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Pastel Business Intelligence Centre - A flexible Excel-based financial reporting tool.
Susan le Roux

Financial Manager

In our Green House

In Our Green House is an innovative company that produces healthy food products for manufacturers, distributors and a wide range of retailers, from large supermarket chains to farm stalls. Their focus is on good health and their products include fresh and dried olives, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and fresh and dried fruits. Some of their products are cultivated on their own farms in the Western Cape.

Given their broad customer base, the company has very specific reporting needs that weren’t being met. For instance, they couldn’t easily review sales by individual store for their large supermarket chain customers, and they were increasingly frustrated by the cumbersome and time-consuming steps they had to take to access this information. Nor could they easily create a report that showed them sales by customer type, such as distributor or farm stall.

This sort of information is vital to an innovative and relatively small business in a very competitive market. Imagine their delight when Auto Excel, their Sage Pastel partner, said that the kind of reporting they required could be processed automatically using Sage Intelligence.

The first Sage Intelligence report they produced was exactly the format they’d wanted. Seeing what the program was capable of prompted them to ask for other specific reports and with every request their reports became ever more useful, often delivering the detail they needed in graphic format and opening their eyes to the power of true business intelligence. Today all their reports are exactly what they want to enable them to make sound business decisions, and they’re all delivered quickly and efficiently, in the familiar environment of Excel.

Susan le Roux, Financial Manager of In Our Green House, has been very impressed with Sage Intelligence. “It saves us so much time. More importantly, the amount and type of information we can get out of our systems now helps us to make better business decisions.”





Deon Katzen

Director

Bella Bathrooms and Tiles
"It is imperative that our client database is managed closely and effectively as our recurring revenue database is the core of our business. Sage Pastel Business Intelligence Centre has allowed me to develop monthly sales reports that do exactly this! The net growth/decline in our revenue stream can be closely monitored on a monthly basis i.e. reflecting the movement of our recurring revenue client by client, by value and numbers."



Danie Bantjes

Group Financial

Director Top Security
"It is imperative that our client database is managed closely and effectively as our recurring revenue database is the core of our business. Sage Pastel Business Intelligence Centre has allowed me to develop monthly sales reports that do exactly this! The net growth/decline in our revenue stream can be closely monitored on a monthly basis i.e. reflecting the movement of our recurring revenue client by client, by value and numbers."



Grant Olivier

Owner

Moores Rowland
"Prior to the Sage Pastel Business Intelligence Centre, management report creation was a manual exercise. Data was exported from Sage Pastel and then placed in Excel. Thereafter all formatting, grouping and calculations were manually applied. Upon first seeing the Sage Pastel Business Intelligence Centre in action, I was impressed by the simple concept and how much time it could save and I could see the obvious cost benefits of using the solution. With the Sage Pastel Business Intelligence Centre, maintaining my Management Packs has become an almost trivial exercise. The only maintenance that is required is when a new General Ledger Account is added, and even this is easy because it has the intelligence to identify which accounts are new."


Howard Tucker

Managing Director

Anglo Office Supplies
"We had already selected Excel as our preferred output for financial reporting but required a solution to overcome the manual intervention required in producing highly detailed reporting. The returns we have already witnessed from Sage Pastel Business Intelligence Centre justifies a new ongoing initiative to provide staff with access to information at their finger tips."


Phyllip van der Merwe

Owner

Crossbow
"Due to the simple fact that transport is charged on weight, we needed tight control over what and how much was being loaded onto our trucks. Sage Pastel Business Intelligence Centre has automated specific reports that give us this information at the click of a button. Due to the simplistic and logical layout that I receive my reports in, I can say that the performance of our entire operation has radically improved."


Pieter du Toit

Dust-A-Side
When we got Sage Pastel Partner, I deliberately set up the general ledger so that each mine site was a sub-account, with an eye to eventually producing management accounts with which each site manager could run his operation as a mini business. This meant that when Sage Pastel Business Intelligence Centre was launched, we were ready and never looked back. Now, at the click of a button, we can provide each site manager with a forecast against which he must order his product and report on variations. Sage Pastel Business Intelligence Centre also automates our factory planning, so that we know how much product to produce at any given time. It has also streamlined the management of our outsourced transport.


Coen Pretorius

Owner

LinkedERP

Sage Pastel My Business Online supports enterprise mobility

Technology business, LinkedERP, has a mission: To make businesses mobile. “We take any task done on a PC or piece of paper, and make it run on Apple, Blackberry or Android devices,” says owner, Coen Pretorius.

Many enterprises still rely on a disconnected mix of desktop and paper based tools resulting in inefficiencies, and difficulties sharing information with co-workers. This is the challenge that LinkedERP aims to overcome by bringing people, processes, technology, wireless networks, and mobile devices together in a process they call enterprise mobility. “Businesses need to work differently today than they did in the past. Everything in a small business now needs to be interconnected and mobile; having access to a range of online business tools enables this.”

Taking some own advice

Established in late 2010, LinkedERP secured a big reseller agreement with an international software company and had to open a new bank account immediately. “We needed an accounting system to be up and running in zero time, says Mr Pretorius. “Naturally we looked for an online solution because of the support for enterprise mobility that our business stands for. We also needed something cost-effective and instantaneous. And a system that could be owner operated, was reliable and could carry us in the start-up phase and beyond was imperative.” 

Mr Pretorius turned to Sage Pastel’s My Business Online, an entry-level, online bookkeeping and business management tool that can scale up as the business grows. “Sage Pastel is a reputable name when it comes to accounting packages and their online solution is reasonably priced and available on demand. That's the beauty of it. We subscribed to the 30 day free trial, were up and running within an hour, and by day two we paid for our first yearly subscription. It was seamless.”  

Into the future

Sage Pastel’s online solution provides LinkedERP with all of the essential accounting functions on a single mobile application and has the ability to integrate with other online business applications. “It is a perfect example of a system that supports enterprise mobility and the interconnected business of today – something that we strongly prescribe to. We also like the Sage Pastel My Business Online iPhone application, which enables us to process customer inquiries quickly and instantaneously.”

“Sage Pastel My Business Online is simple by design. There aren’t lots of unnecessary features and options and we don’t require specialist accounting staff to operate it,” says Mr Pretorius, “We also love the fact that the system has a low cost of ownership and upgrades automatically.”

Accounting is often the least favorite task of business owners but a mobile solution provides them with more time to be creative and run their businesses. After running the application for just over a year, LinkedERP is more than happy. “In fact it exceeded our expectations. Each of our business objectives has been achieved. We do not see the limit even at the rapid pace we are growing.”



Eugene Cilliers

Member

Payplan Solutions

Keeping a grip on flyaway finances

Debt counsellors, Payplan Solutions, gain real-time control of their own accounts using Sage Pastel My Business Online

Payplan Solutions is a micro enterprise providing debt counselling, consolidations, loans and legal services. As experts in their field, they know just how important it is to stay on top of finances with accurate and up to date reports.

Sequestrating the old

Originally or a manual system, Payplan used to use an outsourced bookkeeper on a biannual basis to undertake the time-consuming process of data capture. However, this meant their accounts lay out of their control. “With a bookkeeper attending to our accounting only once or twice a year, there were times when we really had to guess how the company was performing. We had no idea of what our daily and monthly performance looked like until year-end,” says Eugene Cilliers, member of Payplan Solutions."

Payplan also has to keep close track of the financial situation of their clients and fundamentals like the status of a loan account needs to be monitored monthly. In addition, the company found it difficult to negotiate better bookkeeping fees when they had no control over the data. “There was no transparency to the process and our own data was completely out of our hands.”

Payplan wanted to get back in charge of their accounts but felt daunted by the prospect of taking on the tedious task of data management themselves. But an online bookkeeping and business management tool would mean all data is updated automatically in a single application, no fuss. Mr Cilliers says, “I was familiar with Sage Pastel products during my role at another company and saw how well they worked. Because Payplan is a small business and needs mobility, an online tool was the prefect solution.”

Repossessing accounts

 Mr Cilliers chose Sage Pastel My Business Online, a single online application with all the essential accounting requirements including money management, task assignment, project tracking, messaging and reporting. All this is accessible in an open source format that can be accesses from anywhere. After a seamless implementation process where the Excel bank statements of the last tax year were simply uploaded on to the new application, Payplan was good to go.

“Sage Pastel’s My Business Online has given us control of our data again. Being empowered to draw my own trial balance at any time makes me feel like the president of a large corporation with my own accounting team.” Payplan now has access to accurate records and automatically generated reports that can be looked up at anytime, by simply clicking a button. And all for less than the cost of a bookkeeper.
“With Sage Pastel My Business Online, tasks like completing our own tax returns are easy and we are assured that any new changes to VAT or other legislation are instantly updated on the system.” Payplan is also looking to integrate My Business Online with other online business systems such as Sage VIP Payroll & HR, which means that everything in the business will be interconnected.

Forever indebted

After running Sage Pastel’s online solution for six months, Payplan is currently bringing its last few batches of manual entries up to date on the system before all their business objectives are achieved. “In an age of self-help solutions, Sage Pastel My Business Online is to accounting what Wordpress and Joomla are to websites – an entry-level solution that people can use rather than buy.”