Balmori Software Inc.

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Photo: Andrea Piacquadio

Here's an unavoidable truth: Getting started is the hardest part of any endeavor. For example, accelerating a car from a dead stop uses much more of the car's horsepower than keeping it at 100kph, once it gets there.

Similarly, setting up a serious business app is by far the most difficult part of getting a business computerized. This goes double for accounting and financial software. It goes triple for enterprise software.

That's because, no matter how easy-to-use a business app has been designed to be, massive quantities of basic data - aka reference files - first need to be inputted before a serious application can start yielding useful information.

And the more strategically important the application, the heavier is the set-up task. Think enterprise software.

But even more narrowly focused apps can be a bear to set up. Think accounting. Or payroll.

But there's also a conflicting dynamic: Having paid big bucks for the software license, and expecting to reap major efficiency benefits, top management naturally wants to be getting reports ASAP. The owners want to be enjoying the benefits of the app ASAP.

But most people tasked with rolling out the software are unlikely to deliver anything approaching "ASAP."

The problem. For starters, the implementation team needs to establish a chart of accounts. Then they have to design account codes, customer codes, supplier codes, department codes, project codes, location codes, product codes, salesman codes, and transaction type codes.

All of this can take a while, because many companies - you'd be surprised - discover that they have no formal chart of accounts to begin with. Much less a coding structure for the account titles. And many companies realize that neither do they have formal customer, supplier, or product codes. If an organization is missing all or some of these necessary reference files, designing all these from scratch will involve a lot of meetings and inter-departmental discussions; and these take time.

Your car is just beginning to accelerate from zero kilometers per hour.

Assuming you've finished designing all these necessary codes, someone still has to input these into the new app, in order to populate your customer records, supplier records, product records. That's a lot of keying-in work.

And then, even when you've gotten all of those done, you're still not done: someone still has to input account beginning balances, receivables and payables beginning balances, and inventory beginning balances. More data-gathering and more typing there.

Your car has pushed off from a dead stop, yes, but it's still lumbering.

All these mandatory reference file data are prerequisites for setting up any business application. And their sheer volume means keying them into the app will take time. And this reality is at odds with the natural human desire to be "up and running right away." But reasonable people know that you can't have the latter unless you complete the former.

Yes, bringing the car up to speed takes a lot of energy.

The solution. But what if you could dramatically reduce the quantity of reference file data that you had to input? So that set-up time for your serious, heavy-duty application is reduced by weeks, or even months? So that you can be harvesting reports - useful reports - much earlier?

Balmori Software has recently "invented" an approach that makes such a speedy set-up possible.

We've redesigned our set-up menus to distinguish between absolutely-must-have-now reference data and postponable reference data. So now your implementation team can easily tell what reference file data is mandatory for set-up, and what can safely be inputted later, at your leisure, when you're already running the software routinely.

Now, suddenly, the set-up task is stripped down to the irreducible minimum. Set-up encoding can now go a lot faster. And by definition the set-up process becomes much easier, because a lot of what you felt you had to input during set-up can actually be done much later, at your leisure.

The biggest benefit is that you can be inputting current transactions much sooner than previously possible. And that means you can be outputting useful reports much sooner also, thus quieting the barking coming from the executive suite.

And make no mistake, getting to the point of inputting current transactions and then producing actionable reports - that's the tipping point where the application starts being useful to the business owners.

And if you can do these two things, you can say with confidence that your computerization is a success. - rsr









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