Hi Marty,

In the past few months I have had the opportunity to work closely with several of your people on some initiatives here at CN and wanted to let you know personally how things went.

First off was our FRx Forecaster implementation with Neil Smith.  Neil was great, and the implementation went smoothly.  The only hitches were CN caused and Neil handled them and helped us with work-arounds when necessary.  The department managers did not like our previous application and refused to use it.  They would send me spreadsheets they created themselves.  I would then re-key all their data in various states of sophistication into the old system.  We now have a product that department managers are excited about, are comfortable with and will use.  The fact that FRx integrates with it is an added bonus.  This was a great success.  Denise Hawes also helped with our implementation.

Next, during our Forecaster implementation, Neil and I were talking about how to handle prepaid expenses.  During that conversation Neil asked how we tracked our prepaid expenses currently.  We were using an application that was designed specifically for that purpose, but still had to reconcile it at the end of each month, and do journal entries to amortize the expenses.  Neil told me about Deferred Revenue/Expenses in GP and how it worked…and that we already owned it.  We switched last month from the old application and it has reduced the number of tasks at month-end.  Another win.  Also, Denise helped some on this when Neil wasn’t available.

During the RG/Microsoft BI conference in February I learned of RG Journal Entry Copy/Paste.  We purchased that, and are very happy not to have to re-key 200+ lines of JEs each month from Excel spreadsheets!  Sheri was very helpful in getting me started on this.  It is a very easy application to use and we will put it to good use.  Sandy, Holly and Sheri were the contacts for this.

A few years ago, I was delegated the task of tracking CPE costs for each person in the firm.  The process for this was very manual and ridden with errors because it was so manual.  We had converted to BRL when we purchased Forecaster, so I asked Sandy if Project in GP would be a good way to go with that.  She thought it over and thought Project in GP was too cumbersome for our needs.  She recommended RG Project.  Sandy and Holly did a couple of demos with scenarios specific to our needs.  They answered all my questions.  We purchased RG Project and I believe it will be a great tool to track and report our CPE costs going forward.

We ran into a snag in RG Project when use tax was necessary on an invoice.  Project wouldn’t allow me to distribute more than the invoice amount to the projects.  Cheryl Brown suggested we use the Trade Discount feature to track our use tax, since the higher amount would be in the Purchases field, Project would allow me to distribute the invoice amount plus the use tax.  Perfect suggestion.  Elizabeth then modified our A/P Transaction Entry screen so that it matches our internal invoice header.  It works like a charm.

Elizabeth also suggested a product called SmartFill.  I tried it, I loved it, and now we own it.  Elizabeth also built lookups for RG Project for use with SmartFill.  She’s a genius.

Related to RG Project was how to report on the data in it.  So we purchased Smartlist Builder.  Elizabeth really came through for us here.  Since we use Deferred Expenses, and a good portion of our CPE costs (registrations, airfare, hotel deposits, etc.) are prepaid, and we want to report on those expenses in the months they actually occur, Elizabeth wrote us a SQL view that will allow us to do just that.  Cheryl Brown gave me a little training on how to build objects and Excel reports.  She did a great job, but we didn’t have Elizabeth’s SQL view yet, so I will need to get more training from Cheryl soon so I can create my own reports.

We wanted to implement Workflow, but due to system conflicts and a bunch of technical stuff I don’t understand, that was put on hold for the time being.  However, Chris Hebert worked with our IT staff to determine this.  He was out of town at a client site and still took the time to work with our IT staff. 

I know I have probably talked to each one of your staff at different times, and can’t remember all my interactions with them.  I am sure the experiences were positive though (otherwise I’d remember!).  But the ones mentioned above, Neil, Sheri, Elizabeth, Chris H., Cheryl, Sandy, Holly, and Denise have helped us immensely in the recent past and I wanted you to know how much I appreciate their helpful attitudes and depth of knowledge they bring to their respective areas.  As you can tell, I could probably go on, but you get the gist.  Your people have been a  tremendous help to me, the accounting department and Clark Nuber as an organization.  Besides my glowing reviews above, I would like to buy pizza for all your staff on Friday to be delivered at lunch time as a token of our appreciation.  Please let me know a good place to call in your area.  I was thinking five or six large pizzas would do.  What do you think?  Also, please let me know if Friday isn’t a good day for this. 

Sincerely,

Steve Shulze
Controller
Clark Nuber, PS