Janice Phelps, VP, Direct Customer Sales and Service at Blue Moon Industries joins Brian Cohen, Multimedia Specialist and host of ADDcast, to discuss: the benefits that Microsoft Dynamics GP has over other financial systems; how Dynamics can improve the process over QuickBooks for a diversified company doing any invoicing outside of their main fuel/c-store software; reporting capabilities that lessen the need for manual spreadsheets; and outlining consolidated / fancier reporting approaches.
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Brian Cohen: Welcome to ADDcast. I’m ADD Systems multimedia specialist Brian Cohen, and I’m joined today by Janice Phelps, VP, Direct Customer Sales and Service at Blue Moon Industries. Janice, thank you so much for joining us today.
Janice Phelps: Thanks for having me today, Brian. Really excited about this.
Brian: Excited to have you. Can you start by telling us first a little bit about Blue Moon Industries and what services your company provides?
Janice: Sure, Blue Moon Industries has been in business since 1991, and, since that time, we’ve been focused on providing customers with the highest quality software and services to handle all of the financial accounting / back office requirements to run their businesses. Basically, we’ve been focused on the Dynamics product line, specifically the Dynamics GP product line, for those years. We’re referred to as a systems integrator because we both sell the software, as well as provide implementation and then follow on support services for the product.
Brian: Beyond the financials for fuel businesses, or c-store businesses, and because ADD Systems has a diverse client base that often runs businesses outside of the petroleum space, I understand you often see multiple financial products under one ownership. With products like QuickBooks or embedded financials, what are some of the struggles that clients face, and how does Microsoft Dynamics GP software offer additional benefits over these other financial systems, when you have rental companies, rental properties, or maybe a holding company involved?
Janice: Well, the Dynamics GP system is a multi-company system, and as well, multi-industry. It’s not a system that is designed specifically for a rental company or a field business or any particular industry. It makes it uniquely qualified to allow customers that are in multiple industries and have this kind of situation to really be able to move all of their companies under one umbrella, have all of those companies using the same software and then be able to leverage that into intercompany transactions and intercompany reporting. In the past they’ve had to do that manually and using outside and disconnected systems.
Brian: Let’s talk about the invoicing process. How would a diversified company handle invoicing in QuickBooks versus Dynamics?
Janice: Well, if they were doing invoicing out to customers in a separate system that wasn’t integrated with their main fuel-based system, they would need to handle those invoices outside the system and then rekey them back into their back office system. If they were using the Dynamics system, they could implement the receivables and invoicing modules that would then be fully integrated with their existing general ledger and financial backend so that, not only would they have a single point of entry that would give them that flow all the way through the general ledger, they would also have the ability to drill down back to those details, reprint invoices and send them to customers and handle all aspects of that customer relationship in one system.
Brian: As I mentioned at the top of the interview, some of ADD Systems’ clients are diversified into industries outside of the petroleum or c-store focus. How would a company like this take a physical inventory and run it through the same financials package as their businesses that run ADD E3 or eStore?
Janice: Well, similar to E3 and eStore, you have an inventory module and function within your Dynamics GP system, so often customers that have this kind of diverse inventory will create an inventory setup, create items and track quantities right within their Dynamics GP system, and then implement the purchasing side, as well as the sales side, to show the ins and outs of that inventory. They would then, of course, have everything integrated down to the General Ledger level, but would also be able to go in and run a Stock Status Report or other inventory analysis reports to look at quantities on hand, sales by item, or even product family, and then also be able to plan purchases against that inventory by using some demand planning that’s built into the Dynamics GP system.
Brian: Using Dynamics for your entire business probably opens up some powerful reporting capabilities, while at the same time, lessening the need for manual spreadsheets, correct?
Janice: That’s correct. Many customers would like to have powerful reporting within their system. They know they’ve got tools like Excel at their disposal, but often that requires them to export data out or even, in some cases, rekey the data into the spreadsheet in order to get that report to work properly. So by using Dynamics GP, you, not only have a very powerful financial reporting option in the management reporter tool, which if they had all of these different businesses represented in databases within the Dynamics GP system, they’d be able to consolidate, they also have, by using a system that’s based in Microsoft technologies, the ability to create Excel-based reports that are automatically updating with data from the accounting system to kind of leverage that Excel look and feel and flexibility, but have the data automatically updated from their back office accounting system.
Brian: Would someone have to use the same chart of accounts for consolidated reporting?
Janice: No, and that’s another thing that makes this system so flexible. Often, when we’re talking to customers, they’ve acquired companies over the years, and those companies had different chart of accounts frameworks than the ones that they might be using in-house. There’s a common misconception that if they aren’t all the same, or at least have many of the same components, they won’t be able to produce any consolidated financial reporting. That’s just not true. With the flexibility you have in the Financial Report Generator within Dynamics GP Management Reporter, you can identify for each company what the main segments are and what those other segments represent, and create a map that will map those together for a consolidated report.
Brian: Diving deeper into this topic, you also have the ability to create more “fancy” reports, if you will. Could you provide us with some examples of this?
Janice: Sure. A lot of times people need the basics: the P&L, the Balance Sheet, Gross Profit Analysis, maybe even a Cash Flow to really get started. But then, once we talk to them, we find that they’re doing this, but then, over here, in an Excel spreadsheet, often they are doing their fancy reports, or they’re doing the reports they need for study groups and other groups they might be participating in. We often will see reports that really drill down and look, for example, and analyze between different grades of gas and their actual gross profit margins. Because we pull in from our integration with ADD Systems, the units and the gallons, in addition to the dollars, they can look at unit sales. Also, what we’ve seen a lot more of these days, is budgeting those units. Because right now, as we know, the dollars are all over the place, but the units and the gallons that they plan to sell over the year, based on the different types, is really what they’re comparing to. We’ve seen a lot more budget versus actual reporting, but down to the gallon level, not so much at the dollar level.
In other reports that we’ve seen, we’ve really had people start to analyze more on the convenience store side, how successful is every store? Because you know, everybody is looking at everything at a really granular level these days. I’ve had people create reports where they take a grouping of stores, sometimes they’ll look at a geographic area, and they’ll create a report that has, column by column, each store that’s in that particular geographic area. Then they look then, in a really super granular way, at the dollars of sales and the margins of all of their different product categories. Being able to see that all the way down through the operating expenses, that many cases they will allocate across those convenience stores, really gives them a net profit by store and also can give them a lot of insight as to where those margins are good or bad. For example, we had one where all of their snacks were just through the roof. Sales were great. Then a store that was like, maybe a half a mile to a mile away, snacks were just dead, and cigarettes were big. What they allowed them to do is to look at what’s around them. Okay, they were around a bunch of, let’s say elementary schools. Well, snacks were really big. They were near a factory and now the cigarettes were big. So, they were really able to drill down on a lot of that from the financial statement perspective, and really take advantage of the system to learn about where they needed to maybe change some product mixes. Or, even take out some of the data, and look at it to decide whether they should stop selling something in one, to really try to enhance it in another store.
Brian: When it comes to report design, some companies want full control over the designs of their reports, while others need some assistance. How does Blue Moon address these differing approaches?
Janice: Well, one of the things we do at the very beginning of the implementation is we have a conversation with the customer about the process, and about the team that they have, and what their expectations are of us, and what our expectations are of them. We find that by doing this right at the beginning of the implementation process, we’ll learn whether they have someone who’s really just chomping at the bit to get into the Report Writer, they want to design their own, they’ve got some experience, sometimes with designing financial statements. They really just want to learn that on day one, and then just kind of let them loose and have them design the reports. In that case, what we’ll do is give them training very early on in the implementation, and then support them with regular meetings to have them be able to fire off questions, and then they’ll take it from there.
At the same time, we might have an appointment with a different customer who’s running very lean, everyone’s holding a bunch of different jobs and trying to get a lot done in the system. They don’t have time to design anything, and they really need us to take the lead on that for them. From that perspective, what we’ll do is sit down with them, go through the design of the reports that they need designed, and then our team will provide those services for them. Then review them, reconcile them, make sure they tie out with the customer. But, then we take that set of reports and use them as a training guide when we train them on the Report Writer. Because, in that case, now they’ve got a base set of reports to work with, they’re not under the gun or stressed about being able to get financial statements out right after they go live with the system. At the same time, they’ll know how to make changes to the report, and often they’ll use that as their springboard to now start to create their reports of their own.
We find that by learning all of this upfront, we can kind of control the direction that they want to go with that report design right from the beginning, which I think takes a lot of pressure off either the person who really wants to get started, or the person who can’t even think about designing financial statements because they have so much other stuff on their plate.
Brian: Excellent. Now Blue Moon is a platinum sponsor of the 2023 BTC, which takes place May 8 through May 12, 2023, at Disney’s Yacht and Beach Club resort in Orlando, Florida. And, you’re also hosting a breakout session. While May of 2023 seems to be a long time away, it’ll be here before you know it. Is there any chance you could offer us a preview of what you’ll be discussing during your breakout session at the conference?
Janice: Sure. It’s a little bit of what we’ve been talking about before. We often get the request from customers, once they’ve gone live on the system, to take them to the next level, if you will. What is some more functionality they can take advantage of in the Dynamics GP system? What are some of those more advanced or “fancy” reports that they could create now. Or, they might come up to us and say, “hey, I want to design this. How can I do that?”
Our topic for this upcoming conference is really going to be to take that system to the next level with some of those other pieces of functionality, and also to show some of the samples of those more in depth, “fancier” type reports. Just to give people some ideas, and get the wheels turning on areas that they might want to take their system as they continue to run the business, grow the business, and, as we’re seeing a lot of, grow the business in a lot of different areas.
We want to make sure that they know that they’ve invested in a system, between our two companies working together, that is something that’s going to take them well beyond where they are now, allow them to grow their business in a lot of different ways and not have to change systems and just enhance what they’re doing today.
Brian: If someone would like to learn more about Blue Moon and the services you provide prior to the BTC how would they go about getting in touch with you?
Janice: Well, the best way is to probably go to our website, BlueMoonIND.com. We also certainly are participating in other events with you, and they could certainly reach out to anyone at ADD Systems, and they could put them in contact with us.
Brian: Well, Janice, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today, and I look forward to catching up with you next May at the BTC.
Janice: Thank you. We’re really looking forward to it. It’s been so long since we’ve all been together. We’re really excited to get to meet people in person. Because, although most of what we do is remote, we have really been remote in the last few years! So, our team always looks for forward to the opportunity to meet customers in person and really have time to sit down and learn even more about their businesses.
Brian: Excellent. Well, thank you again for your time today.
Janice: Thank you. I appreciate it.
Brian: To keep up with the latest happenings at ADD Systems, visit addsys.com/blog or connect with us on social media by following ADD Systems on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. If you have any questions about ADDcast, feel free to reach out to us at addcast@addsys.com. Thanks for listening and have a great day.
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