For the last couple of weeks I’ve been at a client in Northampton, Kettering area to be precise. I’ve been looking at and analyzing the data in their Sage 200 accounting system, along with third party system called Protean and another third party system that links into the sage software called Sicon.
I’ve been looking at a couple of other databases too, just very small things that they wanted to try and amalgamate to try and get as much management information from those systems as possible.
I’ve been using Microsoft SQL Server, writing sequel views, allowing people to then look at that data within Excel using Microsoft standard software Microsoft ODBC. This allows the end users to be able to easily have up to date management information, all within a medium that everybody understands (Excel). Pretty easy.
From there they’ve been starting to use pivot tables to analyze the data, get some really fantastic management reports out of their systems allowing them to start making those all-important management decisions; commercially and operationally for the businesses that are involved here.
Along the same lines we’ve had a couple of other small projects that have been going on as well. One of these has been assessing and updating the nominal ledger within Sage. Yes, from the front-end you can’t really do very much with it, it’s pretty much fixed. But utilizing and working with the finance officers within the business, we’ve been able to ascertain a few changes to the normal ledger structure. Which really involves editing the nominal ledger code, the cost center and the department, to tie in with some of the third-party software that is struggling due to not having the available fields to map across from one system to another.
All of this is relatively straightforward, but obviously it does quite an awful lot of thought really just to make sure that at the end of the day the information they get out of their system is accurate and is no longer posting to any of the suspense accounts, shortening the amount of additional administration that it takes for them to run their business, to get management accounts out of their system and generally an extremely happy customer.
It looks like we will be here for some time because they keep on finding far more work for me to do, just to try and assist them in their day to day running of the businesses here in Kettering.
info@kconsultants.co
01234 818 028
Kay & Jon Waller
Kay Consultants