The process of selecting mid-market accounting software usually starts with products that have achieved some name recognition and that's fine as long as the search does not end there. SouthWare Innovations (http://www.southware.com) has created in its Excellence Series a worthy competitor serving a number of industries and offering users a surprising array of functionality, either directly as SouthWare applications or through one of their independent sales vendors (ISV).
Detailed Application Analysis
ExcelReport
This unique application allows users to establish both subjective and objective—financial—goals, grade progress toward achieving these goals, measures progress over time, and thereby help people do their jobs better.
The system supports a completely user-defined set of critical success factors for each business, business unit, or even individual employee. These success factors can be financial values or ratios that are then associated with specific grades or subjective factors that will be evaluated and assigned a grade. In addition to calculating and displaying grades on a period basis—with up to five years history—, the system will display both trend lines as well as a grade point average (GPA), just like in an educational setting.
Although there is any number of success factors that can be established and tracked, here are some questions that can be asked and answered.
* Which areas of the business need attention?
* Are we making progress toward our goals?
* Are we able to fulfill customers' orders?
* Are we shipping orders on time?
* What's the average approval rating on sales orders?
* Which items are returned the most due to poor quality?
* How much are errors and complaints costing us?
* What do our customers think about us?
* Are we hitting our financial goals?
* Which vendors are giving us good service?
* What are the recent events involving this customer?
* Have we responded to all the ideas and suggestions we've received lately?
* How solid are our vendor relationships?
* Are our employees satisfied with their careers?
* How well are we preparing for the future?
TaskWise
TaskWise is SouthWare's vision of a completely integrated business management system that includes task management, relationship management, exception management, and information sharing or collaboration. Users can manage their daily work through one convenient portal that gives them access to both information and functions, all wrapped around a central task manager.
* Task Management: Users can define individual or linked tasks that can be text oriented, such as reminders or descriptions of issues that need to be addressed but are not tied to specific accounting functions. Other tasks can be tied directly to accounting functions such as approving purchase orders, invoices, or hyperlinks to specific SouthWare functions, such as order entry for an order clerk. In essence, SouthWare has taken the concept of user-defined menus, which it supports, to the next logical level whereby the concept of a menu has been replaced by a completely integrated task management system that presents those tasks the user should address.
* Relationship Management: TaskWise can function as a complete relationship management system. Since this is a task manager and not a CRM system, TaskWise can handle vendor and employee relations just as easily as it can handle customer relations. TaskWise can also integrate with Microsoft Outlook via SouthWare's OfficeLink application.
* Exception Management: TaskWise is tied into a robust Alert Driver application that identifies exceptions and assigns them to specific named individuals as one or more tasks. Standard tasks can be linked together to form a complete business process. User can also create new alert drivers as an integral part of their daily business functions. For example, they may be worried about the cost of specific items rising very quickly in the future. Rather than checking the prices every day, they can define a new alert driver and prompt the system to notify them if the price rises above a specified value or if the price is rising faster than a certain rate. Many products support alerts, but SouthWare is one of the very few products that provides users with a software-driven business management system that helps them address potential or actual problems. The key concept here is the notion of a system that incorporates what used to be manual control processes into a single software-driven and software-supported business methodology.
* Collaboration: By presenting a software-driven business management system, SouthWare by default supports collaboration. Alerts and tasks can be shared with anyone in the organization, together with supporting e-mails. While there will always be one person who is responsible for a particular exception as an example, that person can send that "file" to another person and ask that they handle it, but they can also ask that person to send them a confirmation that the task has been completed.
SOURCE:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/search/default.aspx?searchTerm=+Bank+Reconciliation+&docType=TEC2009_Articles
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