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Business Continuum 2022 Company Update

Business Continuum - 2022 Company Update

2022 Business Continuum Team

After an unexpected couple of years of lockdowns, our team is ready to ramp up again in 2022. We have had several fresh minds and experts join our passionate team in recent times, positioning us to offer more capability for clients across a broader range of industries and solutions.

With over 7 years of delivering software advisory services across Australia, we have enjoyed moving more businesses to the cloud to cater for the work-from-home movement. More than ever, we are dedicated to assisting Aussie businesses develop smarter solutions to allow them to do more with less resourcing and double-handling.

 

Partnerships:

With the never-ending evolution of digital technologies and processes, businesses have learned over the years that without change, we stand-still. As the old saying goes, the only thing constant is change, and our ability to proactively adapt to change has repeatedly proven to assist us in offering a valuable competitive advantage. We are lucky enough to have an array of dedicated software partners committed to providing innovative ways to improve business processes. It’s no secret that we are constantly expanding our relationships with partners.

New Software Partnerships:

Trusted by companies of all sizes, Business Continuum continues to partner with solutions that expand our clients’ capability to digitise and streamline their workflow and client engagement.

 

Our Team:

At Business Continuum, we strongly believe in fostering a workplace culture that empowers individuals to develop professional technical skills and work collaboratively to develop solutions for our clients. Our diverse team brings different perspectives and expertise to our business which directly translates to the end-to-end business transformation support we provide. The new members to join our team include:

Yesha Sahu – Product Specialist

Joel Krish – Product Specialist

Carter Handby – Product Specialist Intern

Hannah Yao – Product Specialist Intern

Nethmi Irugalbandara – Marketing Intern

Business Continuum Interns

We are conscious of our role in engaging and maturing local talent who are interested in our cloud and advisory space. Thus, the recruitment of our interns provided us with the opportunity to welcome these students into the Business Continuum family and give them a chance to advance their skills while building a network of mentors. Through our mentorship, we want to create a talent pipeline that will add value not only to our business but also contribute to the individual skill sets of our interns.

Moreover, Minal De Silva, who has been a dedicated employee since 2018, has been appointed as the primary Business Advisor for all our inventory and SAP Concur projects. Connor Reich, our Senior Product Specialist, is now enrolled in a Master’s degree in teaching, which has also made him a valuable pillar of support for our new interns. In addition, the team has been instrumental in inducting our new interns and teaching them all aspects of our project delivery methodology and technical solutions we provide to our clients; they have demonstrated great initiative, and their capability is proving to be well beyond their years of experience.

Our goal for this year is simple, we hope to continue embracing the changing needs of businesses within Australia as software change agents.

Finally, we’d like to express our gratitude to everyone with whom we’ve collaborated over the last few years. Our business is built on the relationships we make with our clients, thus we are extremely grateful to everyone we have had the pleasure of working with.

To stay updated on all things Business Continuum check out our Linktree.

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2017 In Review: Helping Our Clients Achieve More in the Cloud

2017 In Review: Helping Our Clients Achieve More in the Cloud

We’re celebrating a year of growth: offering clients more solutions, more capability and more expertise.

It’s been a fulfilling year for the Business Continuum team. We’ve broadened our service offering and attracted many new clients, whilst continuing to deepen numerous loyal and longstanding existing relationships. We’ve also diversified our offerings by adding several talented experts to our team. It’s important to take time to reflect and celebrate, so here’s a few highlights from 2017.

Merger with Realtime Business, appointment of Greg Harrison

In April, we merged with Realtime Business, and founder Greg Harrison became a Director of Business Continuum, alongside Matthew Peng and Chung Hui. Greg’s arrival signified a combining of forces between our two teams, giving our clients access to his many decades of experience in the IT, business management and project management industries. Greg’s approach is pragmatic, process driven and client focussed, making him a perfect fit for the growing Business Continuum team. The merge empowers us to more efficiently service more clients, and increase the breadth of the services we provide.

Appointment of Tim Dowling

In July, we further strengthened our team with the appointment of Tim Dowling as Client Director. Tim’s focus on understanding the client’s overall business objectives and his extensive, in-house knowledge of Xero Practice Manager and WorkflowMax make him a valuable asset to our team. Since his arrival, he’s delivered many successful projects, particularly those that require expert configuration of Xero Practice Manager to help modernise workflow processes for accounting firms.

A bigger team means more expertise for clients

In 2017 we welcomed several new staff to the Business Continuum team. This has allowed us to offer more services and increased capability to more clients. Our new team includes:

  • Sianne Hussey, Client Manager, bringing inventory management expertise with products such as Unleashed, Cin7 and DEAR
  • Ben Harrison, Client Manager and our resident Scoro guru (more on that below)
  • Connor Reich, Graduate Analyst and our data configuration go-to guy
  • Tejas Chandra, Client Manager and specialist in Scoro and Xero SMB sales expert
  • Shelley Foster, Client Manager, with expertise in Concur and business system implementations

We’re also thrilled to announce that we’ve hired our first Sydney-based team member. Rikki Phillips joins us in January with a strong background in XPM and other cloud-based applications.

Partnerships with leading software providers

During 2017 we continued to build partnerships with leading global providers of cloud-based software platforms Concur, Scoro and Unleashed.

Our Client Manager Ben Harrison recently spent time in Estonia, taking a deep dive into Scoro’s capabilities, and he came back impressed with the team and the technology.

We’ve also been delighted to announce our official partnership with Concur. The commitment Concur is delivering to the Australian market, with significant investments in local servers, events and tech development ensures its offering is competitive, diverse and reliable.

We’re also excited to be working with Unleashed. Expanding our suite of services to focus on inventory management is a logical step for us, and a move that has been welcomed by clients looking to get their cloud-based operational systems working as effectively as possible.

Working closely with these new providers as well as others enables us to develop a deep and intricate understanding of their software and capabilities, and which clients may benefit from it the most. As a cloud integrator, working alongside a variety of different software providers empowers us to be channel agnostic: we prescribe the right solution for our clients, not just the only solution we know.

We’ve also cemented our position with SuiteFiles—the content management solution for XPM environments—having been awarded “Partner of the Year” for the second successive year. We’re delighted to extend our relationship with the team at SuiteFiles and we’ve been impressed with the product enhancements they’ve released in 2017.

Events: APIntel, Xerocon and Xerocon Roadshow

Alongside industry peers, we hosted a pre-Xerocon event that offered insights on how to achieve growth, efficiency and productivity using Xero Practice Manager. Our Client Director Tim Dowling spoke alongside AccountKit’s Paul Murray and SuiteFiles’ Andrew Sims at Accounting Practice Intelligence (APIntel). His presentation encouraged firm Principals to focus on profitability by driving more engagement with current and new clients.

And of course, who can forget Xerocon, the granddaddy of industry events for cloud-based integrators like us. Our Director Matthew Peng presented at Uni Day, a range of in-depth sessions designed for accountants and bookkeepers, showing them how to upskill their Xero knowledge to improve profitability and efficiency.

At Xerocon itself we learned of many new announcements, including the relaunch of expenses, the lifelong learning platform, and Xero Projects. (By the way, if you’re weighing up Xero Projects or WorkflowMax for your business, here’s our take on both.)

Business Growth

Our team has more than doubled in size to a total of 11 staff this year. What all of this growth means is more scale in the business to remove bottlenecks of access to people, more specialisation, and more options we can bring to the table for clients. We’re in a far better position than we have ever been to help clients scope out and execute change at a business process level. Our goal is to be a more capable and comprehensive business partner every year, so there’ll be no slowing down in terms of growth.

We’re also pleased to report that we’ve diversified the size and types of our client base. While continuing to work with smaller businesses, our increasing expertise has attracted larger clients as well.

No matter what part you may have played in our achievements this year, we thank you, and look forward to seeing you in 2018.

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Software Spotlight Series: SuiteFiles

Software Spotlight Series: SuiteFiles

Here’s the second blog post in our ongoing series, where we take a deep dive into the latest cloud-based software solutions for your business. We’ll be exploring the big players, the up-and-comers and the niche products to help you decide which option is right for your business.

Today, it’s SuiteFiles.

What is it?

SuiteFiles is a comprehensive content management system built on Microsoft Office’s 365 platform. Fully integrating with Xero Practice Manager, it’s a central and secure depository for all client communications, documents and emails. Anyone working with a client can save that content into the relevant client folder for all other approved staff members to access.

Who uses it?

It’s fundamentally a product for accounting firms, but legal firms use it too. Essentially, any service-based business that deals with clients and needs solid record-keeping functionality will find SuiteFiles a powerful addition to their business.

Templates that do all the work for you

Because they interact with Xero Practice Manager client data, you can use a template to quickly build a document, populated with all the relevant fields. For example, you could be sending an email reminding a client that it’s time to prepare the annual tax return. With a few clicks, you can create a letter using client data from Xero Practice Manager and your Word template. It draws down relevant data using conditional formatting. So, for example, perhaps the client doesn’t have a rental property. Then, the paragraph relevant to rental properties isn’t included in the letter.

Using these templates, each client gets a customised letter, and there’s consistency across the business in your client communications. There’s no other tool on the market that can create templates like this at the speed of SuiteFiles. Decades ago, you would’ve had an assistant writing these letters from scratch. Now, you can have them prepared and distributed in a few minutes.

Security in case disaster strikes

It’s much safer to store your client documentation in the cloud than in a server at the back of your office building. If that server dies or is stolen, all your precious, confidential client information is lost and your practice is in a world of pain. SuiteFiles has greatly enhanced backup and recovery capabilities compared with those within Microsoft Office 365. The native backup Microsoft provides lacks the ability to access single files. If you’ve lost a file, you need to restore the entire database just to recover that single file. But with SuiteFiles, you can easily access and restore that single file if your data is lost. Also, the data is located in Australia, which is ideal for most accounting firms dealing with client data.

Why not use a storage system?

Of course, you can always use storage systems like Dropbox, Box or Google Drive. But those tools, while very useful, are fundamentally just document storage solutions. Whereas SuiteFiles is a much more advanced content management system. It empowers users to store information beyond files, in order to better manage client interaction and project work.

Comprehensive content management

These days, most accountants are used to recording every type of client interaction throughout their day. Because SuiteFiles is built on Office 365, it extends the value of that investment for firms. So when an email comes in, you can click and drag it to SuiteFiles and it is automatically added to that client folder. The easier it is for everyone to habitually record client discussions, especially advice and decisions, the better your firm will service clients.

What are the alternatives?

Unfortunately, other content management solutions don’t integrate with Xero Practice Manager, so they’re less efficient. As mentioned, there are always simple storage systems like Box, DropBox or Google Drive. We estimate that around 200 accounting firms around Australia use SuiteFiles and many more are in the process of migrating from legacy solutions such as MYOB, HandiSoft or APS. SuiteFiles is the only cloud solution to provide the functionality that accounting firms will be familiar with.

What should you be aware of?

It’s a great piece of software, but it can’t fix cultural or behavioural attitudes in your firm. If your employees aren’t in the habit of regularly recording time and client interactions, it may be difficult to introduce this new record-as-you-go-along approach. SuiteFiles works best if users make regular updates throughout the working day (no filing everything in a rush on Fridays at 5pm). You need to be confident that your staff will stay on top of internal processes to get the best out of SuiteFiles.

Although documents in SuiteFiles can be accessed directly through documents tabs in Xero Practice Manager, it isn’t the most functional of features. We recommend using SuiteFiles as a standalone application with the integration being XPM feeding client data through to SuiteFiles.

Be clear on your objectives

The most successful implementations of SuiteFiles are underpinned by the clarity of vision, and the problem that is being addressed. By clearly defining your objectives and your success criteria, you’ll be in a better position to make the most of SuiteFiles (or any cloud software solution for that matter). What is your clear business need? SuiteFiles can’t magic away process problems within your practice, so it’s worth getting clear on your expectations at the onset.

Is it expensive? Is it easy to migrate from a legacy system?

SuiteFiles costs A$18 per user per month, so it’s an easily budgeted-for expense that will adjust as the user population expands or contracts. Migrations costs vary according to the legacy system holding the data—but we’ve migrated accounting firms from Windows file systems, through to MYOB and APS SQL-based systems. Typically, firms migrate around 80GB of data, but we’ve undertaken migration ranging from less than 10GB to in excess of 300GB.

It’s important to have a free trial

We like our customers to have a free trial before implementing SuiteFiles across their business which we can arrange on their behalf. A trial ensures that you and your team are comfortable in the SuiteFiles environment and the way it works before making a permanent transition.

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Software Spotlight Series: Unleashed

Software Spotlight Series: Unleashed

Welcome to our blog series investigating the latest cloud software solutions for your business. Each blog will explore the software solution, sharing our expert take on its strengths, weaknesses and best user application outcomes.

With almost 30 inventory management cloud-based software options on the market, it can be difficult to know what’s best for your business. Each option promises to save time, increase efficiencies and boost profitability, but they differ in areas such as customer support, integration and industry-specific features. We share our experience working with each application and reveal its strengths and weaknesses, hopefully giving you a clearer understanding of the best options for you.

What is Unleashed?

Unleashed is an inventory management software company founded in New Zealand in 2009. It’s now one of the world’s leading SaaS (Software as a Service) providers of inventory management systems to businesses, with more than 6,000 subscribers in 84 countries.

Like all cloud-based inventory management systems, it gives you real-time visibility over your stock levels. But that’s like saying the iPhone is great at making phone calls. Just like the benefits of the iPhone go way beyond making calls, Unleashed offers a variety of measures to help you control your purchasing, sales orders and dispatch processes.

More than stock in, stock out

Unleashed offers a suite of features designed to help you take control of your stock levels. These include the ability to:

  • quickly identify and re-order stock that’s sold out or below pre-set minimums
  • back order and split orders so you can ship and invoice what you can
  • accurately cost products, factoring in landed cost into the unit cost of your products
  • turn stock data into financial reports including stock on hand value, cost of goods sold and profit margins
  • tailor stock reports according to your needs with flexible customisation options
  • use the iOS app to monitor your stock levels from your iPhone whilst on the road
  • monitor your stock across multiple locations and warehouses
  • integrate with other leading cloud-based software programs such as Xero, Quickbooks, Shopify, Magento and Vend, ensuring your business data is up-to-date and consistent across all.

Ultimately, Unleashed helps maximise the profitability of your business by helping you take control of your stock management. If you are losing sales because you’re out of stock, then Unleashed can help.

Things we love about Unleashed

Unleashed definitely helps speed up the sales process. By using features such as barcode scanning and attaching documents and images to products, it makes information easy to find.

For example, a beverage manufacturer might attach a product fact sheet, with information about the ingredients used in the product. Unleashed offers multiple tabs for attaching data to product files, including tabs for codes, dimensions, suppliers, cost pages, supplier prices, retail prices, warranties, care instructions labels and many others. Access to this product information can be restricted or freely available.

There are other great features of Unleashed worth mentioning that you won’t find on a feature checklist:

  • responsive customer support—its support ticket response times are very good
  • it can be easily customised for your business needs (by a developer)
  • the Unleashed forum is a community of users where you can connect with similar businesses to get ideas and troubleshoot problems

Why would you choose Unleashed?

Most other vendors don’t offer the iOS app, which shows your stock levels while you’re on the road—great for meetings with clients making real-time purchase orders.

Unleashed is suitable for a wide variety of industries and business sizes. In particular, it’s ideal for the food and beverage industry. These types of businesses will appreciate Unleashed’s ability to capture batch numbers, serial numbers and product numbers as well as creating different types of reports, such as costs of goods sold or sales by customer group.

What are the alternatives?

While Unleashed is suitable for many inventory-based businesses, it doesn’t handle variance in products well. So if you’re a fashion retailer (for example) you may find Unleashed isn’t suitable for tracking different garment sizes and colours across your inventory.

Other great cloud-based inventory management options to consider include DEAR, Cin7 and TradeGecko. As part of our Software Spotlight series, we’ll be looking at these solutions in the coming months.

What’s the pricing model?

Unleashed offers a subscription model with a variety of monthly payment plans depending on the size of your business and the number of users requiring access.

Like any investment in software, it’s about considering the returns—by committing to using the full suite of its features and functionality, you will find the investment pays for itself. If you put a high value on the time it will save your business, then your investment will undoubtedly be worthwhile.

Want to find out more?

Get in touch with us to find out if Unleashed is right for you. We can help arrange a free trial and make sure you get the most out of the trial period.

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The Benefits of Cloud-Based Inventory Management

The Benefits of Cloud-Based Inventory Management

Imagine a world where automation and cloud technology didn’t exist – a world where everything had to be documented manually. Imagine how long it would take to communicate with colleagues and clients without email, or having to write down every single transaction by hand as a shop owner.

Without software to automate laborious tasks, everything would slow to a halt. Despite this, a significant number of businesses still fail to automate and fix outdated processes that, if they were to do so, would save valuable time and reduce the number of costly business errors caused by manual data entry.

Inventory Management is one example of this. If you’re a business that sells a tangible product, it’s vitally important you get your inventory management setup sorted so you’re capturing the right information, in the right way.

What are the benefits of cloud-based inventory management systems?

When it comes to Inventory Management, some businesses still start with a spreadsheet or even gut-feel to manage their stock levels. This might be adequate enough at the beginning, but as your business grows these manual processes won’t be able to scale with you, reducing productivity and increasing the likelihood of lost business through stock-outs and data entry mistakes.

Here are some of the benefits a cloud-based inventory system can offer.

Save time. Manually entering stock detail into a spreadsheet sucks up a lot of time and energy. Think about how much time you and your staff could save if key parts of the inventory management process were automated by software.

Minimise lost sales. Manual data entry leaves plenty of room for error, and means you’re less likely to be on top of your stock as a result. Cloud-based inventory software has the ability to display your stock levels in real time and allow you to set minimum stock level alerts, so you can anticipate demand and respond proactively rather than reactively when it comes to managing your inventory. The outcome? You’re less likely to lose sales due to unexpected stock-outs.

Powerful reporting capabilities. Access to insightful reporting is one of the big benefits of a cloud-based inventory management system. Apps such as TradeGecko, Cin7 and DEAR have powerful built-in reporting tools that can help you track sales and, in some cases, help you forecast stock levels based on previous sales periods and seasonal trends.

Integration (and automation). Many software platforms like the examples above integrate with other cloud-based apps – examples include Xero, Shopify and Magento as well as many others. Integrating inventory management with your accounting software removes the time-consuming need for double data entry. And with your inventory system and ecommerce store automatically working in sync, your online customers are less likely to be disappointed by a surprise stock-out.

Fit for purpose. One of the great advantages of inventory management software is that it’s built for purpose. POs and invoices capture necessary detail such as quantities, item size, item colour and units of measurement in a way that’s industry standard. Many inventory software platforms also include additional features such as B2B ordering platforms, 3PL integration, barcode scanning and the ability to categorise, track and order product by location.

Monitor stock levels wherever you are. The beauty of cloud-based software is that you can access it anywhere – in most instances, all you need is a laptop and internet connection. If your company has a mobile sales team, being able to check stock and raise orders on the run can save them valuable time.

Cost-effectiveness. Cloud-based inventory software tends to be sold by subscription, and many providers offer tiered packages so you can pick the right one for your business. Paying a subscription also ensures your software is automatically updated by the provider as and when updates are ready – gone are the days of having to purchase a CD and install new software (and with it, the potential for unexpected down-time).

Right, I’m sold! How do I get ready to migrate?

Most cloud inventory software companies offer free trials, and this is a great way to dip your toes in the water as a starting point. Test-drive a few options to see what works best for your business, and make the most of your trial period by getting your team involved and testing out the different features, reporting tools and templates on offer.

Once you’ve made the call to move to the cloud, the first thing to do is tidy up your stock list, customer and supplier information – working with clean data is key. A full stocktake will be required before converting your business over to a new inventory system, so it’s best to schedule all of this outside of your busy sales periods if possible.

It’s also important to consider whether you need to shift your accounting software to Xero at the same time, as this will add a few extra steps to the process to ensure everything integrates seamlessly.

If this all seems like a lot of work, there’s no need to feel daunted. As an experienced cloud integrator, Business Continuum can help guide you on the best way to transition your business across to cloud-based inventory management software. If you’re keen to find out more about how your business could benefit from cloud-based business software, feel free to contact us to discuss your specific requirements.

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