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Posts covering best practices, trends, and insights.

The Value Asyma Solutions Provides

Asyma Solutions has been helping customers, particularly those in the Field Service and Construction Industries across Canada grow since our founding in 2005. We provide our customers insight into their business faster, more accurately, and with a more integrated approach than ever before. In addition to our deep expertise in helping field service and construction contractors find and implement the right solution for their business, our departments of expertise and experience also reaches into Wholesale/DistributionNon-ProfitFirst NationsFaith BasedHealthcare and Manufacturing/Fabrication

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Sage 100 Contractor - A Year In Review

Sage 100 Contractor – A Year in Review

Talking with a few of our current and prospective customers in Alberta, they all voiced the same sentiments that the job profitability margins were very tight due to the economic climate. Believe it or not, now is the best time to look at improving efficiency; from collecting time from field personnel, reducing job costs to improving bid process.

Sage has had a phenomenal year of strategic alliances and acquisitions. This has made Sage 100 Contractor even more appealing to the construction industry in terms of increasing efficiencies while watching the bottom line.

Strategic alliance.

Sage has partnered with:

Procore Project Management Integration

Procore now works with Sage 100 contractor to automatically share data between project personnel in the field and in the office staff. This means that you will reduce double entry, thus reducing human error that comes about from transcribing handwritten notes.

eTakeoff Dimension

This is a 2D takeoff tool that has two-way integration capability for pushing takeoffs and making changes to an estimate. This will reduce the time you take to do a quantity takeoff by using an electronic drawing. This eliminates the need of printing and measuring your plans.

Acquisition

Liberty reports

This is an Excel Add-in solution that is mainly used for analytics, reporting and workflow. Therefore, you can harness existing Excel skills which means a smaller learning curve. You can also create customized reports according to your reporting needs. This core functionality is extended to any SQL database.

Summary

Sage’s strategic alliances and acquisition shows that they are continually investing and enhancing their product offering.

If you are looking for real visibility for your business, Sage 100 contractor is a logical next step from Sage 50 and or QuickBooks. The core functionality will have General Ledger, Payroll, Accounts Payable and Receivables, Project Management, Purchase Orders and over 1,200 pre-built reports. Optional modules are Estimating, Document Control, Service Receivables and Inventory. Procore, eTakeoff and Liberty Reports are fully integrated with Sage 100 Contractor. These tools that will give you the extra edge to increase efficiencies and productivity at the same time.

For more information on the technology available Click Here

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Accounting For Contractors

Accounting for Contractors

Do you want to provide and know more details about your job costs? If you are like most people, the answer will be absolutely!

Construction Accounting

This is where Construction Accounting Software comes in. Construction accounting has the same accounting principles with regular accounting. However, it has several distinct features like Job/Contract Holdbacks, Fixed Price, Time & Material, Unitary, Progress Billing and Job Costing (direct & indirect).

Operational Costs - aka Job Costing

Since construction accounting is project based and each job is a profit center, we want to make sure we capture all transactions that are specific to each job.

We do this by using a process called Job Costing (or expense, cost coding). This is where you separate costs/activities into different categories like Concrete, Plumbing, Electrical etc. Once you have figured out your cost codes, you further group them in to cost types Labour, Equipment, Material, Subcontract, and other etc. Job costs will work in concert with the G/L.

Reporting

When your tasks for each job is broken into activities called cost codes, it makes it easier for you to identify areas of concern by producing actionable reports. This means you can quickly identify areas that need improvement by comparing your actuals with budgeted costs. Therefore, you will be able to closely monitor your key performance indicators (KPI) like: Sales (Revenue) Growth, Income sources, Profitability over time and Working capital.

Conclusion

Your software should be setup to track each job, then show how it affects your company’s profitability. Construction accounting has a learning curve which can be easily achieved with Asyma Solutions help. Job costing helps any construction/service-related company to properly manage project-centered businesses.

Using KPI’s and being able to generate on the fly reports enables you to know which projects to pursue and which ones to let go.

Sage 100 Contractor is a logical next step from Sage 50 and/or QuickBooks. The core functionality will have General Ledger, Payroll, Accounts Payable and Receivables, Project Costing, Project Management, Purchase Orders and over 1,200 pre-built reports. Optional modules include Estimating, Document Control, Service Receivables/Management and Inventory. Procore, eTakeoff, Sage ToolOps and Liberty Reports are fully integrated with Sage 100 Contractor as added enhancements based off of your business requirements. These tools that will give you the extra edge to increase efficiencies and productivity at the same time.

For more information Click Here

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Is Construction Payroll a Nightmare? Nightmares are for Halloween!

Is Construction Payroll a Nightmare? Nightmares are for Halloween!

Are you doubling up on payroll processes/systems? Are you thinking of using Sage 100 Contractor payroll? If the answer is yes, then keep reading…

Scenario

You have one system that collects time and the other system does accounting. The two systems can’t talk to each other. This results in duplicate data entry and added costs.

Cost

How much is it costing your organization to run two systems? How happy is your payroll person every pay period?

Watching costs is at the heart of every business. Remaining profitable with higher costs is a self-defeating endeavor. However, you can minimize your costs considerably in the long run when you streamline your business processes. This means acquiring or investing in a solution that captures costs against the job, which includes payroll.

Compatible system

In my experience, you should invest in a system that is able to address your key pain points and has a high Return on Investment (ROI). If current systems and procedures do not tick all your boxes, then the alternative is to look at other complementing systems (vendors).

For example, you can have a great system that does a great job in accounting and project management but doesn’t capture time in the field. True nirvana is one system that does it all. The reality is that no system will ever give you 100% of exactly what you need but you can sure as heck get very close to 100%.

An integrated solution that you plan to implement should:

  • help you eliminate double entries between systems
  • Implement an approval process
  • Reduce paperwork
  • Enhance communications
  • Enhance customer service
  • In many cases, complement or improve existing workflows

Conclusion

As listed above, there are several advantages of having ‘one’ integrated software solution. But, how do you off the two separate systems?

At Asyma Solutions we are well versed in moving/converting customers from other payroll systems to Sage 100 Contractor Payroll. You can use Sage Service/Field Operations and/or HH2 to capture time in the field and have it sync in real time to the back office Click Here.

If you are interested in learning more about the technology available for your business don’t hesitate to contact us at info@asyma.com or 1-877-448-9895.

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Project Management - Guesswork or Certainty?

Imagine a world where all project information is available anytime, anywhere; where the collection of time, equipment, and material usage in the field is integrated daily into all projects for reporting. In this world, data flows seamlessly and instantly throughout the system, you can see the areas that are over and under budget, and you trust that progress billings include all the correct, up-to-date job costs. Your personalized user dashboard shows key reports and indicators that provide a snapshot of the operational health of your whole business at a glance: cash position, change orders, project profitability.

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SSOP

Operational Visibility

Operational Visibility

One of the main tasks of running any business is knowing where you are at operationally. By having a dashboard where you can quickly see a total of new service orders created, current invoices, past invoices and completed calls; not only helps in resource planning but keeps your mind at ease in focusing on what matters.

A case in point, we recently had our stove fixed at home. At the end of the job, the technician pulled out the paper service receipt and rubbed the face of the credit card for payment. Prior to this technological payment taking process, the technician had come previously and informed us that he didn’t have the part and left saying he might have to reschedule the work for another day. This left the kids and more importantly, left me with no more chocolate chip cookies for a week! Before I Hulk out on how inconvenient this was, as an owner of this business, I would have wanted to know;

  • Did the technician make it to site?
  • How many visits were made?
  • Did the technician have the right part for the job?
  • Often overlooked – how was the customer service?

Here and now, there are tools that enable you to have this kind of visibility. With a real time, streamlined process, your sequence of activities would be;

  • technician picks a part from the warehouse before going to site
  • calls the customer with the estimated time of arrival
  • Punch actions for start – stop (travel and Work)
  • If work is satisfactory, take electronic payment from customer
  • Technician moves on to the next job assignment

With this kind of setup, you are receiving real time information from the field, where the technicians use their mobile devices to provide this info. The real time info ties in to your backend accounting.

Some of the benefits are;

  • Improved communication between the office and the field technicians
  • Enhanced customer service
  • Reduced paperwork
  • Reduced time to invoice, by tracking time, materials etc…
  • Potential new business by creating quotes while on site

Back to our recent encounter with the third kind, the technician came back the same day and the invoice/receipt charge made it to my credit card eventually.

We are at an age where we can cohesively work with technology to make us more efficient provided our internal processes are clearly defined.

Click Here to see the technology available – Sage Service Operations video

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general construction contractor

Project Managers - Master of your Domain

Project Managers - Master of your Domain

Take charge of your projects, don’t let the projects take charge of you. Project management software can put you in command of your projects so that you can intercept problems before they become issues. View hot lists of critical outstanding project tasks. Stay in constant communication with team members with automatic schedule notices sent at set intervals. Monitor the status of all subcontracts including changes, invoices, and balances remaining. Check material status reports to ensure crews have what they need to keep jobs moving forward. Imagine a world where you can have a dashboard to see everything that is happening on not just one, but all your projects.

You may have certain portions of your project management somewhat automated with scheduling or estimating software solutions. If they are not integrated they are costing you valuable time, money and projects are more likely to fail. We had a recent customer that had automated some of their project management with a scheduling software. It looked nice and you could drop and drag jobs and view the related work required. However, the solution required that they reenter information into 3 separate systems. The net result was that their great, good looking, separate systems were costing this company over $75,000 a year in additional manpower, wasted time and the project managers felt completely out of control.  They couldn’t go to one location to see everything that was going on, they had wrong information at times because someone had forgot to reenter or had entered the wrong numbers.

The good news is that there are cost effective solutions out there that can put you in control and help you master your domain. The Sage 100 contractor is one of those types of integrated solutions. http://www.asyma.com/sage-100-contractor-master-builder

Take a look, I think it will greatly help you master your project domain.

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