SAP Business One · Consulting
SAP Business One® consulting for systems that are not doing what you were told.
Straight advice for companies choosing the SAP Business One® solution, and practical help for companies already running it who want more from the system than accounting.
Diagnosis
The symptom is rarely the problem
Five complaints we hear constantly, and what is usually underneath each one. Note that the same symptom has three different causes, which is exactly why guessing is expensive.
What people say
What it usually turns out to be
- 01
“Nobody trusts the inventory figure”
- Counting is annual, so the number drifts for eleven months
- Receipts and issues are posted late or in batches
- Bins and warehouses were configured around the building, not the process
- 02
“Everything important happens in a spreadsheet”
- Reports exist but answer the wrong question, so people rebuild them
- A process the system was never configured to handle
- The system does it, and nobody was ever shown how
- 03
“Month-end takes far longer than it should”
- Operational documents are not flowing into the ledger cleanly
- Manual journals correcting something upstream
- Reconciliations done by hand that the system could do
- 04
“Pricing is applied by hand”
- Contract pricing modelled in a spreadsheet rather than in price lists
- Price list structure that does not match how you actually sell
- Discount authority with no approval procedure behind it
- 05
“Upgrades keep being postponed”
- Customisations built in ways that do not survive a version change
- No test environment, so an upgrade cannot be rehearsed
- Nobody left who knows what the customisations do
The engagement
An assessment, then a decision that is yours
Consulting that always concludes with a large project is not consulting. Sometimes the finding is that your system is fine and the problem is two hours of training.
- 01
Look at the system
Configuration, customisations, integrations, data quality and version. What is actually there, as opposed to what the documentation says.
- 02
Watch the work
Sit with the people doing order entry, purchasing, warehouse and month-end. The gap between the designed process and the real one is where the answer lives.
- 03
Separate the causes
Configuration problems, data problems, training problems and process problems feel identical to whoever is suffering them and need completely different fixes.
- 04
Write it down
Findings, causes, options and what each would take. Ordered by what is costing you most, not by what is easiest to sell.
- 05
You decide
Some clients hand it to their internal team. Some ask us to do the work. Some do nothing for a year and come back. All three are legitimate outcomes.
Questions
About consulting
Next step
Talk through your SAP Business One project with someone who will actually work on it.
A short conversation about where you are today, what is not working and whether SAP Business One and our team are the right fit. No slide deck.