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Winter 2009

Meet the Team

Deb Melady
Project Manager

Debbie brings to the team at Balgord eight years of experience in IT management with particular emphasis on an organization’s profitability, effectiveness and efficiency by implementing information technologies and methodologies. She works with clients and consultants before and after the implementation to make sure the project is on track and on time. Debbie also helps clients stay current on software maintenance and support, and manages service orders for upgrades and customization.

"I recognize the importance of information in business. To achieve long term success, it’s critical that organizations have a technology strategy and make prudent decisions to implement it,” declares Debbie. "Helping our clients to realize a return on their investment and attending to their needs over time is truly rewarding for me."

Debbie’s formal technical training is in computer programming but she has held various accounting, administrative, customer service and management roles in sectors including software development, government educational, agricultural, and health care. This wealth of experience has instilled a broad range of business perspectives which she leverages in her role as Project Manager.

Balancing career and family is a priority for Debbie. She enjoys being a Mom and volunteering at her children's schools and in their extracurricular activities. She especially enjoys the outdoors and is active in many sports including baseball and volleyball.

Productivity Tip
Generate Financial Statements from your GL

Consolidating your financial information from the general ledger into spreadsheets is a manual process and is prone to error, never-mind laborious.

With the current environment, it is more important than ever to have a built-in audit trail to ensure compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and help your auditors to fulfill your company’s fiduciary responsibility.

Your Accpac system has a built-in reporting tool called Financial Reporter, where you can use Microsoft Excel to manipulate, format, graph and print general ledger data to create the financial statements that you need.
 
The Financial Reporter feature adds Sage Accpac-specific functions and commands to Excel that allow it to read general ledger data. Accpac 5.5 has 16 new Financial Reporter reports including:
  • 5 new Balance Sheet summary reports
  • 5 new financial analysis statements
  • New forecasting statement
  • 5 new Income Statement summary reports.
You can include a link on a financial statement that allows you to drill down to the originating transactions.
Learn how to drill down from your financial statements to see the underlying transactions.

Duration: 2 minutes 20 seconds
 

Learning Opportunities

Any Balgord client on a current Balgord support plan is eligible to attend learning sessions at no charge.

Crystal Reports Training for Beginners
Tuesday March 24, 2009 1pm - 2pm
Tuesday April 21, 2009 1pm - 2pm

This training session is designed for the novice Crystal Reports user who needs to quickly become proficient in creating and modifying reports. Some of the topics include planning a report, creating a basic report, and adding formulas such as basic calculations and running totals.

Financial Reporter
Thursday March 26, 2009 1pm - 2pm
Thursday April 16, 2009 1pm - 2pm

Learn how to:
• Print consolidated statements, or print statements for any accounting division represented by an account number segment code.
• Run provisional reports for a financial snapshot prior to posting.
• Produce monthly, quarterly, biannual and annual comparative statements with any number of columns.
• Insert live Accpac data into existing Excel spreadsheets and templates.


To register for these webcast learning sessions, please email.

Electronic Funds Transfer Readiness

There have been numerous legislative changes initiated by regulatory bodies for better corporate governance, privacy protection and safeguards against terrorism and criminal activity. These changes have lead to several new guidelines imposed on financial institutions, including banks and their clients:
  • Cross-border payments must carry mandatory addenda records by March 20, 2009 to satisfy the Bank Secrecy's Act ‘Travel Rule’.
  • All international electronic funds transfers and domestic wire payments that are sent at the request of the financial institution’s clients will be fully subject to the ‘Travel Rule’ and ‘Record-Keeping Rule’ and must accompany mandatory information with the records.
  • Cheque clearing image requirements for print and electronic cheques came into effect September 2, 2008 to help reduce the time it takes for cheques to clear and limit the opportunity to cash fraudulent cheques.
  • Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires detailing the accuracy and scope of accounting procedures and certifying that the controls are helping to prevent fraud, theft and inadequate disclosure.

Sage Accpac ERP endorses the EFT processing module from Orchid Systems that efficiently complys with these guidelines. The EFT module will help streamline the payment process in your business and tighten controls over bank transfers by sending electronic files to your bank instead of mailing and receiving paper-based cheques. You can also pay a group of suppliers easily and cost-effectively in Canadian or US Dollars. This saves you the time and cost associated with creating, distributing and reconciling paper cheques, resulting in a more predictable cash flow.

EFT Processing for AP Payments transfers Accpac AP Payments to the electronic funds transfer functionality of your banking software. Remittance advices can be emailed using standard Accpac functionality. Because EFT processing is written in the Accpac SDK (Software Development Kit) it holds all Vendor banking details. It is also possible to support more than one file format for the same bank.

The use of EFT processing can result in several benefits to your business: reduced Bank transaction fees, elimination of redundant data entry and errors caused by manual entries, increased efficiency by processing payments and receipts electronically and avoiding the use of expensive cheque stationary.

Your vendors and clients will appreciate receiving their money on time, every time without waiting for a cheque to arrive in the mail. Because a deposit can be made directly to their accounts, the payment is safer and more private than a cheque.

Product Webcasts

Find out how you can save time and money with Avalara AvaTax!
February 24, 1:30 pm

Sales tax is a government-required, compulsory activity. It doesn’t drive revenue and it doesn’t reduce expenses. So any time or money spent on tax compliance is by nature, a 100% non-revenue generating activity. Today there are more than 12,500 United States and Canadian tax jurisdictions and the rates, rules and boundaries change relentlessly (about 20-30% each year).

Avalara and our market leading STMS AvaTax has helped over 10,000 users eliminate the tedious work and complexity of calculating, collecting, reporting on, and remitting taxes in multiple jurisdictions. Let us show you how AvaTax can dramatically reduce the risk of suffering loss or penalty if you go through a tax audit, saving you time and money.

Here are some benefits of implementing a sales tax management system:

  • Easy-to-implement solution
  • Achieve compliance automatically
  • 12,000+ unique tax jurisdictions
  • 100,000+ taxability rules
  • Audit protection
  • Save time and money - an average sales tax audit penalty is $35,000
  • Allow resources to focus on revenue-generating activities

Register

How to keep your business moving forward in any economic climate
February 24 - April 7, 2009

Sage is presenting a series of weekly webcasts to help your organization thrive in any economic climate.

From bringing cash into the organization faster, helping employees be more productive, to providing better customer service and everything in between, we will touch on finance, sales, marketing, customer service and operations. This complimentary webinar series will provide actionable tips on how to improve productivity and use technology across your entire organization.

Register for the sessions that apply to your line of business and invite colleagues in your organization, as appropriate. We are focused on helping each and every person within your organization.

View all webinars and their descriptions. You can register for ALL or a subset that you find interesting.

  1. Collect Cash Faster with AR Collections Manager
  2. Optimize the interaction between your sales and finance teams with Sage Accpac Extended Enterprise Suite
  3. Increase Satisfaction with Customer Service Automation
  4. Turn Leads into Closed Deals with SageCRM Salesforce Automation
  5. Out of the Box Integration between Accounting and Sales and Marketing
  6. Generate More Leads for Less Dollars with SageCRM Marketing Automation
  7. Reduce Administrative Costs and Redundant Work with SageCRM Process Automation

In This Issue

Learning Opportunities

Meet the Team

Productivity Tip: Generate Financial Statements

EFT Readiness

Noted & Quoted

Year-end Closing Procedures

Product Webcasts

 

Noted & Quoted

Client Support
"Thank you for helping us to quickly locate and retrieve historical financial data stored on our legacy Accpac system for an upcoming audit. With your problem solving and succinct instructions, we were able to successfully eliminate the financial and legal compliance risks to our company, potentially avoiding fines and charges."

Harjit Grewal, Accounting Supervisor
Ronald Law, Technical Support
Formglas Inc.

 

Year-End Closing Procedures

Closing the year in Sage Accpac ERP is easier than you think.
In this tutorial, we review the major year-end tasks and walk you through the process.

Duration: 7min 19 sec

Play Video

Contact Us

Lisa Sapwell

Business Development Manager
 
Balgord Software Solutions
2660 Sherwood Heights Dr.
Suite 202
Oakville, Ontario L6J 7Y8
 
905-829-3541 OR
877-222-7229