Small-Biz Meets ERP

A Look At The Key Players
But as that changes, solution providers should consider partnering with vendors that can offer small-business clients a clear migration path from basic accounting packages. Here is a CRN Test Center look at some of the some of the primary vendors in the market, beginning with Sage Software.

With its MAS line, Sage has created matrices to satisfy different industries, doing some of the vertical market customization. On its advanced inventory module, for instance, MAS can cover lumber, paper sales, apparel and textile, doors and windows building materials and other business variants.

The CRN Test Center also found Sage MAS 90 workflows concise and its reporting features mature. MAS arrives with customizable reporting on every module and integrates with Crystal Reports, so MAS partners do not have to get stuck using canned reports, an important consideration that is missing from Intuit's QuickBooks Enterprise line.

MAS also arrives with a business dashboard that is designed to give managers a quick look into their businesses. Dashboard fields can drill down to reports.

Clark Haley, president and CEO of San Antonio-based BCS/ProSoft, said his company has won business many times over the past 15 years by providing sound migration strategies using Sage's MAS 90. He said customers who have suffered through badly orchestrated upgrades often are wary of moving between vendor solutions, so being able to show customers a well-coordinated migration strategy is important.

Whether customers move from a QuickBooks or Peachtree to a MAS 90 or Microsoft Dynamics GP environment, they are going to need some training. Most midmarket ERP solutions have complex workflow environments and blend accounting with other business processes. This is another sticky point when selling a complex solution.

To help customers transition between accounting and ERP, vendors Intuit, Microsoft and Sage offer simple ERP products. Microsoft's Small Business Financials, for instance, provides accounting, light inventory, billing and purchasing and optional payroll functionality.

Financials competes with QuickBooks Professional, QuickBooks Enterprise, Peachtree and, to some extent, Sage's MAS 90. Customers that outgrow Financials can upgrade to the Microsoft Dynamics suite. Dynamics competes with Sage MAS 200 and other higher-end enterprise ERP solutions.

Dynamics Offers Customization
The four-pronged Dynamics suite is Microsoft's ERP crown jewel. With Dynamics, solution providers can develop warehouse management solutions using SharePoint portals. Dynamics also provides CRM, electronic banking and e-commerce.

Dynamics arrives with customizable modules, including more than 200 Web services designed to integrate many external systems. With Dynamics, solution providers can safely grow their services from the midmarket all the way to enterprise-scale solutions. The software giant provides development tools for every conceivable integration possibility. For instance, to connect inventory to operational systems that control shop floor machinery of a manufacturing company, solution providers can use Visual Studio to access low-level hardware output.

Much of the complexity doesn't end up passed on to the end user. Dynamics GP, for instance, arrives with a feature called Business Notifications that looks for events, allowing users to quickly find any information without having to navigate the software. Dynamics also integrates with Office's Smart Tags to find and view any transaction without having to search for it on a Dynamics desktop client. Users do not even have to be in the system to open up outstanding transactions.

Intuit Offers Seamless Migration
Like Microsoft and Sage, Intuit provides a fairly seamless upgrade path between its QuickBooks accounting software and QuickBooks Enterprise. Intuit has built various integrated midmarket solutions with ISV software. For instance, Intuit partners with TrueCommerce and Fishbowl Inventory to provide EDI integration and advanced manufacturing features, respectively. Because QuickBooks Enterprise's third-party solutions are integrated into the QuickBooks architecture, training and implementation costs are lower for customers.

Intuit also has reached out to solution providers by providing them with a developer network so that they can build and sell add-ons for QuickBooks products. Working with QuickBooks SDK is fairly simple. The SDK uses XML wrapped around class library to communicate between QuickBooks and external applications. Moreover, all client-based QuickBooks products use the same SDK specification, so solution providers only have to develop an integrated solution once.

QuickBooks Enterprise provides consolidated financial reporting by combining reports from different companies. Customers can view cash flows, balance sheets and other financial statements from multiple companies in a single report. However, companies that want to extend reporting to their customers have to look outside QuickBooks for a solution. Right now, QuickBooks Enterprise users have no way of extending information because they can only export reports into Excel.

Intuit's Full Service Plan entitles customers to use its online backup facilities and data protection services, including unlimited tech support. Intuit takes a more direct approach by providing a CD training kit called Mastering Quickbooks Enterprise to customers. According to Intuit, the CD helps solution providers sell expert services because customers are more aware of the pain points when transitioning between QuickBooks Professional and QuickBooks Enterprise.

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