Client Meeting
A visit to Fung Yu & Co. CPA has one surprise finding.
That is the addition of a reference to customer, job assignment or correspondence for overtime application.
That means we can extract the amount of overtime accrued for each job on the Job Control Sheet or Job Summary for planning purpose.
Bank Confirmations
A visit to Santos C.H. Li & Co. has another surprise-
Their manager Lana Lee has suggested the system to generate the vast amount of Bank Confirmations to clients for signature.
This is actually the same suggestion from Union Alpha, a MBA user. We would like to implement the special page tab called Bank Accounts under a customer folder.
Then we can use a Mail Merge function to produce those bank confirmations, or any other letters or documents. Lana also suggested to use the Correspondence system to keep track of those confirmations.
Thanks for a great suggestion!
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas!
We visited an international CPA firm on Friday afternoon. They had proposed the system to be able to calculate the referral fees among its own world-wide members.
If every CPA firms in different countries set up the MBA systems, we can link them together in terms of communication and the offsetting of the referral fees. This is more than an earlier law firm’s proposal of having an Intermediate Entity set up apart from Customer. Well, it is really exciting to know all these possibilities.
The other proposal is to have a Fixed Assets system. Our concern is whether the assets can be linked to the company resources management system and be useful, rather than just an recurring depreciation calculation.
Prospective customers
We have visited several prospective customers lately.Each time we talk to them we got something back.
Yesterday, we visited S.H. Tsui & Co. CPA. This young and energertic team has impressed us a lot. They have offered many insights into the MBAnywhere system especially on the customer management.
By their recommendations, we will enhance the Global Search function by incorporating the click and enter functions for all the searched parties, using post-it to record the customer service matters and set up a Warning page on Customer Folder.
A little of this and that help can eventually help to make MBAnywhere a truly friendly and usable system for all our users.
Thanks, S.H. Tsui & Co. for your contributions.
Full invoicing
We haven’t been writing much lately, sorry. It is because we are in the middle of trying to upgrade all our existing users to the full invoicing with customize invoice templates, settlement, accounts receivable and financial reporting functions.
Some customers have many different versions of invoices for different location like Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Paris. They all have different types of transaction taxes that need to be printed on their local invoices and report to the authorities.
Other than that, we have to input the past invoices and disbursements into the systems so that the financial information is up-to-date.
Thank you for your patience.
Automatic balancing of the journal entries
We would like to say “Thank You” for the suggestion on the automatic balancing of the journal entries when making addition or changes to the automatic journal entry screen.
It looks trivial but it does save time and recalculation by hand of the corresponding entries.
What we have added is the Recalculate buttons on top of the Credit and Debit columns. By pressing the button, the system will recalcuate the amount and put the difference into that particular column’s existing entry in order to balance the entries. This minor change will be incorporated into all existing MBA systems.
Client Development
Last week, we have a Client Development Manager of a law firm came to our office to discuss about the enhancement of the Prospective Client and other client service functions.
He had made quite a number of suggestions. The suggestions that we will implement immediately are:
- One client transfer from prospective to customer.
- An independent function called Contact Management rather than just part of customer file.
- A user-defined field for Industry classification.
- Set up an Intermediate for each job, together with its related commission calculation.
We would like to thank this law firm and its manager for its great suggestions. After all, it is the users that count!
Quick Charges
We are still working on Quick Charges as well as Quick Invoicing. It takes a lot of time than we thought.
In addition, we have tried out the iPhone access. It looks promising. However, we need to ask users which way they would prefer:
1. iPhone (xCode),
2. Android or
3. Any smart phone (xHTML5).
Almost any phone can access the full MBA System. We are talking about the mobile apps of the MBA System.
Most likely, we will start with the iPhone one, since this is the most popular one and then expand from there.
Quick Invoicing function
Last week, we sent out the screen layouts for the Quick Invoicing function to all existing users and asked for their comments.
After extensive consultations, we have finally agreed on the following:
1. We will add a Quick Charges template:
User can define a set of regular charges like photocopy, travel, company search, with default invoice description, default amount and chart of accounts. When running the pro forma invoicing, users can add one or more Quick Charges templates to all or selected invoices. This function will save users to input the miscellaneous charges individually.
2. We will add a Quick Invoicing function:
User can create an instant invoice using the existing Quick Charge template or just create one from scratch with no need to set up anything before hand.
We would like to thank you for the users’ response and comments.
Job assignment
The original job assignment and time sheet system is a tightly controlled system with its origin in the audit programs and other preset work procedure with a known team of workers.
However, many users opt to use very simple or sometimes with no preset work procedures and no predefined work team. The tightly controlled environment would be a hinderance rather than a help to very small firms.
In order to facilitate smaller firms to adopt this kind of loose control approach, we are now implementing a different set of job assignment function.