Did you know about Nolan Business Solutions eRequest...?

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We would be unable to provide the range of functionality in our products that we do without the feedback and useful suggestions from our customers. In today’s Blog I am going to touch on 4 features that we have added into Nolan Business Solutions eRequest after they have been requested by customers and to suit their particular requirements. As we review requirements on a quarterly basis, we felt that this functionality would be of use to many of our eRequest users as well.

Multi Browser

Organisations today do not all work on one common platform and with the multitudes of different devices that are available to users to do their work different standards have arisen to support web applications. The user facing element of eRequest is delivered to the user through a Web Browser and there are a number of different browsers available to users. It was important for us to deliver on the main platforms so extensive work was done to eRequest to enable it to be used with Microsoft Internet Explorer, FireFox, Google Chrome and Safari. This means that eRequest will run on most desktops and most tablet devices. Where approval is required from a user, this is also provided via a formatted email that can be viewed and responded to from SmartPhones.

Analytical Accounts

The Analytical Accounting module builds a hierarchy over the Chart of Accounts which enables customers to define a simple chart of accounts and create dimensions and codes by which the accounts can be analysed. For example a travel nominal code may be setup to be analysed by employee or travel type.

eRequest allows users to define which analysis dimensions and codes the expense will be posted to and this detail is passed to the Purchase order when the request is approved. When the invoice is received and linked to the purchase order the dimensions and codes are pulled through onto the invoice transaction and posted to the Analytical ledgers.

The Analytical Accounting module in Dynamics GP is able to assign dimensions and codes to restricted lists of users and accounts, eRequest adheres to all these restrictions ensuring that any data entered is valid all the way through the process.

Pre-Payments

Sometimes a user who is putting on a request knows that they services that they are requesting will be billed up-front from the supplier but will only be consumed on a monthly or quarterly basis. This happens frequently in business for all sorts of services such as cleaning and maintenance services. The payment to the supplier is known as a Pre-Payment and is posted to a pre-payments account and then the cost is recognised into the Expense account on the P&L on a scheduled basis.

So, if the user who is requesting the service knows when the service will start and how many periods the service is to be consumed over, eRequest now enables the person entering the request to tell the system these details.

Linking in with the Dynamics Revenue and Expense Deferral module, eRequest enables the posting of the whole cost to the pre-payments account and the individual amounts per month to the expense account automatically when the invoice is entered to match the Purchase Order.

The benefits to the business here is clear as the details are entered into the system when they are known and by the person requesting the service so the Purchase Ledger staff who are entering the invoice do not need to know this detail or send email or memos around the organisation to find out the detail at a later stage.

Multiple Budgets

eRequest is able to interact directly with the Dynamics GP budgets in order to find out the value of spend that has been budgeted against each individual account.

Different organisations however may have different budgets for projects, for departments and per period (normally quarterly re-forecasts) and years.

By taking the flexibility of the forms approach in eRequest where you may set up an individual form for requests relating to a particular department or cost centre or project, we are able to assign a budget to the form and display the budgeted values related to the accounts for that form and also check the committed values when the request is being entered against the budgeted values and to warn or prohibit requests where the value would exceed the total budgeted value.

Thanks to particular clients sharing with us the pain of checking requested values against budgeted values where the delivery of the goods may span several years, we have been able to provide a useful commitment checking facility in eRequest that is assisting those customers who need to keep a careful watch on the spend against the budgets.