Your most important asset: your customer!

It's easy to think of a business asset as something you slap a tag on, such as computers and machinery; certainly assets encompass buildings, land, and also intangible items such as intellectual property and business processes.  And as management gurus write in their tell-all books, you should value your staff as one of your most important assets.

Let's not forget the one asset that should be at the forefront of all others: your customer.

As a business owner and manager, you are spending time and resources to acquire new customers. But have you thoroughly given any thought to the process of keeping the relationship with your customers at the center of your business processes? A customer-centric view of your operations may look very different from your current set-up.  Here are several areas of your business that may help you establish and sustain the relationships with your customers regardless of the point of contact:

• Empower your staff with enterprise-wide access to vital customer, partner and prospect information
• Integrate with your accounting software for efficient access to customer transactional data such as purchases, calls and interactions, emails and documents sent and received
• Analyze, forecast and report on key sales data
• Integrate with other applications through sophisticated but easy to use web services interface

Customer information accessed by the sales and customer-facing departments delivers unique benefits for the entire organization, as well as to its customers.

Sales wins by:

• Having unprecedented levels of visibility into the order and invoice processes.
• Knowing the account credit status, terms, and account balance before creating an order
• Knowing the invoice, payment, outstanding balance, and aging information to provide more complete customer service
• Using past product purchasing information to plan future marketing campaigns

Accounting wins by:

• Maintaining control over the order entry process so that salespeople can generate accurate and complete orders
• Controlling product pricing and/or discounting
• Reducing the time spent answering questions from sales or generating reports because the teams have accounting information available at their fingertips.
• Reducing customer maintenance activities

Overall, everyone wins with customer-centric integration because orders move to accounting more quickly, customers receive products sooner, the company gets paid faster, salespeople receive commission checks earlier, employees are more satisfied with their jobs, and clients receive higher levels of customer service.

Call on us to explore your options to implement customer-centric operations at your company.

Have you taken care of your PUP lately?

Your payroll update plan that is. If you have, then the yearly tax updates are available to you now so you can update your Sage Pro or Sage ACCPAC systems.

There were additional tax changes announced after the release of the January 1, 2008 tax updates. These changes have been incorporated into the January 31, 2008 payroll updates that current PUP clients have access to.

If you are unsure about your PUP status, may we suggest that you contact Customer Care at 800-642-7693, Monday through Friday, 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific Time, and you'll be taken care of. 

Secrets of hardware support plans revealed

Have you looked at hardware support plans recently? If you're shaking your head right now, then please read on. And we promise to reveal the secret behind our efforts to convince you to sign up for such a plan.


Simply put, a hardware support plan is a preventative maintenance program designed to protect your systems and data. Here's a sample of the services that we include:

• Virus protection and firewall software up to date and functioning
• Review firewall intrusion logs for suspect activity
• Services packs kept current
• Sufficient disk storage available
• Clean up of temporary files
• Review firewall intrusion logs for suspect activity
• Integrity of backups
• Sample file restore on a back-up
• Review remote connectivity for security protocols
• Review server event logs for problems

But contrarily to a support plan that you would buy for a brand new household appliance, there's no one-size fits all plan. It is a service that we need to configure based on our knowledge of your systems. Would you not want the peace of mind to know that your systems are protected and optimized for best performance?

WAC Consulting cares about hardware support plans: as your business technology partner, we support your operations with our software expertise and our depth of knowledge of supply chain solutions.  But just like a car with the most finely-tuned engine and four flat tires, you won't be able to get far unless all systems are checked regularly. 

The secret? In order to be able to give you our most efficient service when you need help, we need this baseline service plan in place. Discover how affordable this program is by emailing Stephen Vogel and asking for a review and a quote for your systems.