Shining Results for Rising Sun With Sage BusinessWorks
Light is like magic. It can brighten a dark area, lift moods, and transform a workspace from dull to exciting and vibrant. It can stimulate us and provide a sense of health and well-being, causing us to be more productive. When well conceived and implemented, it can also give us complete control over our visual environment, whether we want a stimulating, cozy, or creative ambiance.
Rising Sun Enterprises helps clients achieve the exact setting they desire through full-service lighting design, consultation services and product sales. They are an industry leader in energy-sensitive lighting design and new technology assessment, and are one of the few firms nationwide that offers turnkey lighting implementation. Rising Sun provides lighting solutions for commercial, industrial, residential, and landscape settings. Clients include many Fortune 500 companies, with projects ranging from the CNN Center in Atlanta to the corporate headquarters of Esprit de Corp in San Francisco.
Old System Dim on Financials
Rising Sun needed to shine more light on its financials. The basic bookkeeping package it had used for years was unable to keep up with the firm's growth, and could not provide sufficiently detailed reports. Management needed a clearer look at profit margins and sales numbers.
After a thorough comparison of available business applications, they could see that Sage BusinessWorks 50 Accounting was a brilliant answer.
A Bright Solution
"Switching over to Sage BusinessWorks was definitely a smart thing to do," says Megan Twitchell, bookkeeper at Rising Sun. "Making the change was surprisingly easy, thanks to the excellent support we received from our reseller. I was able to export all of our 2,000 inventory items into an Excel file, and then transfer them directly to Sage BusinessWorks without retyping a single entry. This saved me an entire week of work."
"Sage BusinessWorks has trimmed about 10 to 15 percent off my workload, and allows us to run our business in a more strategic manner."
Sage BusinessWorks now performs all the basics of financial management at Rising Sun, plus much more. Besides payables, receivables and general ledger functions, it is used to track current and projected cash flow, calculate profit margins and keep tabs on overall corporate operations.
Inventory management tools within the new system have been especially important for Rising Sun. "Our former accounting package could only calculate reorder points," says Twitchell. "But now with the stock turnaround reports in Sage BusinessWorks, I know exact quantities on hand. I can prevent over- or under-purchasing inventory based on the turnover rate and the average stock on hand. And I can easily compare the best price and last price paid for any given item, and determine whether buying in volume will get us a lower cost and higher profit margin."
The new system produces detailed reports on the performance of each of the company's seven sales representatives. This ensures consistency among sales practices, encourages greater productivity and, in addition, quantifies which producers have earned incentives.
Learning how to use Sage BusinessWorks was simple for Twitchell, due to her familiarity with other Windows-based applications. "After only a few months spent mastering the system," comments Twitchell, "I’m now ready to start training others within the company."
Twitchell plans to add the solution’s Job Cost module soon. This will allow Rising Sun to monitor labor and material expenditures by individual project and achieve even greater profitability.
"Sage BusinessWorks has made me much more efficient," comments Twitchell. "It has trimmed about 10 to 15 percent off my workload, and allows us to run our business in a more strategic manner."
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