This month we are excited to see that our Sage Accountant’s Network (SAN) program for Sage NonProfit Solutions (NPS) featured in the CPA Practice Advisor publication. Written by, Brian Tankersley, CPA.CITP, Sage Non-Profit and Hosted Solutions for Sage Accountants Network Members highlights the benefits of the SAN nonprofit program that is hosted on a virtual platform for easy, secure, and reliable access to applications and data from anywhere at any time.
Members of the SAN Nonprofit Program no longer need to install costly software on their computers and data is managed securely. This allows Accountants and Bookkeepers to move away from stringent and time consuming installation and update processes, remove business risk of using out of date software, while increasing data security and ensuring business continuity in disaster scenarios.
Accountants and Bookkeepers have got to love this! In fact, Gartner Inc. predicts that by 2012, 80 percent of Fortune 1000 enterprises will pay for some cloud-computing service, while 30 percent of them will pay for cloud-computing infrastructure.
But what is in this for you? Well, your accounting or bookkeeping firm can become familiar with your Sage Nonprofit Solutions software (and even test drive our other offerings specifically for nonprofits and governments), giving you another reason to love them – and them a reason to love you!
Recently, I was typing in a journal entry and it had 100 lines of data. (I am not exaggerating!) The accounting software I was using was Sage Peachtree Complete 2010. I couldn’t set up the entry as recurring because the entry didn’t fit those rules but what I did do was save it in Excel so that when I needed these lines again I could just copy from Excel. The problem with this is that I still had to review and complete 100 lines of data entry.
The other day I just found out that you can copy journal entries using Sage Peachtree 2012! No more 10-key data entry for me – well at least its cut down by 50%. I can copy transactions from the entry screen or list view of Quotes, Sales Orders, Proposals, Sales Invoices, Purchase Orders, Purchase Invoices, and General Journal Entries.
Easily create a new sales invoice when a customer calls and says “give me the same thing I got last month but make it 10 widgets instead of 8.”
- Just find the sales invoice from last month.
- Open it.
- Click Copy.
"Copy Transaction" functionality in Sage Peachtree 2012*
Change the number of widgets – or anything else – and save. It’s just that easy!
Great news for me – and anyone who enters this much data! If you haven’t yet done so, check out Sage Peachtree 2012.
Anita Johnson – Sage Accountant Advocate
Have you ever walked through your office while everyone is hard at work and found the atmosphere a little stifling? Everyone may be hard at work, but the layer of stress in the air is so heavy you can cut it with a knife. Deadlines, budgets, and projects – oh my!
Sometimes I long for the “good old days” back on the playground, where almost anything brought on fits of laughter and giggles were plentiful. It was such a stress free time. My enjoyment level associated with even the most menial task seemed amplified as a child. Why is it that when we enter adulthood, we let go of the freedom to laugh? It’s not really that we have outgrown laughter, but more about work needing to be taken seriously. Research is now showing us that a little laughter can make us better performers.
According to a survey published by Training and Development magazine, 84% of the HR Managers stated that employees believed to have a sense of humor performed better at work. Multiple studies have shown that humor can greatly reduce stress and may also have the following positive effects:
• Increased job satisfaction – if you enjoy being at work, you will have more enthusiasm toward your day to day activities
• Improved work relationships – sharing a laugh can help put people on a level playing field and weaken some barriers that may normally impede the exchange of ideas
• Increased creativity – a little fun and a few giggles can breathe some new life into a creative project or problem solving
• Improved employee retention – if work is a nice place to be, odds are you and your co-workers will want to stick around
Laughter is also good for your health. Did you know that we change physiologically when we laugh? Our heart rate and blood pressure increase, we take in more oxygen, we stretch muscles – we even burn a few calories. Researchers have shown that laughter eases tension, promotes better quality relaxation and sleep, sometimes even relieves pain – the list of benefits goes on and on.
So now you may be asking yourself how to best incorporate a little fun into your workday in an appropriate manner. You may try a couple of these suggestions and see how they work for you:
• Include humorous quotes in communication, when appropriate
• Grab a co-worker and take a play dough break – see who can create the best sculpture. Just 5 minutes of goofing off can strengthen your focus when you are ready to get back to work
• If you’re a manager, encourage a little levity with your staff. Happiness can be infectious.
• Toot your team’s horn. When you experience success, celebrate a little. Hand out kudos and take a few moments to enjoy your victories, both large and small.
Just remember to keep your humor work friendly. Teasing, off color comments, and sarcasm are not productive additions to your workday. Keep it light, keep it fun, and begin enjoying a better work experience today. A little silliness may be just what you need.
Stephanie Barr
So you have a choice to make. You can spend a week in southern Florida riding in the spinning cups or you can be in our countries capital, Washington D.C., July 9-15 attending the most valuable Sage conference ever…Sage Summit. And I don’t make that statement lightly. We have made every effort to ensure Sage Summit is packed full of highly relevant and beneficial learning opportunities while keeping your budgets in mind (see if the mouse does that for you!) Here are some of highlights as to why Sage Summit delivers the ultimate bang for your buck:
• Registration not only gives you great content, but great food, entertainment, and multiple networking parties
• Earn up to 23 CPE credits when you register under the Sage Accountants Network (SAN) track
• Reduced group hotel rates (starting at $180)
• Free wireless internet access throughout the conference center. Try getting that on Space Mountain
There is a new approach to learning at Sage Summit. For 2011, expect new intensive product sessions that run longer and dive deeper into the topics that matter most. Plus look for more hands-on labs. New partner-led sessions. Interactive panels. Oh – and don’t forget to check out the new SAN pre-conference events on Saturday and Sunday, featuring mind-expanding workshops by notable thought leaders including Darren Root, Ron Baker, and the CPA Practice Advisor Hall of Fame inductee, Greg LaFollette.
Plus – you can’t forget the Sage Summit trade show, worth the price of admission itself! Gain access to a whole spectrum of companies that are leading innovation for Sage with new technologies and applications. There’s so much to do, see, ask, and learn. Get face-to-face with the experts. Get hands-on with the tools and technologies. Make a bee line for the Sage booth…no ticket required. You can also plan on adding to your pen collection.
So tell the kids you are taking them to Washington D.C. this summer to enjoy everything our capital has to offer and while you are there you can stop by Sage Summit for an experience of a life time. No, you won’t meet Mickey or his friends but on the bright side, you can meet me and I’m a character too!
John Parisi
It seems the words “Time Management” are a buzz everywhere I go these days – both at work with projects and at home with tasks or chores. Instead of shortening our lists of things to do or adding more time in the day, we are forced to find a way to manage our time in an effective manner. There are many books, seminars, and weeklong retreats that will teach us how to de-clutter our lives and manage our time better.
Just over a month ago, I had over 700 emails in my Outlook inbox, a full calendar of meetings and sticky notes in every crevasse and corner of my desk. I thought I had the best, most functional and effective way of handling my tasks. I barely missed a meeting, got most of my work done and only reset my password (on my sticky notes) once a week. Clearly I was organized, right? Wrong !!!
Earlier this year my team and I huddled in a large boardroom at 5:30am (darn that Eastern time zone!) and started the journey of learning TASKit. This is a comprehensive task management system developed by Roger Reece, based on the task features of Microsoft Outlook.
Roger Reese began by asking us what kind of Time Managers we were and then how we would like to improve. (At this point I was still wondering what system could be more effective than colour coded sticky notes, but I was beginning to see the light.) We broke our tasks down into bite size pieces and explored how to prioritize effectively. We began to learn that every task, every email, has a timeline and how an implemented TASKit system will keep us focused and working on the right project within the right time frame. The course was interactive and allowed us to walk away with a solid plan to transform our current process (which clearly wasn’t working) to an organized, well oiled, Task Management Machine.
I am happy to report, that as of today, I am 100% TASKit implemented! I have less than 10 emails in my inbox at the end of every day, no more sticky note wall paper, and I’m on time – and on top of deadlines, at the end of each day. Most importantly, I feel an improvement in how I perform, in the quality I produce, and in the way I feel about my work.
For more detailed information about the TASKit Time Management Workshops, visit http://www.timemanagementworkshops.com.
Amber Kenyon
Welcome (at long last) to the Sage Accountants Network blog. This blog has been a long time in the making and we’ve had a lot of discussion about it at our office for a while now, so I’m glad to see it finally go live. For this inaugural blog post, I’d like to share how we finally “arrived”.
On the Sage Accountants Network team we are lucky enough to have a social media “task master” (yes, Kimberly Creamore – that’s you!) and every time we said “We should have a blog!” Kim said “I think that’s a great idea – who is going to be responsible for ensuring there is a new post AT LEAST twice a week?”. That question was followed by… Crickets. Silence. People staring at their shoes.
Then it dawned on me (and I’m not sure why it didn’t sooner) – why does it have to be just one person posting to and maintaining the blog? We have an amazing North American team of talented individuals with insights, opinions and knowledge in so many areas of business. Why wouldn’t we all contribute? And so it began. Well, it didn’t exactly begin there – it took a little nudge from Brian Tankersley at K2 (if you would say registering a URL would be considered a “nudge”). I figure if someone that doesn’t work at Sage would go through the trouble of registering a URL for the Sage Accountants Network, there must be a few people who genuinely want to hear what we think. So let’s get it going!
Here is our commitment to this blog: we will post new content to our blog at a minimum of twice a week and our content will be original. We won’t pay people to write it and we won’t have ghost writers, and although some may think this could be a mistake I think the opposite – I don’t think we need to. We may not be the best writers out there and we may not always be the resident expert on the topic we’re writing about, but as a team we do have well over 200 years of combined career experience (don’t ask me how I came up with that calculation). I think this blog is a great opportunity for each of us to share with you our perspectives and for you to get to know our individual personalities (which will be entertaining all on its own!). We’ll be covering all kinds of topics that are all about accounting and some topics that are about business in general so there will be something for everyone.
The one thing our entire team has in common is that we all love accountants and our team mandate is to continue to improve the way that we (Sage) serve accountants. I’m confident you’ll see that come through in our blog and we look forward to the content that is on the way! If you have feedback, thoughts or ideas you’d like to see us write about, please reach out to me and let me know – we’re very happy to take requests!
More to come and thanks for joining us.
Jennifer Warawa
