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AccountMate Software An International Product No One Knew About Part Two: Applications, Competitive Analysis, and User Recommendations

Charles Chewning Jr. - 1/20/2005

AccountMate Software An International Product No One Knew About -- Part Two: Applications, Competitive Analysis, and User Recommendations
Featured Author - Charles Chewning Jr. - January 20, 2005

Introduction

With installations in more than 54 countries, AccountMate Software (http://www.AccountMate.com) of Novato, CA (US) has been one of the quiet leaders in the middle market for a number of years. AccountMate's strength has always been the fact that it provides source code which allows its resellers and independent software vendors (ISV) to modify the core product to fit the needs of individual customers.

AccountMate's current management team is focused on marketing several critical facts that will point up its products' strengths:

Part One of this note described the company's standard product line and applications.

This part continues a description of the company's product line, describing additional applications.

Business Intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) is a powerful query and reporting tool that enables users to analyze their business data from any angle, including non-AccountMate application data. Benefits include faster reporting cycles, higher quality information, sophisticated data analysis capabilities, better data on customer buying behavior, and improved end-user productivity. BI comes with many predefined queries such as best-selling products, largest customers and vendors, top salespeople, product class and product line analysis, and much more. Other features include the following:

Consolidated Ledger

Consolidated Ledger brings easy-to-use features to financial consolidations, providing the ability to quickly combine each different company's account balances and budget information into a single unified ledger to present consolidated financial statements and other reports.

Fund Accounting

AccountMate's Fund Accounting features facilitate not only the specific reporting needs of the not-for-profit organization, but also provide the tools necessary to provide a detailed accounting of funds expenditures.

Contact Manager

AccountMate 6.5's Contact Manager is a full-featured contact management software program that helps professionals manage the total business cycle more productively and efficiently. Contact Manager fully optimizes Microsoft BackOffice to provide a complete, automated contact management system that offers an all-in-one solution for managing multiple contacts.

Inventory Control

Inventory Control is AccountMate's basic inventory application. If users require additional functionality, they can purchase other AccountMate inventory applications. Although this can be thought of as a "standard" application, it does allow users to assign serial numbers to inventory items, define multiple substitutes for an item, record transfers of units from one item to a similar item or to the same item in a different warehouse, list all the vendors that supply a particular item or all the items supplied by a particular vendor, and copy inventory items to another company.

Price Control

Price Control supports price maintenance in one menu location, unlimited simultaneous pricing by quantity and price code, the ability to set up minimum prices for inventory items and a customer price paid default option. The module is also ideal for making quick and easy changes to inventory prices without spending hours on data entry.

Customer Inventory Manager

Customer Inventory Manager allows users to easily cross-reference inventory item numbers, descriptions, and units of measure (UOM) with their customers, as well as automatically updating prices.

Inventory Specification

This application allows users to create categories for inventory items, such as size, color, weight, and texture, and then to track and price them by each category created. This provides users with the ability to quickly suggest a similar item when the desired specification is not available, thereby reducing the likelihood a sale will be lost.

Kitting

Kitting allows users to create and manage groups of inventory items packaged together as kits (such as the components of a computer system) and sold to others for assembly.

Lot Control

Lot Control allows users to track units of lot-controlled items from purchase or production through inventory and sale, as well as recording each lot-controlled unit's expiration date.

Manufacturer's Inventory

With AccountMate 6.5's Manufacturer's Inventory, users can break down large jobs into multiple starting dates; post work-in-process (WIP) status automatically or manually; print work orders, routing slips, production slips, and a wide variety of reports; and track jobs, resource usage and backorders through to the posting of finished jobs and the cancellation of any unused allocated resources.

Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA)

RMA allows users to manage all aspects of the RMA process including the generation of sales return invoices and the calculation of the resulting gain or loss from inventory replacements, or substitute items. RMA also supports other specific functions such as the claims person, inventory warranty, and the defective inventory adjustment maintenance.

Return to Vendor (RTV)

The RTV module offers users an accurate and comprehensive system to manage purchase returns to vendors. Users can create RTV orders, as well as record important tasks such as shipments of purchase returns and the receipt of substitute or replacement items.

Industry-Specific Applications

AccountMate was designed from its first release twenty years ago to become a platform that allows resellers to meet the needs of individual customers as well as create applications that serve specific industries. Over the years resellers and ISVs have created a significant number of industry-specific applications. The following list is certainly not all inclusive, but does identify some of the leading applications that may be of interest to users.

One of the interesting facts about AccountMate and its independently developed applications is that many of these applications operate in a wireless environment, probably more so than even its larger competitors.

Competitive Analysis

AccountMate 6.5 offers a very rich set of applications. Its direct competitors are ACCPAC Pro Series, MAS 90/200, SouthWare, and other middle-market products. Depending on the circumstances AccountMate 6.5 could find itself in competition with products such as Navision, MAS 500, and similar higher-end products, or lower-end products such as BusinessVision, CYMA, and TurningPoint (Red Wing Software).

In the past AccountMate may have been viewed as a nice middle-of-the-road product that offers source code. Its resellers might have been similarly viewed as programmers, not necessarily sales or business oriented people. To some extent this is now its most significant challenge.

Price is a market reality and AccountMate's relative position (less expensive than higher-end products) gives it an opportunity to create a competitive advantage. At the same time it is more expensive than lower-end products and therefore at a competitive disadvantage. If smaller prospects are also looking at lower-end products, they must be convinced that they need the added value AccountMate can provide. If larger prospects are also looking at higher-end products, resellers must convince them that they do not need all of the functionality they think they need or that they (the reseller) have the ability to understand the user's requirements and create appropriate modifications.

User Recommendations

It is not absolutely necessary to spend $50,000 or $100,000 (USD) to acquire highly productive accounting and business management software. AccountMate is one of those products that does not receive a lot of press, and yet serves customers in fifty-four countries and four languages. That's a lot better than many products that call themselves international.

As users are evaluating their requirements some of the following factors should be considered:

About the Author

Charles Chewning, Jr. is president of Solutions, a Richmond, Virginia-based consulting firm specializing in accounting software selection. He is considered a leading software selection expert. Chewning has written a number of accounting software reviews and is a frequent speaker on the subject of accounting software selection as well as sales and marketing. He is the publisher of The Accounting Library (http://www.accountinglibrary.com). He can be reached at cchewning@accountinglibrary.com