Does your organization have unique aspects that can't be handled by and an off-the-self, general purpose accounting solution? You may already have an application that is designed specifically for your industry, which operates separately from your "real" accounting system (we'll call it your "back office accounting system" from here on out.) Maybe you don't even have a real back office accounting system, but are trying to use something that is built-in to your industry-specific (vertical) application that is supposed to make it a function as a complete "accounting system." Or, you may be holding back on getting the vertical solution that you know your business really needs because you are convinced that it won't connect with your back office accounting and will just create more problems than it solves.
If any of this rings true with you, then you could benefit from Winged Disc Integration Services. General purpose accounting systems cannot possibly meet every need that every type of business may have, and there are a plethora of vertical solutions available to meet the special needs of almost any specific business you can imagine. Vertical solutions usually do what they are intended to do very well; that's the whole point of their existence. However, when it comes to general ledger accounting, accounts payable, and cash/bank accounting; vertical solutions either don't even try to include that kind of functionality, or if they do it is usually substandard at best.
You may think (or have been told) that integrating a vertical solution with a back office accounting package can't be done. However, we think that you will be pleasantly surprised to find that it can, in fact, be accomplished if the vertical and the back office products use modern technologies and you employ a competent consultant. Winged Disc specialized in working with Microsoft® and Intuit® products, which both have excellent tools on the back office side to achieve integration with a wide variety of vertical solutions. Winged Disc has the knowledge and experience to evaluate a proposed integration and give you a straight-up, realistic opinion about whether it can be accomplished in a manner that will fulfill your expectations. And, if it can be done, then Winged Disc has the technology, tools and experience to make it happen.
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Integration Success Story Our client, a wholly-owned subsidiary of a multi-billion dollar European technology conglomerate, operates a specialized business of importing aeronautic equipment for sale in North and South America and providing equipment repair and certification services, all under strict FAA supervision. For years the company had been using an internally-developed Microsoft® Access database application to track its inventory and repair work orders, but this system functioned completely separate from the company's very limited, low-end accounting system. This was a painful situation that required transfer of transactions from the Access database application to the back office accounting package by manual reentry. The inventory carrying value in the general ledger was never completely up to date, and was not very reliable in the Access database either. The company was growing rapidly and these problems were becoming more and more obvious and costly, and had become a great impediment in generating monthly financial statements on the timetable required by the parent company. Winged Disc recommended that the company convert its back office accounting to Microsoft® Business Solutions Great Plains running on the Microsoft® SQL database, at the same time we located, evaluated, and recommended an aviation maintenance-specific vertical solution (using an Oracle® database) that closely fit the company's special needs. Using a third-party integration utility program, Winged Disc then set-up and fine tuned a tight integration between the aviation maintenance solution and the Great Plains back office accounting package. After the implementation of these new systems the company is handling almost double the sales volume with the same number of accounting staff because the integration has removed so much of the redundant manual data entry work. Also, the company can now submit accurate financial reports to its parent company within a few days after the end on each month. This success could not have been attained without the combination of Winged Disc expertise with Microsoft® technologies, general database concepts and tools, together with our knowledge of and experience with the underlying accounting and business process issues that had to be addressed. |