The ESS portal gives your employees access to their personal data in a secure and transparent environment. As an employee you can for instance enter or change your time off period, enter an expense claim or change the personal address. This undoubtedly leads to reduction of administrative costs.

In the new simplified version of Exact Synergy, that will be available as a beta version in product update 244, we particularly focus on ESS features. One of them is Time Off.

The screenshot above is the entry part of Time Off. As you can see the screen is truly focused on getting the task of asking time off done easily. Also the user is presented the information he or she naturally needs, for instance “What is my balance?” The entry fields are linked based on the choices the employee made so the employee can quickly fill in the request and ask for approval without being confronted with unnecessary fields that may be left blank.

Now you can ‘dream’ about how to spend your personal time while entering the request instead of the think about which procedures to follow to enter a time off request. And that makes a lot more fun…

If you have any questions regarding this post, please create a comment to this article.

Image credit for the header image: neloqua.

In the coming product update (244), we extend the IIR functionality with a document previewer, which shows automatically a preview of the scanned invoice that is attached to the IIR request. The big advantage is that the resource does not need to click on the hyperlink to open the attached invoice. The document is already visible in the request and the resource can directly compare the content of the invoice with the financial transaction lines in the request.
This saves the user a lot of time.

If you have any questions regarding the IIR document previewer, please create a comment to this article below or let me know directly via vincent.henricks[at]exact.com.

Image credit for the header image: cybrgrl (from Flickr).

On behalf of the Product Management team, I am pleased to announce that Exact Synergy Enterprise will move into the controlled release phase for product update 243 as per April 9. Our stakeholders were very helpful to verify the functionality for this update. Your feedback is very much appreciated so that we can make this update general available. This new product update is planned to be generally available in May.

More than 30 customers are already lined up to participate in the controlled release and start using it. On top of that all of Exacts partners/resellers will be able to download the 243 release as well.

Vladimir Bataev posted the article ‘Five highlights of the product update 243 of Exact Synergy Enterprise’ on March 31. A summary of the highlights:

• Request labeling;
• Time & Billing;
• Notifications on updated requests;
• Synergy mobile;
• Integration with Microsoft SQL Reporting Services.

 I will give you an overview of other items that you can expect in this update.

CRM

• Faster access to back office reports of the customers: quotations, sales orders and sales invoices are available from the account card;
• Complete controls over contact details for customer and reseller portal users with editable external references for social networks;
• Multiple contacts can be added during account import;
• Richer mail merges with additional tags for the main debtor;
• Opportunity management: tighter control over reasons why opportunities get lost.

 HRM

• More flexible absence calculations based on calendar and working days;
• Improved absence balance overviews in hours and per 4 weeks in the absence and cost analysis reports;
• Instant Visibility of Information in Competency, Performance Review, and Target Agreement Profiles;
• Easier overviews on people search results with sorting on various columns.

 Business users

• Business users can take part in workflows, because roles can be assigned to them;
• A Business user can edit documents that he or she created;
• Business users can see all requests and documents attached to their customers.

 Employee Self Service users

• Employee Self Service users can now participate in workflow routing. It is now possible to add roles to employees who are assigned the Employee self service user license type.

 Data synchronization

• Near real-time data synchronization between Exact Synergy Enterprise and Exact Globe. This offers customers who are currently using Exact Globe and Exact Synergy (asp) in an integrated scenario, to migrate to and start benefiting from Exact Synergy Enterprise.

 Smaller enhancements

• Synergy Office Integration: an easy overview of unread activities;
• Support for fully-fledged CRM template in the templating tool;
• Customizable project and contact cards;
• Filtering on pending remarks so that it is easier to see what colleagues need to be poked.

If you are interested in the contents of these product updates, and we hope you do, please keep an eye on this blog. Here we will share our ideas, experiences and news about all planned new and improved functionality.

And what is even more important: we hope that you are also willing to share your opinions and suggestions with us. In the end, you will be working with our solutions and therefore it is extremely important for us that we know exactly what you need. This blog is one of the channels we use to gather your input, so please make yourself heard.

Please keep in mind that this is a planning that might be subject to change.

Photo credit: doug88888

This means that before the end of 2009, all 27 EU countries will have to include these changes in their local VAT legislation. I will not go in full detail of the new package in this post, but I will give you 3 major changes that might also impact your business (if it’s located in the EU, of course). It is a complicated manner, so I tried to write it down as clearly as possible.

• If you are a VAT-registered business and you sell or move goods to other VAT-registered businesses within the European Union (EU), you must record and report data on your activities. There are two systems: Intrastat and the European Community (EC) Sales List. This EC Sales List, the listing of delivery of goods, will be replaced by the listing of delivery of goods and services. This listing will thus not only be for the delivery of goods, but now also for the services that you provide to customers that are liable to VAT (B2B) located in another EU country. The periodicity of the ESL (EC Sales List) will be quarterly or monthly depending of the size of the company.
• In case of (cross-border) delivery of services, you will have to list these services on the EC Sales List if the location of your customer is in another European country than your own. In other words, the location where the service is actually executed is not relevant anymore. Only the country of your customer is relevant.
• The VAT return can also be changed, but this will differ per country. For example in the Netherlands, goods and services have to be reported in the existing ‘box 3′ while in Belgium two new VAT boxes will be added to the VAT return. Whatever solution a country will choose, the objective is always to have a full coherence between the EC Sales List and the VAT return.  

For some countries the modifications that have to be implemented in the EC Sales List and the VAT return are already known, while in other countries these modifications will not be totally clear before November or December of this year. 

Even though not all the changes are known yet, Exact Software will not and cannot wait until the last minute to implement these changes in Exact Globe and Exact Online. With customers in almost every EU country we have to take timely measures. Therefore we are currently, for each individual EU country, in contact with the local VAT administration and accountancy firms to investigate the impact for the local VAT return and EC Sales List.

Around Europe, you have probably received invitations to follow a seminar regarding this subject, often organized by the VAT authority, accountants offices or business organizations. We advise you to follow one of these seminars. This because the new VAT package will not only have impact on the VAT return or the EC Sales List, but it will also have an impact on the way that you will register your financial data.

As soon as we have new information about the VAT package of 2010 and/or the impact on our software, we will keep you informed via this blog.

Photo credit: Phillip