COVID & XAPPS Blog Series
Back Office Automation
Welcome back to our COVID-19 and e-Emphasys solutions blog. In this edition, we will talk about the current challenges facing your back office team, specifically during this last year in a global pandemic. We will highlight how e-Emphasys financial management and other solutions will alleviate current pain points and drive your business forward.
Introduction
The global pandemic proved that businesses need efficient and dependable processes combined with adaptability to remain successful. As many businesses were required to operate at reduced capacity, it seemed that back office teams were predominately asked to work from home. When part of your workforce is operating remotely, interdepartmental tasks can be a nightmare if you lack the proper platform and processes.
Finance and Accounting
As the hub of your company, everything you do flows through your finance department. From billing delays to tax issues, your department may be experiencing disruptions brought on by the global pandemic or simply by an inadequate billing system.
“One of the areas that we’ve experienced immediate savings was in the back office, the accounting and finance area,” said Ryan Greenawalt of Alta Equipment Company. Tony Colucci, CFO of Alta Equipment Company continued to explain the benefits e-Emphasys brought to their back office, “Given that we work off of one database, it’s been helpful in terms of being able to close out our months much quicker”.
e-Emphasys enables back office automation and creates an efficient and accurate Accounts Payable department by automatically uploading all invoices into the AP module. This eliminates the fifteen to twenty minutes typically spent creating the invoice and takes you one step further toward a paperless department as the digital copies are stored within our Advanced Document Management section. We have also seen dealerships growing organically and through acquisition without the need to add resources to the back-office staff.
With the e-Emphasys platform, your back office has access to powerful tax automation tools. Tax interfaces within the ERP system that provides the most accurate and up-to-date tax amount that should be charged on your transactions. All transactions within the system are covered, from sales transactions to sales returns, eliminating the time spent updating the tax rates within the system manually.
“A good example is utilizing the Avalara sales tax information, which allows us to eliminate 100% of the work we were previously doing on that,” explained Rick Krauss, CFO of G.W. Van Keppel Equipment Company.
Going Paperless in Your Back Office
Particularly in the context of the global pandemic, the ability to operate your business completely online with little to no physical paper is critical. For Linder Equipment Company, the global pandemic hastened their need to create a paperless dealership. With both safety and efficiency at the forefront of their decision, they worked with e-Emphasys to set up their ERP system to make their workflow fully electronic during the early stages of the pandemic. “I want to say it was three or four days we went from paper to mostly electronic in terms of getting the payables through,” said Peter Richa of Linder Machinery.
Earlier in this blog series, we discussed other mobile and paperless solutions including the Advanced Document Management. You can read it here.
“The system has allowed us to go paperless. We can upload all of our documents into the actual contract, so anybody can access it at any time, saving tremendous amount of time looking for paper folders. We have the utilization and the report.”
– John Kimball, CEO, Kimball Equipment
Fully Integrate All Your Departments
The fully integrated nature of the e-Emphasys ERP system and accompanying suite of purpose-built applications means that tasks that previously required multiple departments time consuming collaboration, now are simplified, and streamlined.
With eServiceTech, technicians can upload their service notes, complete jobs, and capture customer signatures via the mobile application. This information is uploaded directly into the ERP system, giving your back office everything it needs to invoice the customer.
“e-Emphasys has cut our service administration expense by at least 50 percent. I would say the reduction in time with e-Emphasys in generating financials is 70 percent or greater. Things that used to take two departments several days going back and forth now take, in some cases, 10 to 20 seconds.”
– John Kimball, CEO, Kimball Equipment
