zMgtToolkit provides SMB users with the following suite of useful tools and utilities. Each of them is designed to automate specific management tasks and/or analyze important business information in a way that can't be duplicated using SMB alone. Among the many tools are the very popular Budget Tools that many businesses have found to be invaluable for their strategic planning and ability to increase their bottom line.
Budget Summary
The Budget Summary imports the “real” financial information from SMB into a familiar spreadsheet like format. Then nine powerful forecasting tools allow you to easily “crunch the numbers” to match the strategic business plan. Then one click of the export button sends the budget back into SMB which saves hours of tedious data entry.
A budget is the financial blueprint of a business – a prediction of the future. As a prediction, a budget is not exact or perfect, but it is the best way to compare what you plan and what actually happens. Analysis of the reasons for the variance between the budget and actual provides the business manager with valuable feedback and understanding.
The best way to make a budget for the future is to have a detailed understanding of how you spend your money now. Most business managers understand the importance of budgets, but dread the challenge of creating a detailed budget that is based on the current financial performance of the company.
The Budget Summary makes budgeting easy for SMB users!
Budget Forecasting
The Budget Forecasting tool allows controllers and managers to quickly and easily enter and document the basis of their predictions. Then the user can develop the forecasted amounts using various techniques including rolling forecasting and methods based on amounts by revenue, number of employees, and operating expenses.
Forecasting is the foundation of budgeting and it is as much art as it is science. Even the most skilled budgetary artisan (a.k.a. bean counter) can't perfectly predict the future. Forecasting is based on experience, market analysis and research. Many factors must be considered: current sales, last year's sales, last year's budget amount, direct costs and any planned changes to fixed costs.
Budget Management
The Budget Management tool provides a dynamic canvas which allows users to quickly and easily obtain up-to-date actual data from SMB as the year progresses. This data is presented in comparison to the budget data in grids, charts and graphs that are easy to review. Then the data can be used in the Budget Forecasting tool to update the forecast for subsequent months.
Once you have forecasted a reasonable budget, the next step is to manage the business to stay within that budget. In today's climate of rapid change, preparing a budget is no longer a stagnant once-a-year chore rather it should be a dynamic and continual process. The frequent review of budget to actual data is necessary to stay current with what is going on financially in the business and make any necessary plans and adjustments.
Budget Historical Review
The Historical Review tool allows the user to access and then analyze three sets of data at the same time - 1) prior period history in the current SMB company file, 2) data from the archive company files, and 3) import data via Excel template for prior year information from other accounting systems.
One of the essential components of creating a budget forecast is the historical experience of the business. For example, what sales were done last year, the last five years or 10 years, what % of income was direct material and/or labor cost, etc? This information not only shows trends, but also reflects the prior strategic planning of the business.
Break-Even Analysis
The Break-Even Analysis tool simplifies and speeds up analyzing the break-even point. It also provides the ability to perform a variety of what-if scenarios that are essential for effective business strategic planning.
The Break Even point is where business costs and income are equal. Since there is no profit or loss, the business has 'broken even'. Break-Even Analysis provides business management a dynamic view of the synergy between sales and costs that result in profits. In its simplest form, this analysis is done to answer one question: At what volume of sales will I start making money?
When doing strategic planning it can even be more helpful to run a series of what-if scenarios. For example: What if I add another person to the payroll? How many additional sales dollars will be needed to recover the extra salary expense? What if I borrow money for a piece of equipment; How much will be needed to cover the increased principal and interest payments?
Cash Flow
The Cash Flow tool automatically imports SMB accounts receivable, accounts payable, payroll and cash account balances thus eliminating the need to reenter them. Any non-SMB data can be manually entered, maintained, changed or deleted. If non-SMB data is subsequently entered in to SMB, the Cash Flow tool will recognize this and synchronize the data automatically. This allows the continuity of the information to be maintained. The Cash Flow tool also maintains historical cash flow projections which can be used to improve your cash flow forecasting abilities.
Cash Flow is simply the flow, and timing, of cash IN and OUT of a business. It is used to define liquidity. Being profitable does not necessarily guarantee that a business will successfully continue. Profitable businesses can fail when they do not have the money to meet their current financial obligations. Therefore, Cash Flow projections are an essential part of a business manager's job.
Typically it is troublesome to obtain all the necessary Cash Flow data from a business accounting system, including SMB, because they only record what has already happened. Cash Flow projections also need data about what is going to happen in the next week, month or quarter. For example, on the IN side, a large job has a progress billing, but the invoice will be posted in the future. On the OUT side, payroll has not been posted yet, but is owed to the employees in the next week. Neither of these transactions is available for Cash Flow reporting in SMB.
So, how do business managers track cash flow projections? They use a spreadsheet. While spreadsheets are easy to use and flexible, entering all of the necessary data into a spreadsheet is a tedious, costly, and time consuming process. This is because you must not only enter the data that is not currently in SMB, but you must also needlessly reenter the data that is already in SMB.
Charts and Graphs
The Charts and Graphs state-of-the-art tools will make your SMB data come alive by depicting the relationships between numbers. The old adage, "a picture's worth a thousand words", describes why charts and graphs are so popular.
Using these tools you can visually analyze SMB data from your current company file and even your archives, yes company archives. This gives you a proactive edge by allowing you to spot patterns and trends more quickly.
Pivot Grid
The Pivot Grid tool allows you to dynamically sort, count, filter and total your SMB data using a drag-n-drop, spreadsheet-like screen. This allows you to easily summarize and analyze large amounts of multidimensional, company information.
By using the Pivot Grid tool, you will be able to answer tough business questions relating to the counts, sums, averages, minimums, maximums, and standard deviations. From "Who is my highest performing sales person this month?" to "What is my average revenue per customer?" the Pivot Grid will provide the answers with the data that matters most to your business and bottom-line.
Reports
The Reports tool supports all of the standard SMB data relationships as well as many that SMB doesn't make available to you. This allows you to create reports containing important and revealing business content that you simply don't have access to in SMB's report writer. The Reports tool can even create reports that pull data from your existing company file and multiple archive files simultaneously.
While the Reports tool is certainly more advanced than SMB's report writer, it doesn't require advanced technical expertise to operate. You don't need to understand the SMB database structure or the various relationships within SMB's data. The Reports tool handles all of this for you, allowing you to concentrate on creating and running the reports that your business needs. If you can point-and-click, then you can use the Reports tool.
If you are tired of paying someone else $300, $400, or even $500 for a custom SMB report, then you're ready for the Reports tool. You're going to love how easily and quickly you can create your own reports.
Department Allocation
The Department Allocation tool automates the process of calculating and distributing the department allocation amounts. It is designed for companies who have a departmentalized Income Statement and use, or wish to use, an allocation department. A business typically implements department allocation when it is not possible or practical to initially post income or cost to a real department and yet, it is still very important that the income and/or cost ultimately be posted to a real department.
Department allocations offer a wide-range of benefits for the companies willing to do them: improved management, accurate profit measurement, profitable selling prices, informed decision making, personnel motivation, and more. Given these benefits you would think that most companies using SMB would be more than happy to implement department allocations, but still most do not. The problem is that SMB does not provide automation to calculate and distributed income and expenses across departments, and doing this manually is no small chore. Thus the need for the Department Allocation tool.
Unapplied Direct Cost Allocation
The Unapplied Direct Cost Allocation tool calculates and distributes job cost allocation amounts from an allocation clearing job and account to the applicable real jobs and direct cost accounts. While SMB's Job Cost functionality provides managers with very important actionable data about the job, sometimes it is not possible or practical to initially post the cost to a real job, but it is still very important that eventually the cost gets posted to the related real job.
There are literally hundreds of situations where this would apply. One example where Unapplied Direct Cost Allocation would be of benefit is in the case supplies that are purchased for multiple Jobs for an extended period of time. And, one of the best ways to handle this situation is to create a Job in SMB called 'unapplied cost'. Then you can post these kinds of costs to the 'unapplied cost' job. By holding these costs, calculation and allocation of them to the real jobs can be done later as part of the month end close. It is this final step that presents the rub for most businesses as calculating and appropriately distributing the costs between all the jobs to which they apply is not for the faint of heart.
Overhead to Direct Cost Allocation
The Overhead to Direct Cost Allocation tool is similar to the Unapplied Direct Cost Allocation tool except that the costs are posted to overhead rather than an 'unapplied cost' job. This tool automates the process of calculating and distributing the cost from overhead to job cost.
The upside of posting to overhead is that it is easier. The job cost record does not need to be entered at the time the transaction is posted. The downside of posting to overhead is that the costs sit in the overhead section of the Income Statement until the allocation is done even though the cost is really direct cost.
Archive Import
The Archive Import utility is used in conjunction with the analysis tools. This utility maps the SMB archive company files so that the archive information is available for use by the Charts and Graphs, Pivot Grid and Reporting tools.
Cost Code Conversion
The Cost Code Conversion utility converts all SMB cost codes from existing codes to new codes in every SMB table and field. If you have SMB cost codes that you don't use anymore and you can't delete them because they have been previously used, or if you wish you could redo your cost code list now that you really understand the use of cost codes in SBM, then the Cost Code Conversion utility is for you.
Parts Update
The Parts Update utility will merge duplicate parts in SMB. In addition the Parts Update utility can merge inventory parts, calculate the average cost, and figure the quantity on hand (total and by location). If you have duplicate parts in SMB, but you can't remove them because they have been used in previous transactions, then the Parts Update utility is for you.
Assembly Quick Replace
The Assembly Quick Replace utility can save you time by updating the assembly parts en masse. If you want your Assembly Part detail to match the underlying Part detail or you are frustrated that SMB doesn't update the detail in the Assembly when you make a change to a contained part, then the Assembly Quick Replace utility is for you.
MB Find and Replace
The MB Find and Replace utility makes correcting problems in SMB data a breeze. This utility automatically finds inaccuracies in SMB system data and reports on any problems it has found. You can then review the problems and make decisions on how best to address the issues reported. Then, if you decide that you want to fix the data directly, the MB Find and Replace utility will allow you to change the effected records in the SMB database to reflect the correct information.
Have you ever wished that you could replace some inaccurate data in SMB? In our years of working with SMB, we have run into hundreds of examples of this. A new employee entered the phone number as the Job instead of using the next Job number and now it can't be changed because records have already been posted to the wrong number. Or, a new Accounts Payable (AP) clerk entered the wrong Job on a whole batch of AP Invoices, so now all of the Job Cost records are hooked to the wrong Job. Seemingly irreversible errors such as these can happen so easily, but they can also be fixed just as easily using the MB Find and Replace utility.
Recalc Assembly Totals
The Recalc Assembly Totals utility is designed to recalculate the Assembly total based on the current default cost. SMB figures the Assembly total when you save the record, but it will not update that total to reflect changes in the part cost until you save the Assembly again. This can be a real problem if you have a lot of Assemblies and want to print out a list of Assemblies with up-to-date totals. The Recalc Assembly Totals utility will make this problem a thing of the past.
Recall Jobs
The Recall Jobs utility allows SMB users to recall jobs and related information from SMB archive databases back into the current company file at will. Routinely SMB users will close out their year not realizing that jobs with a "Closed" status will be archived and no longer available for lookup within the current company shown in SMB. This can cause frustration whenever the need arises to access an archived job's information, such as when information pertinent to a warranty is needed.
The Recall Jobs utility allows you to search and retrieve previously archived jobs and related information with ease. No longer will you have to go through the tedious task of opening SMB company archives in order to view job information that you wish was still in your SMB current company database.