Small thing does make a big difference
Sometimes, small thing does make a big difference.
Sabrina of Union Alpha, a very bright lady with talent in programming, has been feeding us with many kinds of suggestions such as a better sorting criterion when printing reports and employee performance reporting.
Whenever we get these kind of suggestions, we treasured them and make changes as quickly as we can so that users can have a better experience with the system.
In the past week, we try to give the MBA System a name so that prospective users can easily identify the product. Although MBA System does consists of timesheet, billing, customer relations, human resources, accouting and finance functions, but these modules are not the heart of the system. It is not an ERP system, nor CRM, nor Accounting, nor Practice Management.
But one thing for sure, the system is vital for managing a business. This is why we adopt the name MBA to begin with. MBA System is a Management System for Business Organization. Maybe we can call it an Business Management System (BMS) for Professional Business? Any suggestions from our users?
Settlement function
We have a wonderful meeting with Cheng & Cheng, CPA on our presentation of the Settlement function.
Pat, the financial accountant, has raised a very good point after carefully examined the features. She wanted to have the instant granting of discount and write-off at the time of doing the settlement, rather than afterward in a separate function.
That really make sense. We have already included the overpayment to be recorded automatically to client’s advance and deposit account. What if a client pays less than the invoice amount and demanded the discount from it? Would it be convenient to do all these things in one place and record them in the journals automatically.
The other thing that worth mentioned is that when the firm offers no charge to a particular item, they don’t want just to use the zero amount on the invoice. So, we come up with a “list of descriptive terms on no charge item” to be input by the firm on a firm-wide basis.
Pat, thank you!
MBA System
After much debate, we have decided to adopt the name to be called MBA System. With the fast adaptation of the Internet connection even on buses and planes there is really no point to specify the term “anywhere” as part of the system name.
So, we will change all login from mbanywhere.com to mba-system.com. If your company is called World Travel, accessing your company system using wt.mbanywhere.com, the new address will be wt.mba-system.com.
VAT system
Sorry for all the delay. The French VAT system has taken us more time than first envisioned.
The invoicing system can now take into any kind of transaction taxes, including the VAT, GST and Sales Tax.
We then marched on to finish the Trust Monies System. This system is unique for law firms to have a secured and separate accounting for client’s monies deposit and distribution.
Coupled with the Trust Transaction Report and the enhanced document management system, the MBAnywhere for law firms is near its final completion. We hope we can have the bank management system with bank reconciliation, invoice settlement, write-done done within this month. The last hope is to get all the versatile transaction reports done as quickly as possible.
Job Assignment Control Sheet
Lately, we have been spending a lot of time refining the Job Assignment Control Sheet.
We are trying to put everything related to this job together so that it is going to be a One Stop view of everything that goes on in that job.
In addition, we are implementing a new function called Trust Payable, as a unique way to take money out from Trust Deposit accounts, thanks to Belinda of Cheung, Tong and Rosa, Solicitors.
Also, we have finally completed the Balance Sheet and Income Statement function. We finally understand that users are more comfortable with the pre-defined statements rather than the catch-all Trial Balance report.
What’s New section
It has been a long time since we had updated the What’s New section. There were many changes to the program since then.
Our users from Paris has been asking for the VAT (value added tax) to be added to the invoices. So, we have set up a separate function for the transaction tax.
The transaction tax includes the commonly used VAT (as in most European countries), GST (as in Singapore) and Sales Tax (as in USA and Japan).
The tax rate is date sensitive. That means it can calculate the correct tax amount based on invoice date. The final tax will then be printed on invoice. All taxes accrued will be grouped automatically under a Tax Payable account.
Client Advance and Deposit
We had a fruitful discussion with the prominent law firm Cheung, Tong and Rosa’s partner Mr. Da Rosa and his professional staff regarding the use of the Client Advance and Deposit (AD) function.
At the moment, any balance left at the AD account will be allocated to invoices as a form of prepayment. However, Mr. Da Rosa told us that this is not entirely true.
Law firms only act as a trustee to the money deposited in the account. When the transaction is completed, the money will be transferred to beneficiary. This is entirely different from the deposit and payment concept.
In order to do that, we have implemented a series of important changes to the AD function. Additional fields such as Interest Bearing, Not Applicable to Invoicing, Stakeholder’s status, Associated clients, files and other parties will need to be added to make this AD function user-friendly.
In addition, we have added the Bank ID instead of just the chart of accounts for easy tracing of the money flow.
What is MBAnywhere?
Today, I received an enquiry as about the MBAnywhere system. The question is whether the MBA system is to be considered an ERP system.
If from the viewpoint of defining the original meaning of ERP as the optimization of the enterprise’s resources as the planning tool, then MBAnywhere is definitely an ERP system.
However, there are many systems that are also called ERP system whereas the core value is placed on the general ledger. So, you will see many enlarged manufacturing accounting system to be called ERP system. The R as for resources are targeting the material, labour and inventory. In MBAnywhere, the R part is for human resources, the caller has proposed the term PLATFORM as versus as SYSTEM to distinguish the difference between the present ERP system as to the MBAnywhere system.
So, what we are doing is to provide a PLATFORM for enterprises to group their resources (employee, clients, communications, documents, HR, accounting etc.) together on a single platform so that they can “talk” or “relate” to each other.
Here, we thank you for the caller’s clear analysis and naming the true nature of our service. May be we should change the subtitle from ERP for Professional to a Cloud Platform for Enterprises. I hope that may be a easier to understood term for a forward-looking system than a old paradigm.
A Reply to a Request from a law firm that may be of interest to reader of this website
Dear Sir / Madam,
We are a solicitor firm in HK. We are looking for a software tool to manage our case files. Basically, the tool keeps electronic copies of documents in the database. There should be categorizations of documents into Correspondence, Documents, Research and Pleadings. Our staff will be able to rely on the system to search and fetch the relevant documents efficiently.
It appears that MBAnywhere maybe suitable for us. We have 7-9 users. Can you give us a quote of the product? Do you have a demo for the software?
Our Reply:
Thank you for your interest in the MBA system. The present document management system can organize the electronic documents into correspondence, case file, fixed-term contract, or just to the client file itself. Users do have the option to choose whether to put that document inside the internet server database or just to record the linkage to the actual file location. We use tag, client, case file to search for that particular file that you are looking for. The beauty of it is that it is easy to use and accessible anywhere, even on a mobile phone. We have added an important security measure of a security password to PDF file which is needed when opening the file.
Document management and the related record storage management are just some of the collateral function of the MBAnywhere system. You can explore the need to do the case file management, billing, credit note, settlement, client advances and disbursement and other functions in the future. The cost is based on rental fee. The monthly rent is at $1,000 per month for up to 20 users plus the initial setup fee of $12,000. There are no other hidden fee involved.
If you have any question please feel free to call us for an demonstration of the system.
With best regards!
Sincerely,
Harry Tsui
P & L Associates