The Incoming Invoice Register is Exact’s solution to efficiently and easily validate and approve incoming purchase invoices by the correct responsible person in your organization. By doing that your business avoids paying invoices it should not pay at this time or shouldn’t be paid at all thus reducing the effort it puts in money back procedures.

Vincent already explained in his post that an invoice preview will be made available in Exact Synergy Enterprise so that the scanned invoice is immediately visible next to the financial booking information. But what really is the Incoming Invoice Register solution? And how can it help you to take control over that part of the purchase process within your organization?

Still interested? show me how it works!

After a purchase invoice is registered in Exact Globe’s Incoming Invoice Register one or more approval requests are created for the person(s) who needs to approve the purchase invoice in Exact Synergy Enterprise. Whom the approver(s) are, is determined by register codes. It’s also possible to specify whether or not the approvers can approve simultaneously or in sequence. As soon as all approvers have approved the request the financial booking within Exact Globe is updated and ready to be paid based on payment conditions. When the purchase invoice is incorrect and one of  the approvers rejects the invoice, the financial administration is automatically notified. After correction of the financial booking or invoice, all approvers need to approve it again.

I hope this short introduction gives you more insight on Exact’s incoming invoice solution and how it can help you taking control over your expenses.

Feedback is highly appreciated. Watch online incoming invoice register demo of the add-on version here.

Mmm, are you lost? Do you understand what this is about? Maybe you do, but let me explain how we and our customers benefit from Scrum. The power of Scrum is continuously focus on quick delivery of maximized business value.
Through early feedback we can react faster so quality, understandability and predictability of software development can improve. This will give us an agile development process in which we can deliver better products in a shorter time frame.

How?
Scrum contains sets of practices and predefined roles. The main roles in Scrum are:

1. the “Scrum Master”, the facilitator. A key part of the Scrum Master’s role is to protect the team and keep them focused on the tasks in hand.
2. the “Product Owner”, who represents the voice of the customer. He/she ensures that the Scrum Team works on the “right things” from a business perspective.
3. the “Team” has the responsibility to deliver the product. A team is made up of 5–9 people with cross-functional skills who do the actual work (design, develop, test, technical communication, etc.).

During each “sprint”, in Exact a two-week period, the team creates a shippable product enhancement (for example, working and tested software). The set of features that go into a sprint come from the product “backlog”, which is a prioritized set of high level requirements of work to be done. Which backlog items go into the sprint is determined during the sprint planning meeting. During this meeting, the Product Owner informs the team of the items in the product backlog that he or she wants completed. The team then determines how much of this they can commit to complete during the next sprint. During a sprint, no one is allowed to change the sprint backlog, which means that the requirements are frozen for that sprint. After a sprint is completed, the team demonstrates how to use the software.

Benefits!
An important advantage of the Scrum approach is that planning is a continuous repetitive activity. Scrum does not try to predict the future at the start of a project, but aims at continuously improving the estimates based on experience. Each sprint the productivity of the team is determined and this knowledge is used to make a more accurate estimate for the next sprint. Furthermore estimating tasks are being performed by the team itself, and the whole team is doing it. This has two major advantages. First, the estimate are based on the knowledge and vision of all team members and therefore more realistic. Second, everyone is committed to the estimate, because everyone must agree on an estimate during planning. Another important advantage of Scrum is it always serves the business. A Scrum team is always working for the actual most important business goals, and the business may if necessary adjust quickly. And because a Scrum project should yield operating software on a regular basis, and the product owner determines what functionality should be delivered, it is not possible to pass difficult problems to the back. Finally, the Scrum approach has some financial benefits. With Scrum key functionality can be taken in production as soon as possible. The return on investment is higher, and the financial impact of any delay is smaller.

Please share your experience and ideas via a comment to this article  and use the ‘share and enjoy’ buttons!

• The name Pick-IT will change into E-WMS!
• Pick-IT Central Warehouse will be rebranded to E-Intercompany Logistics
• Pick-IT Sales Transactions will be rebranded to E-Mobile Sales
• A new module structure will be implemented
• No separate installation anymore

Pick-IT, Exact’s warehouse management solution has been renamed to E-WMS as from product update 398 to reflect its growing functionality and full integration into Exact Globe as a standard module. One of the functional areas of growth for e-WMS is the addition of SKU management, another one is the addition of directed put-away possibilities. Besides the name change of Pick-IT to E-WMS, Pick-IT Sales Transactions will be named E-Mobile Sales from now on and Central Warehouse will be named E-Intercompany Logistics.

For more detailed information, please read this document

All feedback on this topic confirmed our assumptions, accounts and secondly items are the most important master data, to be maintained centrally. That’s why we decided to start with accounts and aim on creating a prototype, so we can share and discuss the direction we are heading for. The prototype is based on Exact Synergy Enterprise (ESE), and multiple Exact Globe (EG) divisions.

Currently, at maintain Accounts in ESE you can define only a debtor code on divisional level:

We started adding fields to the Division ‘tab’, so it is possible to define different data for the specific divisions. For example, it will be possible to define on Divisional level  who will be the manager of this account.

The exchange of the data will be done by Exact’s connectivity framework. As explained in this blog post Connecting Exact with other applications, exchanging data via XML is not the solution to establish easy, standard connections between Exact’s applications and/or other applications. The main reason is that those possibilities are not standardized and /or do not work real-time.

In my next blog I aim on sharing the first visuals on the prototype!

If you have any questions/remarks or you would like to share topics we definitely should take into account concerning maintain/exchange accounts, do not hesitate to reply to this Post.

Photo credit:bijkerk

I’ve written about Functions and Features versus the User Experience, Simplicity being the new Gold, the Survival of the Sexiest and the fact that it’s all about the User. All these articles have in common that they are changing the mindset towards more focus for the end user of the products and services. I’ve created a short presentation on the progress to embed the User Experience in everything we do. If you can’t view the presentation below you can find it here.

Focus alone is not enough, it also requires special expertise and of course YOU! The user of our products and services as the main source of information on you emotions and feelings. If you want to participate, fill in a comment below or email at ux@exact.com

Image: ovizo0n

Our corporate center of learning, Exademy, has released a series of excellent highlight videos about the latest update of Exact Globe.

Well, this is not that much of a news, since Exademy prepares such videos for every single product update for both Synergy Enterprise and Globe, and they have always been of notable quality.

However, there are two major differences this time.

First, Exademy filmed the new videos with our customers in mind and made them available to everyone. If you have already read about Globe product update 397, do watch the videos, because they are good and they tell a lot of interesting details. Since the videos are in now public domain, we encourage you to share them with customers, prospects and anyone else who is interested.

Second, Exademy produced the videos in such way that soon subtitles can be added easily to complement the soundtrack in English. This means that if you would like to share these videos with someone else, but you need to have them in a language different from English, there will be an option. You can get the subtitles files from Exademy, translate the texts yourself, and get a copy of videos with subtitles in your own language. We will keep you updated on the launch of this brand new service we will be providing.

Enjoy!

1. Server improvements.
The server improvement section is related to your SQL server configurations and answers questions like: Have you installed the latest Service packs? Can you make changes in your SQL Server configuration to make use of all available memory? Etcetera.
Screenshot of Server Improvements:

2. Database improvements.
The database improvements section is related to the database itself and gives advice about new available product updates, clean up of historical journal records, clean up of voided entry record, background jobs, clean up of temporary tables etcetera.
Screenshot of database improvements:

The number of requested improvements reports are growing every month. The Exact System Information tool can be downloaded and used for free by all organizations that uses Exact Globe and/or Exact Synergy (Enterprise). Did you already request an improvement report? Do not forget to specify your email address when running the tool.

If you have feedback please comment on this blog or send an email to Andre.van.de.Graaf@exact.com The ESI tool can be downloaded from here.

Many of Exact’s customers still interact manually with banking software in order to post payments, receive collections or import bank statements. Soon they will not need to take the trouble as banks are offering online data synchronization systems, giving you the opportunity to save a lot of time through instantly imported bank statements and thus having banking information real-time available in your business software!

Exact Online already supports this way of working with Rabobank in the Netherlands. It provides integration and automatic exchange of bank payment files, bank collection files  and bank statement files between Exact Online and Rabobank, so all up-to-date banking information is automatically at your fingertips.

Further progress is in the pipeline! The Exact Online Rabobank solution will also be available for Exact Globe customers later this year.  Today Exact is also conducting research into presenting this way of working with other Dutch and Belgian banks.

You are welcome to stay updated on further developments in the area of cash flow management and electronic banking solutions through our regular postings on the Exact Product Blog.

Most of the SDK development tools are automatically available when installing Exact Globe or Exact Synergy Enterprise. Having the correct modules in the license will activate the SDK for the developers to develop their solutions on top of our products.

To support our development partners the best, we are constantly looking how to improve the SDK. Examples we currently did, or are working on, are:

1. Constantly improvements and extension on SDK functionalities,
2. Extended the SDK training for Exact Synergy Enterprise with a repository section,
3. Setup development guidelines for solutions on Exact Synergy Enterprise,
4. Updated the product certification process,
5. And we recently started to document the most important controls of Exact Synergy Enterprise.

For the development of the solutions we offer our development partners online documentation about the SDK development tools. This documentation is presented on our portal and can only be accessed by our customers, partners and employees. There are two start pages:

• SDK Exact Synergy Enterprise – Customer/ Partner/ Employee
• SDK Exact Globe – Customer/ Partner/ Employee

We now addressed the SDK documentation as the next step to improve. We already made a start with the documentation of the controls but that’s not the only improvement we would like to make.

I would like to invite you, our development partners, to comment on this blog what you really miss or what you would see improved about the SDK documentation. Based on your feedback I will compile a list of improvements that would make your life easier. In a new blog post I will share this list with you and where we will focus on for the coming period.

I’m looking forward to receive your input.

 Examples
• Sending a purchase order to your production facility, and they will create a sales order for their administration.
• Sending goods to your sales office abroad, means a receipt at the sales office
• Sending an sales invoice to another subsidiary, so a purchase invoice on their side.
• Headquarters orders and pays for an advertisement, all divisions have to pay a part of the costs.

Just some examples, there are much more (complex) scenario’s.  Although working at the same company, and (maybe) working with shared master data, entries need to be done twice. Next to the double entry, and the inconsistencies that can occur due to manual errors,  companies also wants reporting. Reporting like stock in the different subsidiaries, so you are able to see if the item you need is available at another subsidiary, or as a financial controller you want to see all outstanding financial intercompany transactions company-wide, etc.

Currently we are analyzing how Exact could provide/enhance a solution for companies facing this issue.
Do you (know companies) face this issue? How do you currently handle this, indeed entering your data twice or do you use other ways?

If you have any ideas/remarks, your comments will be highly appreciated!

Photo credit: Managementsite