Overall
Jim Diefenbach, President: The nature of our company is that it’s long-term relationships. We spend a lot of time consulting our clients on business matters. We’ve had several customers this year have accounting people retire, so we spent a lot of time working with the replacements and the owners to make sure they’re getting continuity in their business. We know their business so intimately that we can provide that role.
System
User: The one thing that we were really concerned about going in to MV was that it was a Unix-based system. And I was really concerned about who was I going to get to support a Unix system, but as it turned out, I'll be very truthful, we have never had a crash or any freezes with the Unix system. And in 20 years, we're still using the same server, and we've only gone down once in that 20 years when the hard drive had to be replaced. So the system is very stable and very secure and it's doing everything that we wanted it to do when we purchased it.
Jim Diefenbach: Some of our clients still have servers, but most of our newer clients are cloud-based. And in some cases clients who have older hardware go to cloud so they eliminate having to deal with servers and all that.
Inventory
User: We use the inventory control module extensively. I like to track and manage what we're doing by product code and drill down to report classes. And as an example, we break up all of our products that are in inventory into nine different groups. And those nine groups would be things like media, toner and cartridges, machines, supplies, machine service, those kinds of things. But within those product codes, we can drill down to report classes. So under media, I can break out the media section into groups like 20-pound paper for LDC or inkjet or photo base or any other media that we need so we can break it down to a point where we can get very specific about what our costs are and what our profits are, and our sales are.
So the inventory control module is excellent and it makes things very easy to reorder. Each inventory item has a min and a max and every day, or even multiple times during the day, if you need it, you can generate a reorder report. From that reorder report, it's easy to go to the purchase order module and place your orders. So things are simple and flow very well. The purchase order system, the way we use it is it assures that we maintain our costs control in that no inventory is ever ordered without a purchase order being generated. And with the purchase order, it not only includes the quantity on the items that are being ordered, but it includes our PTX, or price to exact, which is our costs.
Jim D: We have real-time inventory. As you write an order, you see exactly what’s on hand and what is already committed to customer orders. If you’re heavy into supplies in particular and want to know where to pick it, you can create a picking ticket and they can find it. You also can go further with that and track it to multiple locations in the warehouse. There’s also a feature in the inventory module that will give purchase advice. For instance, if sales are high during spring and summer for a particular product, it would tell you to order those heavier in those time frames.
Order Processing
User: We also use the order processing module, and it's very simple to use. Every account has its individual account number. Within the accounts itself, if one of the locations has four or five different shipping addresses, we can generate different addresses. Our shipping address codes enable us to look at what each location purchased, what the costs were, and the profits were. So order processing is simple and easy.
Jim D: Clients with a more intense production side use the job tracking software, which is tied into order entry. They create the order for a customer, that creates job tracking, which defines which department does the job and the operations involved, and tracks the job in and out of each department.
Pricing
Jim D: Pricing can be adjusted by customer. You’ve basically got foundational pricing, then you can layer in volume pricing. You can lump customers into groups for pricing and you can go to a specific customer and do exact pricing. So it goes from the most generic to most specific.
Reports
User: Each of the modules that we use has excellent reporting, and anything you want in a report, you can get. Now, they may not be laid out exactly the way you want it, but the information is there and for each module there must be close to a hundred different formats for reporting almost in any way that you would like. The reporting system sometimes is a little bit clumsy unless you know exactly what you're looking for and that the ID system that MV uses for the reports makes absolutely no sense to me, and it's hard to identify some of the things that you want and the detail that you want. Just about every report can be formatted in about five or 10 different ways to give you different looking reports. But the reports are excellent as long as you know what you want. Drilling down sometimes is a little bit tough and finding some of it with so many options.
Jim D: Among the specialized reports are sales per employee. If you want productivity by individual employees, you can track by who did the work. You can track who wrote the order, who was the salesman, who did the work on individual items on the order. Even in the basic system, you can export data to spreadsheets.
Integrations
Jim D: For integrations the typical scenarios are:
- Exporting from Profits Plus to 3rd party is via: custom direct read-only access using sequel database calls or built-in CSV output files.
- Importing into Profits Plus from 3rd parties is via: published Profits Plus Web services real-time interface (primarily for customer web orders or 3rd party billing/sales applications) and csv/flat file uploads.
The choice of which technology to use and using standard or custom files depends on the specific integration needs of each client and the level of their 3rd party support so every situation is uniquely configured. Our standard imports & exports can be used with many 3rd party applications and customization is used where necessary to handle any edge requirements.
Tech Support
User: I've got to give it to them, they have really been very supportive and very responsive. When we did not replace the bookkeeper, we went to just somebody that had a little computer experience and online experience. They had no bookkeeping experience and the system is pretty automatic, but when we ran into a problem and didn't know how to handle something, we would call them or send them an email and they were very responsive, not only for technical issues, but even for accounting issues. They helped us more than I would probably care to admit with some of the accounting that needed to be done at that time. So, we feel they've been very supportive about the support.
Cost
User: When we purchased MV, as I remember, the system cost between $20,000 and $25,000. We had to get a server and a few more computers to set up in here. So I think our total investment was probably in the low 30 range. The month-to-month fee for MV is $300, I think we're paying now. And that includes all the upgrades and any support service. So it's not cheap, but it's not expensive either. And the way we use it, we still feel it's a bargain.
Jim D: Traditionally you purchased the system so had a large upfront cost and then paid for support. Now most people host it as a service model and pay monthly fee instead. To boil it down to a simple figure, it runs from $25 to $75 per user per month.