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Categories
ERP Integration

Sage Resellers and the Sage Ecosystem

One of Sage’s greatest strengths is its collaborative approach to innovation, both with its Sage resellers and its independent software vendors (ISVs). Together with Sage, these players make up an ecosystem of innovation that can drive your business forward. But in order to reap maximum rewards, we need to first understand how this ecosystem works. 

The ecosystem

You can think of Sage software as the central organism in a large ecosystem that also contains Sage resellers and ISVs. If a Sage user wants functionality that isn’t part of the core product, there’s a good chance that an ISV has created a product to provide it. But Sage users can’t spend every day familiarizing themselves with all the new software that emerges in this ecosystem. This is one of many areas where a knowledgeable Sage reseller is so essential. 

Like any ecosystem, the Sage ecosystem is defined by interdependence. Hundreds of ISVs are constantly working to extend the core functionality of Sage software, and this is by design. With its partner program, Sage marketplace, and even a Partner Podcast, Sage is constantly encouraging ISVs to innovate. It also provides them unparalleled support in doing so. This is because Sage understands the innovation that can come from this group. The trick, then, is for a Sage user to navigate their way through this ecosystem to get maximum benefit. This is another place where Sage resellers become very important. 

Your guide

It’s not fair to expect Sage users to stay up-to-date on every new product or feature that emerges in the Sage ecosystem. Luckily, there is a community of expert Sage resellers who make it their business to stay informed on the latest and greatest features available to Sage users. It’s the involvement of these resellers that allows the ecosystem of innovation to function, because without them, the amount of choices out there might be overwhelming. 

But guiding users through their options isn’t the only way that resellers support this ecosystem. Many of the products created by ISVs are also environmentally sensitive, meaning that they integrate with Sage (and potentially other ISV products) in sometimes complex ways. Changes in one piece of software can impact other parts of the ecosystem, and this is where resellers come in again as a core player. These resellers know how certain pieces of software interact with others, and they help users keep their own Sage ecosystems healthy and robust. 

Moving forward 

Simply put, Sage has made itself a premier provider of enterprise software due to its collaborative, interdependent approach to innovation. But it’s always important to remember that navigating this world of innovation requires the guidance of professionals who spend every day working with these solutions and staying up-to-date on the latest and greatest features available, either from Sage itself or an ISV. It’s important to reflect on the central role of resellers in building and maintaining this ecosystem. It’s also important to remember that a caring, knowledgeable reseller is worth their weight in gold!

Categories
A/R Automation ERP Integration Integrated Payments

Automate A/R in Sage 300. Get Paid Faster.

You do a great job for your customers and deserve to be paid for your services in a timely manner. But how often does it really work that way?

Many companies spend months trying to chase down payment for a job well done. This effort can cost you a lot of money and even more headaches. 

To address this, you can study up on the techniques for improving collections. But you can also automate your A/R in Sage 300 for maximum efficiency. There are many benefits to doing this, but the biggest are streamlining your A/R and accelerating cashflow.

Enter OneView

It was with this goal in mind that we created OneView, the best-in-class solution to automate A/R in Sage 300. 

How does OneView do this? It’s simple.

1) It loads a list of your customers from Sage and invites them to set up an account on your OneView portal

2) It pulls from Sage to show customers their outstanding balance, open and paid invoices, orders, credit notes, and other info.

3) When connected to Conligo Pay, it allows them to pay their outstanding invoices online. 

4) It generates automated emails to remind them of unpaid invoices or outstanding balances. 

Sound good? 

Let your customers shop for more!

We should also add that the portal allows customers to access inventory info from Sage and easily reorder items or add new ones. They can also enable an auto-reorder function for frequently ordered products. 

In short, OneView does 95% of the job of a full B2B webstore at a fraction of the cost and with much greater simplicity. That means greater reliability, speed, and convenience for you and your customers. 

We’re talking about a fully ERP-integrated solution that is:

  • Out-of-the-box
  • Highly configurable
  • Streamlined 
  • Simple
  • Clear
  • User-friendly 

For a list of this product’s incredible features, click here to learn more. If you’d like to learn more about how you can automate your company’ A/R process in Sage, book a demo today by reaching out to sales@conligo.ca.

Categories
Order Entry

Meet the fastest, easiest way to place orders in Sage 300

Let’s face it. Order entry can be a huge headache for companies using Sage 300, but it doesn’t have to be.

The Challenge

In our 20 years, we’ve come to appreciate just how important it is for companies to have an easy way to get new orders into Sage 300. With faster-than-ever turnaround times, companies need their employees enter orders easily, quickly, and accurately. They also need all vital order information to be captured in the company’s ERP with zero errors. Finally, they need to make sure these employees have access to vital customer and inventory information contained in Sage 300. 

The Solution 

It was with this challenge in mind that Conligo created OrderDesk, the best solution for placing orders in Sage 300. When connected with Conligo Pay integrated payments, this solution can leverage your current payment gateway to easily run credit card payments on new orders. And all of the data flows seamlessly to and from your Sage 300 ERP. 

This solution sits comfortably inside the screens of your Sage CRM and will very soon be available in a standalone version. It is also the most highly configurable product of its kind, meaning that you get all the reliability of an out-of-the-box product with the flexibility to accommodate your workflow. 

If you have 5, 10, 20, or even 50 employees creating new orders in Sage 300, Conligo’s OrderDesk product isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s a must-have. Your team can skip the frustration of its current processes with one-click ordering and payments, and they can do this work remotely through OrderDesk’s cloud-based interface. 

All the Benefits

OrderDesk’s easy-to-use order form displays real-time customer and inventory lists—along with complete pricing—pulled directly from your Sage 300. You’re also able to use multi-company support and pull accurate tax information, as well as accurate shipping rates from FedEx, UPS, and more. Your reps can access up-to-date inventory status, including stock availability or arrival dates, and can print quotes directly from their browser. 

Other popular features include:

  • Copying entire quotes
  • Applying discounts by line item
  • Performing advanced inventory search
  • Searching active orders and order history
  • Creating an Order from an Opportunity in Sage CRM
  • Attaching documents to an Opportunity

A full list of benefits can be found here

Life’s too Short

You deserve an order entry solution that lets your employees push new orders easily and accurately into your ERP with zero headaches. 

To learn more about this product, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at sales@conligo.ca. We’d love to answer any questions you might have and to help you decide whether OrderDesk can add value for you and your team. 

Categories
ERP Integration Integrated Payments

You don’t have to switch gateways to integrate Sage 300 payments

Integrating payments in Sage can be a major hassle. 

First, there’s the fact that most payment integrators will force you to work with their preferred gateway. That means you’ll need to switch away from your existing gateway. It also means risking the credit card data you have stored with that gateway and needing to recollect it. Sure, your current gateway might provide you with this data when you integrate payments in Sage. But they aren’t legally required to do this. 

Even if they’re nice about it, you’ll increase your PCI exposure by handling sensitive credit card data during the switch. 

And even if you get your existing credit card data migrated to an integrated gateway, you might pay much higher transaction fees. That’s because the landscape of integrated payments is far more specialized than the world of generic payment gateways. 

In the end, what you end up with is a costly, risky, and time-consuming switch to a new payment gateway and higher transaction fees.

But what if there was a way to gain all the benefits of integrating payments in Sage without needing to switch gateways?

The Solution

This is one of the many benefits of using Conligo Pay to integrate payments in Sage. Our solution will integrate your existing gateway with Sage 300 and charge rates that are specific to the integration portion. 

Because it’s a cloud-based solution, Conligo Pay will also ensure that you are always automatically upgraded to the most recent version of the software. Our upgrades are also reverse compatible with over a decade’s worth of prior versions of Sage 300. That means you can rest assured that your payment integration is always current.  

To learn more about the many benefits of a flexible payment integration solution, visit our product page for Conligo Pay. If you have any other inquiries, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our Director of Sales & Marketing, Phil Glennie at pglennie@conligo.ca.  

Categories
ERP Integration Integrated Payments

The Overlooked Opportunities of B2B Ecommerce

Think that ecommerce is really more of a B2C thing? Think again. B2B ecommerce is in fact twice the size of B2C ecommerce today, and it’s anticipated to be the largest area of ecommerce growth for 2020-2025.

At the end of the day, everyone wants to accomplish more online these days, and this desire is only going to accelerate with time as younger cohorts become the buying class of the B2B world. In fact, that day might already be here, as a 2017 report by Merit found that a full 73% of B2B buyers today are Millennials, and that this group strongly prefers to buy online.

That’s why it’s essential for B2B customers to be able to achieve core transaction tasks, like viewing and paying open invoices, or viewing order and transaction history, through an online portal just as any B2C customer might expect.

This vision might not feel right to many, who still believe that in-person sales and relationships are at the core of B2B commerce, especially in sectors with long sales cycles and multi-year, even multi-decade vendor relationships. The fact is that both things are true, and this is why B2B ecommerce requires not only a portal where customers can view and pay invoices, but also a portal that your sales and customer service reps can easily create new orders.

Traditionalists are also right when they say that B2B customers aren’t the same as B2C customers. B2B customers often know what they’re looking for. They also have a greater need to have their invoices and order history easily viewable, as well as the ability to easily reorder items that they typically order on repeating cycles. These needs are so different that many companies that serve both groups have begun having a separate ecommerce platform for their B2C and B2B business.

While it’s crucial to have user-friendly portals for your customers and sales reps, it’s just as essential to make sure that these solutions send data directly into your backend accounting and inventory system, or ERP. When your online B2B portal is also connected to ERP-integrated payment processing, you truly have all the most vital data being inputted by your customers and running directly into your ERP. This creates a more frictionless experience for all involved, and if there’s one principle that’s true in the digital age, it’s that the less friction you have in your processes, the easier it’ll be to retain both customers and talented staff.

To learn more about the benefits of letting your B2B customers view and pay invoices online, and of having this information automatically run back to your ERP system, please reach out to us today at sales@conligo.ca. We’d love to connect to learn more about your current needs and how to meet your goals moving forward.

Categories
Integrated Payments

How ERP Integrated Payments Became a Must-Have

The year is 2020, and it’s become very difficult for companies to justify continuing on without ERP integrated payments. This isn’t just the case for B2C commerce, but B2B too.

ERP payment integration refers to the authorization and capture of payments directly into a company’s ERP system. This can take place in different ERP screens, such as Order Entry or Accounts Receivable, but the general principle stays the same. This is all about making sure payments are captured and recorded in the very heart of a company’s accounting and inventory control.

As Toolbox.com reports, integrating payment processing with an ERP ends up making both solutions better.  “Because payments increasingly are the primary touch point an enterprise has with consumers,” the report notes, “better integration of ERP and payments data becomes critical to improving both customer experiences and organizational efficiency.”

The Need for ERP integrated payments

 

It’s easy to argue that as a business scales, the need for seamless, durable, and frictionless payments becomes more essential. As the number of transactions climbs into the thousands, it becomes almost impossible for humans to keep up with the demands of manually entering payment information into the ERP. This isn’t to mention the burden of PCI compliance they take on, or the human toll of having people constantly enter all that data manually. On top of that, you also have to cope with human error, which can quickly cascade into much larger problems as a company grows.

But what about a small to medium-sized company that isn’t
really growing? Even in this case, it’s tough to argue that the cons of ERP integrated payments outweigh the pros. Some of these pros include the following:

1.    Save time

While it might be tempting to continue using manual workarounds for getting data into a company’s ERP, many of these workarounds
aren’t actually PCI compliant, and they use up a lot of a company’s staff hours. Now, that data automatically appears in the ERP.

2.    Improve your cash flow

You’ve got vendors, employees, taxes, and other costs to pay, so your business needs to have a clear, up-to-the-moment understanding of its cash flow. And no one likes long waits for invoice payments. ERP payment integration provides reliable, up-to-date reports on exactly how much money your business has available at the end of each business day, which helps you manage everything from payroll and inventory to paying vendors.

3.    Reduce human error

Human beings make mistakes. It’s what we do. Having a person re-enter data always introduces the possibility of error, either in the form of entries being duplicated or data entered incorrectly or applied to the wrong account. This could bog a company down for hours trying to locate the error. It can also frustrate customers through overbilling, not having a payment properly attributed, or false tax reporting. The seamless flow of data into the ERP eliminates entry errors and provides confidence that accounts are accurate.

4.    Reduce your labour costs

Integrating the payment process also eliminates the need to have a dedicated accounts receivable employee on payroll. You can also avoid paying an accountant for the sole purpose of re-entering data from credit card transactions to reconcile accounts. In addition, you can save time and money you might otherwise spend training employees due to the growing simplicity of the entire process of payment integration.

For these reasons and more, ERP integrated payments have become a competitive must-have for businesses both big and small. If you are interested in learning more about how integrated payments can help save your company a lot of time, money, and headaches, you can reach out to Conligo at sales@conligo.ca to learn more. We’d love to discuss how ERP integrated payments can help you move your business forward.

Categories
ERP Integration

When it’s Time to Integrate a Solution with Your ERP

You’re probably aware that there are solutions out there that can help you automate the flow of data from your payment, sales, and ecommerce solutions back into your ERP. You’ve probably also been pitched on many of these solutions over the years, and have heard the promises about improved efficiency, happier customers, and the like. But sometimes, all this talk of benefits can overcomplicate what is really a pretty straightforward proposition—

At the end of the day, integrating your ERP is about automating or streamlining the flow of data from external sources to and from your ERP and making sure it lands in the right places. That’s it.

The Big Question

There might be many different benefits associated with doing
this, but getting this data into your ERP in the most efficient, durable, and foolproof way is what it’s all about.

The question you then need to ask yourself is where and when
you would benefit most from this kind of integration. And here are some questions that will help you figure it out.

  • Where are your team members spending a lot of time manually re-entering data into your ERP system?
  • What is the real cost (financial + human cost)
    of all this manual re-entering of data?
  • How often are mistakes made?
  • How much do those mistakes cost?
  • Of all the reasons for not integrating, how high on that list is inertia, or the sheer mental barrier to making a change in your
    processes? (be honest…)

Once you’ve asked these questions of yourself and your team,
then it’s a matter of setting your priorities and moving forward on making a change for the better. These types of changes can sometimes involve big up-front costs that make it all the harder to bring change to your organization.

Luckily, these types of integrations are now available on a
SaaS or monthly subscription model, so you have the chance to deploy the integrations you want, see whether they’re worth it, and then turn them off if you don’t see enough of a return.

If you’d like to learn more about how our ERP-integrated
solutions
can provide you with seamless payment processing, remote order entry, and ecommerce, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at sales@conligo.ca. It’s our pleasure to answer any questions you might have and to do everything we can to bring your business to the next level.

Categories
ERP Integration

Backward Integration vs. Building Out from Your ERP

You’ve made a big investment in your accounting and inventory software. After a lot of time, money, and effort, you’ve gotten to the point where you and your team can use it the way you like.

But how do you make sure that your ERP knows what’s happening on your other business platforms, like your online store or payment card gateway? Leaving these platforms unconnected to your ERP requires you to constantly re-enter all the data from these platforms into your ERP, which can lead to costly errors. Worse yet, members of your sales or customer service teams might not have the ability to access vital customer information contained in your ERP.

To deal with these issues, you might go out and get yourself an external ecommerce platform, payment solution, and sales team dashboard. As SelectHub notes, there are many different platforms you can integrate with your ERP. But now you need to manage all these different platforms that don’t talk to each other. That means your sales team might not know vital information about a certain customer’s order history, or they might not be able to remotely send new orders to your ERP. Someone in your office might also forget to take the information from your online orders and enter it into your ERP, which can annoy customers and damage your brand. Or your payment card solution might not send crucial payment and ordering details to your ERP.

One way people try to deal with this problem is backward integration, where you ask a company to build and configure a set of custom connectors to link all of your scattered solutions back to your ERP. But the flow of data in this situation is often not done in real-time, and you find yourself needing to rebuild, redesign, or reconfigure these connectors as your business scales.

The other option is building outward from your ERP with purpose-built solutions. These cloud-based solutions start with your ERP and build outward to provide seamless e-commerce, payment card processing, and sales team intelligence that flows to and from your ERP. That means your ERP knows what the rest of your business solutions are doing. That means more accurate data, more reliable payment card processing, and solutions that scale easily as your business grows.  

If you’d like to learn more about how your company can
further unlock the potential of its ERP by building outward, please don’t hesitate to contact Conligo today at sales@conligo.ca. We’d be very happy to offer advice on the best path forward and to discuss your options.