The recent release of V8.2 is a great example of this commitment with some fantastic new features that I’m sure our clients will love. On the back of a successful V8.1 release with some great enhancements to the Sales Order screen and some HUGE speed improvements to support our clients with large databases V8.2 concentrated on new features.

Here are some highlights:

This release provides enhancements to the data analysis and reporting capabilities of the EXO Business system. This includes:

• The addition of the EXO Analytics module at no additional charge
• Improvements to the usability of existing dashboard technology;
• Enhancements to the Sales Analysis reporting capabilities;
• Refreshed look & feel of the Management Report;
• Ability for users to undertake ad-hoc queries via standardised data sources.
• Additional email capabilities

EXO Business Analytics is a separate module that presents a customisable overview of the organisation’s business status. It is intended for use by management to monitor business performance. EXO Business Analytics extracts data from various sources in the MYOB EXO Business system and then displays it in a consolidated format. This allows managers to quickly get a complete picture of the entire business.

The EXO Business Dashboards interface has been reworked to improve usability and increase the possible methods of displaying data on Dashboards. Significant changes have been made to the “widgets” that make up the Dashboard display: new types of widgets have been added, and improvements have been made to how they are docked an arranged on the Dashboard display.

The tabs on EXO Business Analytics are fully customisable. Each tab displays a collection of Dashboard widgets. The following types of widgets are available:

• Clarity widgets – widgets that display a Clarity report.
• Web widgets – widgets that display the target of a URL, e.g. a web page or a local file.
• Pivot widgets – widgets that display SQL data in a pivot table.
• Grid widgets – widgets that display SQL data in a standard ExoGrid.
• System widgets – special-purpose widgets created by MYOB, which cannot be edited or customised.

Debtor Statement Mailshot

A new Mailshot function has been added to the Debtor Statements window, making the process of sending statements to Debtors more robust:

The release also contains other enhancements and improvements which are detailed in the MYOB EXO Business Release Notes 8200.

You can learn more about the Analytics module by reading the white paper:

MYOB EXOBusiness Analytics whitepaper

It was described as “The worst outage in cloud computing history”. 

Amazon’s US data centres recently took a massive hit resulting in an outage over the 2011 Easter break.

It resulted in trouble for thousands of customers and businesses alike with the cause being pitched as an “unknown network event”.

Although Amazon Web Services are back online, the occurrence poses a number of questions, few of which have been asked before.

For the purpose of this discussion we’ll focus on Cloud Accounting.  The reason I make this distinction is that the benefits and risks associated to Cloud Accounting are very different to those of Cloud Media Storage and the like.

An obvious benefit of Cloud Accounting is flexibility.  Accessing your accounts and basic GL information from any browser has huge appeal to small businesses but with this come a raft of security, privacy and reliability issues.

OPTIONS

Let’s take a look at the two most popular Cloud Accounting solutions in Australia today and their target market:

• MYOB LiveAccounts. $25.00 per month.  Aimed at micro business, sole traders and small sporting/community groups.
• Xero Accounting. $29.00 – $64.00 per month. Aimed at micro and small businesses.

As you’ll agree, both offer great value for money and with the average cost of the solutions being around $40 per month it’s easy to see why it’s one of the fastest growing software trends in Australia today.

The 3^rd option once you’ve outgrown the baby brothers of Cloud Accounting is of course Netsuite with both upfront and ongoing costs associated to taking the leap with some arguing this poses bigger financial AND reliability risks.

It’s fair to say that the cost savings associated to not having to implement a server, having no upfront software cost and not having to invest any time in upgrades and customisation have huge appeal.  But are you really saving?

RISK

Most Cloud vendors will guarantee you 99.9% uptime meaning 0.1% is allocated to failures.  This equates to 8 hours and 45 minutes of outage a year. Regardless of business size, every organisation, big or small, will be sensitive to ANY downtime in a year.

Once a business becomes a certain size and has sufficient complexities around business processes there will come a point where Cloud Accounting solutions simply won’t cut it.

It’s fair to say that quick customisation, robust performance and scalability are all appealing facets of larger scales ERPs, almost all of which require the software to be installed on a server, not run from the cloud.

Having software that adapts to your business processes and will change for YOU is a nonnegotiable requirement of any mid-sized enterprise and Cloud Accounting solutions all too often don’t offer this flexibility.

NON CLOUD ERP SOLUTIONS

Yes, the costs are greater but the risks associated with Cloud Accounting solutions for any mid-sized enterprise are far too great.

And let’s face it, if you’re big enough to deem a Cloud Accounting solution too small, you’re likely to have the available funds to make the leap to an ERP and bask in the long term wins that go hand in hand with many SQL solutions on the market today.

IN SUMMARY

Cloud Accounting solutions offer supreme value for money but all too often the true pro’s and con’s, scalability and suitability are overlooked.

On Thursday last week one of our customers experienced something that as a business owner you know about… but maybe never experienced.

The main business server CRASHED. Not just crashed… it did it really well and corrupted the entire file system so only random files were recoverable and needed a full rebuild.

Now I know what you are thinking – I’m OK as I have a “backup” system in place and everything I need is on there. This particular customer thought the same as they did in fact have a backup system running… but did it work?

After looking through the old tape backup it was discovered that the backup job was not updated in the last year. In the last year they installed ExoBusiness and also added new folders, new users etc. and the IT department had not included any of these things in the backup!

That’s right – No ExoBusiness database, no CRM, no customised reports and forms.

What could this mean for the business?

• 1 week of downtime as the server was rebuilt and re-installed
• The potential of losing 4 months’ worth of accounting data and an almost impossible job of rekeying
• Lost revenue and cash flow as you have no idea who owes you what and who you owe what to?
• Lost sales during the downtime
• Lost time conducting stocktakes to get back on track
• Expensive re-customisation of the system
• The list can go on….

Luckily in this case we were able to assist and work with the IT Company to pick up the pieces. With the help of our contacts at Mydba.com.au (Industry leading experts in SQL databases) we were able to restore the database with no data loss. There was also enough recovered from the crashed server that between that and backups that we keep on our server we could reassemble the whole system to working order.

The point of this story is that this client was lucky and it could easily have gone the other way. Even with the good news this still caused significant down time and expense.

The Real Good News:

You can follow these simple steps to ensure you are protected as best as possible:

1. Do you backup all your business data? If not – START! Contact your IT provider or Bizpro to discuss your options and get this done immediately. If you have important information on workstations you should set up a file server and set up a good system to ensure EVERYTHING is backed up to the server and included in the server backup.
2. If you have a backup, does it work? The next most important thing to backing up is actually testing the backup to make sure it works and includes everything you need. Again contact us or your IT provider to schedule regular test restores of the data to ensure it is working correctly.
3. Backup your system state not just data. Having your data safe still leaves you at risk of timely and expensive IT bills while your server is rebuilt and all workstations are re-joined to the network. This can be many days of work however a good full backup allows you to restore the server and avoid having to deal with the workstations.
4. Don’t skimp on hardware. Good quality hardware with redundancies and power protection will protect your data and last longer. Saving $1,000 on a server equates to $16 / month over its life.  A crash will cost easily 2-3 times that in labour without even considering the effects on the business.

As always if you have any concerns about your systems please contact us for advice. We hope to never see another situation like this one!

All the best,

Mark Belkin

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Enjoy!

Mark Belkin