geared toward getting a new user up and running with the basic accounting capabilities they had with their previous accounting package. Too little time and attention is devoted to identifying and learning new functions that can benefit their organization.

How did I respond to my client’s request for assistance? My reply included the following:

“There are a couple of ways to assess the "not knowing what you don't know" problem.  I could spend a day nosing around your office, observing and asking questions to try to identify areas that can be improved.  Or you and your staff (accounting and project management) can make lists of things that annoy them, things that they spend valuable time doing in Excel or Word, things they wish they had, things they suspect the program should do but they just don't know how to do, etc. The lists can be compiled and sorted and a [training] plan can be developed.”

Many clients have purchased modules of the program and then left those modules unused for years! I often see Estimating, Document Control, Equipment Management, Scheduling, Change Orders (!), Insurance Certificates (!), Credit Card Management, ACH/Direct Deposit Payroll and Vendor Payments, and similar modules forgotten and unused, or perhaps just underused.  Wise clients will take a little time to scan through the program menus just to remind themselves in general sense of what the program can do, and then call us to ask if it might be of use to them.

Clients are always calling with requests for a report that shows certain information that they need to run their business.  Often the report already exists in the program and we can point them in the right direction and give them pointers on how to use report selection criteria to hone in on their specific need. If a report doesn’t already exist, we can usually create a custom report to meet their need.

If you wonder what you don’t know, take the time to jot down notes about those things that annoy you about how you use the program, what tasks or reports you spend too much time preparing with Excel or Word, what things you wish the program could do for you, or what data you want from the system that you currently aren’t receiving.  Then give us a call and talk it over with us.  It may cost you some consulting fees, but the end result is usually well worth the investment.

Current Version Information

Sage released the 2016 Payroll Tax Table update on December 17, 2015. Version 19.7.28 contains all federal and state payroll tax table data available as of that date that will be effective in 2016. It also contains a few enhancements and fixes related to payroll processing.  Install this update after all payroll to be paid in 2015 has been final computed, and before any 2016 payroll is processed.

Archive Locally to Minimize Problems

While users can usually archive data across their network, running the program on their local workstation on the data folder located on the server, this involves pushing and pulling massive amounts of data over your local network, in thousands of operations and processes.  This tends to require much more time to process since pushing and pulling that data over the network is inherently slow. Sometimes networks fail to make a connection reliably, and this can cause the archiving process to fail.

There are two ways to get around these potential problems:

• Perform the archiving process from the server’s desktop, rather than a workstation. This eliminates entirely the network’s effect on the process, or
• Copy the company data folder to your workstation’s C:\MB7 folder.  Perform the archiving process on the copy of the company residing on your C: drive, and then copy the two resulting data folders – the cleaned up current company data folder and the new archive folder—back to the server.

Users working in a cloud configuration typically are not presented with network speed or reliability issues and can ignore this tip.

For assistance with archiving data, give us a call at 480-471-5305 or send an email to walt@mathiesonconsulting.com.

Backup before Archiving!

The archiving process, whether for payroll closing or archiving the general ledger, is a destructive process.  Every discussion of archiving starts with an admonition to back up (twice for safety) your data .

Most users have invested in significant backup systems and processes that they rely on to prevent catastrophic loss of critical data.  Too many of these same users do not regularly test the backup process to ensure that their backups are effective and able to be restored easily and quickly.

Too often we find that users are relying on these overnight backups as their only backups when archiving their data.  If they have a problem with their archiving process—and problems do occur—they must restore from backup and start the archiving process over again. And since they have relied on their outside networking consultant to administer the backup process, they must wait for the networking consultant to restore the data from the overnight backup, losing valuable time in the process.  And this is NOT the time to find out that your overnight backups haven’t been working properly!

The easiest, and most expedient, way to make a quick and restorable backup is to use Windows Explorer to copy the current company data folder and paste it onto your workstation’s desktop or some other location in your network.  To ensure that no one has any files open that may not copy properly, just log into the company with Sage 100 Contractor with Exclusive Access, and then log out to make your “copy and paste” backup.  If the archiving process has any problems, you can easily recover by deleting the file folders affected by the failure and restoring the data folder from the “copy and paste” backup data folder.

Backups when archiving are important to cloud users also.  Check with your cloud hosting provider to ensure that you can make a quick and easy “copy and paste” backup as well.

Give us a call at 480-471-5305 or email walt@mathiesonconsulting.com if you have any questions or need help.