TriTech

Is Your Company Outgrowing QuickBooks?

November 1, 2022 Christine Wells

Technology has helped to transform the world around us, supporting businesses in becoming more streamlined and efficient. When it comes to accounting, QuickBooks by Intuit has been one of the most popular software providers for startups and small businesses.

However, while this has helped thousands of organizations to transform their accounting, many find that QuickBooks does have its limitations, primarily the lack of flexibility and scalability to continue to meet the demands of a growing business.

What is a growing business?

When you hear the term ‘growing business,’ the first things that will likely spring to mind are rising profits or an expanding team. However, that is not always the case. Business growth could mean adapting the services and products on offer to meet the ever-changing demands of the modern consumer. It could also mean purchasing new equipment or working to ensure your organization meets new regulatory compliance.

Whatever it might be, growth means change, and while QuickBooks has helped countless small and medium-sized businesses, they can quickly run into various limitations as the basic features no longer meet their requirements. When this happens, it forces these businesses to make the switch to a more comprehensive business management and accounting solution.

Signs you might be outgrowing QuickBooks

If your business is changing and expanding, then you might start to notice signs that your current business management solutions are no longer working as effectively as they once were. There are many signs to look out for which indicate that your operations might have outgrown the capabilities that QuickBooks provide, including:

Finding that you have to manually enter an increasing amount of data into your systems.
Noticing that you are managing more of your inventory outside of QuickBooks on spreadsheets or via add-ons.
Paying for multiple systems or solutions to manage everything.
Regularly needing to transfer information from one application or system to another in order to stay up to date.
No longer having the flexibility to manage your inventory across your warehouses or easily update things such as prices or inventory counts.
Not being able to customize your quotes or manage shipments and backorders as well.

Time for the next step?

If you are finding yourself agreeing with any of the above points, then it is time to start thinking about taking the next step to ensure your business can continue operating as efficiently as possible. While QuickBooks is a fantastic tool, Spire can be the perfect solution for organizations needing greater control over their finances.

Spire is a unique business management tool that has been designed to provide you with the power of ERP software without the hefty price tag. The fully integrated software ensures you do not need to worry about any additional apps or add-ons; instead, your team can focus on a seamless solution for managing your entire operation. The unique conversion tool even lets you quickly migrate your current QuickBooks Desktop information over!

Want to find out more about the Spire system? Get in touch with our friendly team today for your free discovery call!

Increase Production Visibility

June 1, 2022 Christine Wells

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Software

Does your business operate within the manufacturing sector? In recent years, the industry has experienced rapid growth, with 2021 seeing global production increase by 9.4% to record highs across the world. However, this increase in demand is also seeing a significant increase in pressure for companies.

Consumers are now expecting high-quality products in the quickest time possible. This means manufacturers are having to maximize efficiency and quality while keeping costs down and improving profit margins.

Here at TriTech, we know how challenging this can be, which is why Spire’s Production Manager has been created to help you meet these demands. How can it help you, though? We thought we would take a closer look.

How Spire can help you

TriTech’s mission has always been to provide the most innovative business management software for our clients. For manufacturing companies, Spire systems can support you in an array of sectors, including:

Simplify your planning

One of the biggest challenges that manufacturers face is accurate production planning. Our unique system can help you to streamline your production through automation and accurately schedule any processes. This ensures that you are able to reduce your lead times and have complete peace of mind that your deliveries will be on time. Spire Production Manager is also able to be quickly adapted, offering custom production as required.

Control your inventory

Being able to understand your current inventory is essential for any successful manufacturing company. However, as you grow and demand increases, it becomes far more challenging to keep on top of this. Spire will help you to accurately track your inventory, allowing you to implement reorder points from sales and production.

Integrated accounting

Of course, it is not just about trying to better manage your inventory. Spire can help you with every aspect of your manufacturing business, including accounting. This is often one of the most time-consuming areas for any small and medium-sized business, which is why we offer complete integration with AP, AR, GL, and Account Reconciliation modules. This will help you to speed up the process, maximizing your efficiency.

Alongside this integration, we can also support you with an array of comprehensive information, including giving you complete access to your vendor history and information, ensuring your team always knows what is happening. To help ensure the smoothest process possible, you can also add purchase orders and sales to each specific job.

Improve your costing

Incorporating our system into your business will allow you to accurately track all purchases and labour costs alongside the raw materials you need. This will help you to accurately cost your manufacturing, helping you to increase your profitability. Our system will also allow you to create more accurate scrap and yield factors, ensuring you can enjoy higher profit margins.

Comprehensive insight

Finally, our Spire will provide you with comprehensive insight that will allow you to make better business decisions. You will be able to increase your production visibility, ensuring you can make far quicker decisions.

Alongside our real-time information, we also provide in-depth reporting tools allowing you to accurately monitor all key indicators.

Want to find out more?

Are you looking to find out more about Spire and our unique solutions? We have decades of combined experience in implementing powerful business management software for small and mid-sized businesses, ensuring we can always find the perfect solution for you.

We aim to provide you with the necessary tools to take your business to the next level, so get in touch today to find out more! Start your free trial today!

How Traceability Can Support Canadian Manufacturers

February 24, 2022 Christine Wells

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Software

In this fast-paced world, technology is continuously transforming how businesses operate. For manufacturers, it is not only helping to improve efficiency and maximize productivity but also enhances traceability.

How is technology improving traceability?

In the highly competitive world of manufacturing, organizations are under increasing pressure to keep up with the demands of consumers. Improved traceability is helping them to manage quality, identify areas of inefficiency, and reduce the risk of recalls.

Tracing is essential in helping manufacturers prevent contamination and ensure that materials are exactly what they claim to be. In certain sectors, such as pharmaceuticals and food and drink, traceability is also a legal requirement.

Investing in traceability software can help provide a wide range of benefits, including:

Supporting to meet all regulatory compliance
Help with product recalls
Improve efficiency
Provide insight to improve decision-making
Monitor stock and material levels
Build stronger relationships with suppliers

How Spire can help you

Here at TriTech, we know how important tracking software and traceability are to your manufacturing business. That is why we are a proud reseller of a comprehensive software called Spire that is designed to help you transform your operations.

If you are struggling with quickly checking product information, are still manually checking inventory, or cannot track products from the manufacturer to customer, then we are here to help you. Spire’s Lot Tracing will help to give your business the edge over your competitors, helping you to:

Make recalls quick and efficiently
Comprehensively track product information, ensuring expiry dates are no longer a concern
Improve your communication with both suppliers and customers
Boost your productivity by removing manual batch tracking
Save time, effort and money.

Want to find out more about our inventory management and lot tracking software? Check out our service page or sign up for your free demo today!

Spire Update: 3.8

February 23, 2022 Christine Wells

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Spire Updates

The Top Three Pains That Your Current Accounting Software Is Causing Your Business

February 7, 2022 Christine Wells

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Software

There can be no denying that technology has transformed the world we live in. From effortlessly communicating with clients to automating time-consuming tasks, businesses have never been more efficient. However, when it comes to accounting software, certain options on the market are still lacking in certain areas.

Three of the most common pain points that finance teams find include:

Tracking inventory

One of the most common areas that frustrate businesses is the inability to clearly track their inventory. Accounting software often lacks the ability to clearly record serial numbers, lot number tracking and knowing when you need to reorder more inventory. A very common issue that arises with businesses looking for new software, is the cost of over-stocking warehouses with inventory they do not need.

Real-time data

While technology has helped to automate many aspects of our work, a lack of real-time and up-to-date data can be a major pain point when it comes to finding the right accounting software for your business.

User accountability and permissions

In this fast-paced world, teams are often changing, and remote working is only serving to make things more challenging. A lack of ability to assign permissions or track accountability will only make things more complex.

Solution

At TriTech, we know how frustrating these software pains can be. That is why we are a proud reseller of Spire; a unique software designed to help you transform your operations. The business management and accounting software is every controller’s dream. It automates accounting processes with greater accuracy and efficiency, tracking your business performance in real-time so you can always see the latest information at the touch of a button.

Spire also gives complete control of your inventory, helping you to have a clear overview. You will have the ability to:

See how much inventory is in stock at any given time.
Create automated purchase orders from within your reorder points.
Track a lot number or serial number within seconds.

With this information, you can cut costs and improve your profit margins and always be informed on how your business is running. Alongside supporting you with increasing your profits, Spire also offers complete accountability for users and differing permissions, helping you to eliminate manual workflows and bring in new employees with ease.

Don’t have the infrastructure to run a full accounting system? Ask us about the option to host your Spire data on the cloud.

Watch this video on how lot tracing works in Spire:

Want to find out more? Get in touch today!

Losing Focus with too many Notifications?

May 10, 2021 Christine Wells

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IT

With today’s instant notifications and over stimulation, there are days that it can cause you to lose focus on what you were… ding.. oh look, there is a new cute squirrel video!…. oh, sorry what was a typing again? Oh right… losing focus!

While there are times that these notifications can be important, there are also times that they can cause us to be unproductive in our day to day work. When you have a project or a slot of time that you need undivided attention, you can use the Focus Assist in Windows 10 to keep you on track.

This tool will stop all notifications for a specified time, and can be scheduled to repeat regularly or they can be turned on manually when you are sharing your screen with another person during a video meeting. If there are certain contacts that you need to receive notifications from no matter what, you can set them as VIP’s so that they will come through even if you have Focus Assist toggled on.

So, how do we turn on this tool to help us focus? Here’s how:

Hit the Windows key on your keyboard
Type “Focus Assist”
Click Enter

You will be presented with the screen below, and can set all of your parameters to suit your specific needs.

The IT team at TriTech is fully equipped to assist you in managing your IT even in small ways such as turning off notifications. Give us a call today for a network analysis to see how we can make your business more productive today at info@tri-tech.com.

How To Do A General Ledger Year End In Spire

December 30, 2020 Christine Wells

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Spire Updates

User Defined: A hidden gem within Spire.

August 29, 2019 Christine Wells

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Software

Struggling with communication within your business?

Spire has a few ways to improve communication, but today we will focus on a hidden gem within Spire, called User Defined Fields (UDF).

Ever since Spire added the UDF into the program, here at TriTech we have utilized it in many ways; one of which is creating a shared space where our Accounts Receivable (AR) team can communicate information that might be important and useful for each other to know. For us, this could be the date we contacted a customer, or it could be a note to say that the customer missed an invoice in their recent payment and we have now emailed the missing invoice to them. Another example of course, is everyone’s favourite “Cheque is in the mail”. Each member of our team who has permission to see the UDF module can see and add information.

Some of the main features of UDF in Spire are:

Custom fields can be added to different modules
Set as text fields, dropdown lists or checkboxes
Define mandatory fields
Print custom fields on forms and reports
Custom fields are indexed and searchable
Multiple word search of all custom records

How do you set up a User Defined field?

Continuing with our example of communicating within the aged AR, let’s learn how to setup your first user defined fields.

Open one of the customer’s in your AR list, and then click on the User Defined tab.

Once you have selected the tab above, next you will need to click the UDF Properties button.

First click the NEW PAGE and this will give your TAB a name. Name it AR NOTES.
Next, click NEW FIELD and create a UDF text field that says NOTES and date field called CONTACT DATE and save & close.

Let’s test our new fields: Open up one of your customers in the AR module. Then click on the User Defined tab, and add some notes into your new fields; then Save & Close.
Go into your AR list again, right click on the column headers at the top of the list, and scroll all the way to the bottom where the newly created UDF fields will be listed. (Note: if they aren’t showing up right away, go into another module within Spire, and then go back into AR)
Put a checkmark in your fields, and then go back to your AR list.
Now whenever you update your fields with information such as “Cheque is in the mail”, anyone who has permission can see all the communication you have been doing and when you are expecting payment on the aged AR. It is a great way to have automated communication between all departments within your business.

In one screen, you can see all of your notes and the last date they were contacted, on every customer who is showing up in your AR.

A few extra notes:

When creating new UDF Fields, there are eight different types of fields that are available:

Numeric
Text
Multi-line Text
Drop Down Lists
Check Boxes
Dates
Integer
Boolean

All of these fields can have a validation added. And can also be set to be a ‘required’ field, or not. If it is set to ‘required’, then the user will not be able to save & close if the field(s) are blank.

Have fun, be creative and think outside of the box!

Are you having trouble finding the UDF within your Spire? Or would you like some extra help to set it up? Just email the helpdesk at TriTech, and we can help you out!

Are your passwords secure?

April 26, 2019 Christine Wells

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IT

When it comes to using computers and the internet we are challenged to create a plethora of user names and passwords to protect our information. But how do you make up a username and password that will be easy for you to remember but impossible for anyone else to figure out? Here are some suggestions:

First of all, there are good passwords and bad passwords. If someone wanted to “crack” your password using computer software they would probably start with lists of common passwords. For the dedicated “password cracker” there are actually huge lists of common passwords available online. Also, when you hear on the news that the accounts of the XYZ Company or the ABC Website have been hacked those passwords can end up on websites like this one where other hackers can access them. Here is a list of the most common passwords used today:

1. 123456
2. Password
3. 123456789
4. 12345678
5. 12345
6. 111111
7. 1234567
8. sunshine
9. qwerty
10. iloveyou
11. princess
12. admin
13. welcome
14. 666666
15. abc123
16. football
17. 123123
18. monkey
19. 654321
20. !@#$%^&*
21. charlie
22. aa23456
23. donald
24. password1
25. qwerty123

So what makes for a good password? Here are some basic suggestions but in the end it will be up to you to come up with something that works for you:

1. Avoid common names, dates, phone numbers or things easily associated with you.

2. Avoid common words or phrases as they would be the first thing checked by password cracking software.

3. Use a combination of numbers and letters. For example, substitute numbers for letters and letters for numbers in a word or phrase.

4. Make it something you can remember all by yourself. Don’t write it down anywhere!

5. Don’t use naturally occurring keyboard sequences (like “qwerty” for example)

6. Try to make it at least 8 – 16 characters long. Obviously the longer the better.

7. Plan on changing your password often. Experts suggest changing your passwords at least every 6 months.

Whether it’s about protecting the money in your bank account or just restricting access to your email, you’ll need to have good usernames and passwords to protect yourself. Choose wisely.

Is it time to move away from RDP for remote users?

March 21, 2019 Christine Wells

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IT

One of the most convenient ways of working remotely is remote desktop access. It is a widely known fact that opening a hole in a firewall in order to get a direct RDP connection is risky as it entails a weak encryption or VPN. Because it is convenient and so much quicker to set up a direct RDP rather than a VPN or a gateway proxy, most users tend to ignore the risks associated with it. Additionally, it is also considerably cheaper.

However, there are numerous disadvantages that accompany the use of direct RDP for remote users and perhaps the most important one is the concern for security. Because RDP makes use of port 3389 which is an open port, the security and safety of the user is at stake. The server can be immediately attacked by hackers through countless attempts of authentication in the hope that at least one of them would work. It is best to rename your user account from ‘administrator’ to something different, as well as have a strong password and enable auto-lock on your account when there has been three attempts on entering the incorrect password.

The biggest problem concerned with the use of direct RDP is performance. Because of the aforementioned attempts to log into the server by hackers from all around the world, there are thousands of sessions created every minute which require the system to respond to them. Consequently, the main functions you are trying to perform on your server are affected through slower processing and unnecessary lags. There are some steps you can follow to ensure that your slow performance of the system is not because of a brute force attack; one of which is checking the session numbers to see whether they are insanely high or not.

While these can be temporary solutions, they are not always effective and the whole setup will still be a big threat to the safety of the user. Perhaps the best solution is to use a VPN or an RDP gateway proxy. These help secure the connection through the establishment of an encrypted tunnel in the network which prevents middle-man attacks and also helps provide a better network with better performance. A convenient and cheap as direct RDP sounds, it can be a source of a great deal of trouble in the long run and therefore it is advised to always take the safer route in order to avoid easily preventable costly incidents in the future.

Our technicians at TriTech are well informed and can help you get setup in a more secure environment. Send us a quick email to support@tri-tech.comand we’ll help you out right away.