Month End Accounting the way it should Be Today

Month end accounting has always been a business critical exercise. Without the balance sheet, income statement, and other financial reports this exercise ultimately produces, management could not make informed decisions to keep the company in the right direction and at the ideal operational speed.

Now, in order to maintain optimal business velocity, month end activities have to be carried out as swiftly and as accurately as possible. Delays will only inhibit managers from reacting and effecting necessary adjustments in time. Inaccurate information, on the other hand, obviously lead to bad decisions.

But that’s not all. Never has the month end close been as demanding as it is today. Regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Solvency II, Dodd-Frank Act, and others, which call for more stringent controls and more robust risk management practices, are now forcing companies to find better ways to face the end of the month.

Sticking to old month-end practices while striving to achieve regulation compliance can either cost a company more (if they add manpower) or simply bog it down (if they don’t). Among the worst of these practices is the use of spreadsheets.

These User Developed Applications (UDAs) are very susceptible to errors. (See spreadsheet risks)

What’s more, consolidating data from spreadsheets as well as carrying out reconciliations on them is very time consuming. These activities usually require data from outside sources – i.e. a workstation in a different department, building, or (in the case of really large corporations) geographical locations.

Furthermore, if one of these sources fail, the financial reports won’t be complete. This is not a far-fetched scenario, considering that spreadsheet storage and backup is typically carried out by the average end user. This leaves the spreadsheet data vulnerable to hard disk crashes, virus attacks, and unexpected disasters.

Thus, in order to produce accurate financial reports on time all the time, you need a financial/IT solution that offers optimal provisions for risk management, collaboration, backup, and business continuity. Learn about server-based solutions and discover a better way to carry out month end accounting.

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How FieldElite helps Electricians

The need to hire an electrician arises more often than we expect. It’s quite common to come across problems with structure-wiring, whether at home or in your business premises. It’s, therefore, not surprising to come across a home or a business owner in search of electrical services.

Whether a startup or a fully-fledged business that offers electrical services, there are challenges that come with running the venture. Where you have field service electricians, the challenges are even compounded, more so on matters of assigning tasks, receiving complaints from customers, and receiving field service reports.

As we all know, an electrical business isn’t just limited to the management of field service electricians. You’ll have to manage all the processes, a responsibility that can be quite daunting.

It doesn’t have to be difficult, though. You can take advantage of a field service management software program to make the entire management process effortless.

FieldElite is one such software. With FieldElite, you can assign tasks, communicate, and receive reports from your electricians on the go. Incorporating field service management in your electrical business enables you to run your business operations smoothly. 

Below are some of the benefits of using FieldElite field service management software. 

Increased Efficiency

Improved efficiency is the number one benefit electricians can get from field service management software. With FieldElite, electricians can accept jobs while in the field and add attachments together with client signatures using their smartphones or tablets. From the field management software, they can get information on the optimal route to the site, the tools required for the job, the service history of the customer, and contractual commitments.

Managing and scheduling tasks on FieldElite are just a few clicks away for office-based operators. That means reduced travel times and delays that often cripple workforce management.

Improved Professionalism

FieldElite field management software gives you a professional edge over your competitors. With this field management software, you can store all your business-related information in a central place. Therefore, each of your electricians can access the data from anywhere using their smartphone or tablet installed with the FieldElite mobile application. As such, there?s no breach in communication, and that means the electricians will get the scheduled tasks on time. Building such relationships with your team in the field encourages teamwork and motivates each team member to play their part. Again, since you can monitor what’s going on in the field, you can address the issues raised by your electricians or customers as soon as possible. 

Effective Communication

Timely communication is very essential if you’re working with field technicians. Since you’ll not always be with them in the field, it’s always important to establish a proper communication channel to ensure information reaches them in time. With FieldElite field service management software, electricians receive notifications and details about tasks assigned to them via the FieldElite mobile app.

On the other hand, office-based staff can access the report with the details of the job once the electrician completes the given task. This implies that both the electricians and the office-based operators can get communication instantly, enabling them to see and manage their workloads. Individual electricians can close jobs on-site and proceed to the next task without having to do paperwork reporting. For this reason, electricians can complete multiple tasks within a short time, which improves their overall productivity.

High Accuracy

With FieldElite field service management software, missing data or incomplete information is a thing of the past. Electricians no longer have to deal with paperwork, which can be daunting and time-consuming, yet with a million and one errors. With FieldElite advanced mobile features, all field service processes and operations are automated. The electricians are left with quite little to do, and that minimises data entry errors.

Because the managers get real-time updates from the field techs, they can accurately maintain and track the field processes. With FieldElite mobile features, managers can get information regarding the job status, the actual time of arrival, and the time taken to complete the task. With such updates, the electricians are better placed to do the job well without wasting much time, thus improving their overall productivity. 

Improved Co-ordination With The Team 

Apart from improving the productivity of the electricians, FieldElite improves coordination with the entire management team. For instance, an electrician can be assigned new tasks within the same area where they’re currently assigned instead of sending another to complete a task in that same place. FieldElite makes this possible by always capturing the current location and job status.

Whenever a new request is made in an area, FieldElite first checks the database to confirm if there is an electrician already assigned in that area. If the status of the ongoing assignment is complete or almost complete and the new task request can wait for the remaining time, the electrician in the field would be assigned the new task. By doing so, the business saves on cost and time and minimises movements. 

Improved Customer Satisfaction

As an electrician, you’ll only be satisfied if the service you offer makes the customer happy. Apart from fixing their wiring problems, they?d be happy if you responded quickly to their request. This is only made possible with field service management software. With FieldElite, managers can notify the electricians on the service requests in their respective areas, allowing them to respond to the call within a very short time. Not only does this give you some level of satisfaction as the business owner but it’s also a win for the company. 

Make your field work-flow better with FieldElite, and improve the productivity of your electricians. With FieldElite releasing regular and timely updates, users aren’t left behind whenever there are changes in the field service industry. The updates introduce new features and capture new standards to ensure that you get the best experience with the software at all times.

Saving Energy Step 5 – Bringing it together

We hope you have been enjoying our series of short posts regarding saving energy, so what we use we can sustain. We have tried to make a dry subject interesting. After you read this post please comment, and tell us how it went. We are in the environment together. As the man who wrote ?No Man is an Island? said, ?if a clod be washed away somewhere by the sea, Europe is the less? and Europe was his entire world.

The 4 Steps we wrote about previously have a multiplier effect when we harness them together

  1. Having a management system diffuses office politics and pins accountability in a way that not even a worm could wriggle
  2. This defines the boundaries for senior managers and empowers them to implement practical improvements with confidence
  3. The results feed back into lower energy bills: this convinces the organisation that more is possible
  4. This dream filters through all levels of the organisation, as a natural team forms to make work and home a better place.

None of this would be possible without measuring energy consumption throughout the process, converting this into meaningful analytics, and playing ?what-if? scenarios against each other to determine where to start.

The 5th Step to Energy Saving that brings the other four together can double the individual benefits as innovative power flows between them. The monetary savings are impressive and provide capital to go even further. Why not allow us to help you manage what we measure together.

ecoVaro turns your numbers into meaningful analytics, makes suggestions, and stays with you so we can quantify your savings as you make them. We should talk about this soon.

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New Focus on Monitoring Soil

There is nothing new about monitoring soil in arid conditions. South Africa and Israel have been doing it for decades. However climate change has increased its urgency as the world comes to terms with pressure on the food chain. Denizon decided to explore trends at the macro first world level and the micro third world one.

In America, the Coordinated National Soil Moisture Network is going ahead with plans to create a database of federal and state monitoring networks and numerical modelling techniques, with an eye on soil-moisture database integration. This is a component of the National Drought Resilience Partnership that slots into Barrack Obama?s Climate Action Plan.

This far-reaching program reaches into every corner of American life to address the twin scourges of droughts and inundation, and the agency director has called it ?probably ?… one of the most innovative inter-agency tools on the planet?. The pilot project involving remote moisture sensing and satellite observation targets Oklahoma, North Texas and surrounding areas.

Africa has similar needs but lacks America?s financial muscle. Princeton University ecohydrologist Kelly Caylor is bridging the gap in Kenya and Zambia by using cell phone technology to transmit ecodata collected by low-cost ?pulsepods?.

He deploys the pods about the size of smoke alarms to measure plants and their environment.?Aspects include soil moisture to estimate how much water they are using, and sunlight to approximate the rate of photosynthesis. Each pod holds seven to eight sensors, can operate on or above the ground, and transmits the data via sms.

While the system is working well at academic level, there is more to do before the information is useful to subsistence rural farmers living from hand to mouth. The raw data stream requires interpretation and the analysis must come through trusted channels most likely to be the government and tribal chiefs. Kelly Caylor cites the example of a sick child. The temperature reading has no use until a trusted source interprets it.

He has a vision of climate-smart agriculture where tradition gives way to global warming. He involves local farmers in his research by enrolling them when he places pods, and asking them to sms weekly weather reports to him that he correlates with the sensor data. As trust builds, he hopes to help them choose more climate-friendly crops and learn how to reallocate labour as seasons change.

Ready to work with Denizon?