Case Studies
Project Profile for the Central Order Processing and Invoicing System
Executive Summary
Company
The Elgin, Illinois based company has offices, depots, and mines around the US.
Solution Description
The company is now able to meet IRS tax requirements without spending countless hours maintaining tax rates. Also, an interface was created to automate the entering of vendor payables into the Great Plains Accounting software.
Benefits
Labor intensive tasks that were subject to human error were eliminated. Company staff members are now happier and more productive. Accounting books are now less error prone.
Software and Services
- Microsoft Access 2003
- SQL Server 2005
- Microsoft Great Plains Accounting system
- Microsoft Windows XP
Customer Profile
Sector: Basic Materials
Industry: Minerals
The company is a leading provider of snow melting salt. They sell road salt to consumers, townships, and snow plowing businesses.
Business Situation
The company uses custom developed proprietary software to run the day to day operations of its business. The software tracks customers, vendors, contracts, incoming inventory, customer orders, invoicing, and payables. As the business grew staff members had to continue to do normal day to day labor intensive tasks, but in less time. A few examples are:
Maintaining Tax Rates
The company buys, sells, and ships in hundreds of different locations. For IRS tax purposes the company has to maintain tax rates for the hundreds of different townships.
Entering and Vendor Payables
The company purchases salt and shipping services from hundreds of different vendors. The vendor payables clerk would have to enter vendor invoices into 2 systems. The vendor invoices would be entered into the operations system and then again into the company’s Great Plains Accounting software.
The company hired alligatortek to help streamline and automate their day to day operations.
Solution
Tax Rates Automation
The system was integrated with a third party tool that provides the latest tax rates. Now to maintain tax rates, a file is downloaded from the third party tool and then a button is clicked in the system. A task that used to take several hours now takes 5 minutes.
Vendor Payables Interface
The system was updated with a method to automatically send vendor payables to the company’s Great Plains Accounting software. Now the system creates a file with the vendor payables which is then imported into Great Plains. This is another task that would take a few hours every week that now takes 5 minutes.
Future Enhancements
There are still many different points in the company’s business process and system that can be streamlined. The company will be contacting alligatortek in the future to help make their business more efficient.