The Control Issue! the absence of the posting feature!
my company is considering various ERPs, I suggested Manager but got rejected after accountants tried it claiming it lacks control, they said there is no feature for reviewing information before the effect the accounting records of the company.
for example: if the warehouse manager issued a goods receipt note, it will immediately affect Inventory records, leaving no room for review and approval.
what they deemed correct: the warehouse manager issues the GRN, the predetermined entry (DR Inventory, CR Supplier) remains unposted until the chief accountant reviews it, browse attached documents (PR, GRN) then he/she approve/post the transaction (similar to recurring journal entries, where entries do not affect records until approved.
if this is available, then definitely your already great ERP will crunch a big chunk of the market share.
I have experience with SAP and can confirm that there is no review required after the GRN is recorded. Once the goods are receipted, entries are posted automatically.
Come on people! Manager already has this feature! When you make recurring journal entries, alert message will show and someone has to approve the journal entry before it’s posted, it is that simple.
There are infact a number of things that would appreciate manager’s value on the market:
Hierarchy control (as you stated)
Updated and comprehensive user permissions
Updated sales module for a POS terminal
A barebone simple CRM (though manager claims it IS just an accounting software)
Didn’t your team have any issues with the inventory module showing costs and pricing to the user? Such issues also prevented me from fully deploying manager to all our team members from my management, and infact we are running it parallel to another one. Hope @lubos can consolidate this. If he does i have at least 7-10 companies of friends who are ready to deploy manager server editions for their offices
100% agree to all you have said, they should start with the easiest:
1- decide wich accounts each user can view (only stationary and elect for example).
I agree this should be optional but I disagree majority of the users are happier with the current state.
I also support the idea of having some form of control on what gets posted.
Aside Audit trail/History, another important feature is Controlling who can post what and who approved what to be posted. The whole plan is to bring internal controls into the asset/financial Managing Software
But not at the expense of the user experience. Part of manager’s charm is it’s short processes, which you can argue that it’s lacking control but it is what it is, simpler, faster and easier and people seem to like it.
We used another package before manager which has most if not all of controls “missing” from manager – and we still use it till this day. But we still migrated most of our clients to manager and they like having a simplified processes because it suits them better.
The thing is controls are a luxury not everyone can afford. Many businesses do not have distinct departments, segregation of duties or even managers. To those businesses any additional step is wasted time that they can do without.
Manager doesn’t completely lack control (at least for Cloud and Server Edition Users). The Lock Date, the User Access Privilege and the Audit Trail are powerful control tools.
As the user base grows, and the features are improved, different organizations with different structures will adopt Manager and there has to be an option for them.
Such a feature wouldn’t take anything away from the software because it most likely going to be optional.
This would help users who want to tie their internal control procedures to the software.
Many of the International donors and big local donors who operate in my country, for example, require organizations (NGOs) they donate to or sponsor to have a system that requires approval from top executives before posting to General Ledger or at least when making payments, and want to see the approval action in the audit trail.
We could limit it to a few types of transactions. For example, a user may deploy it to the entry and updating of suppliers, entry and updating of Purchase invoices, entry and updating of Payments or the use of some bank/cash accounts and entry and updating of Journal entries. Another user may only need approval when discounts are involved in sales transactions.
Another user may set the post control to ensure authorization is requested when the total debit or total credit of a transaction is greater than 1000 of the base currency for example. This adds an extra layer of control for Managers to monitor what gets captured into the GL. There are so many ways this could be added.
The main attraction of Manager is that it is so simple to use without having to jump through hoops because the program won’t “allow” you to do things. The market sector that Manager is aimed as small businesses who want to concentrate on running their business not spending all their time doing their accounting.
Those large corporations need a very different type of accounting program and Manager is not targeting that market sector. There are plenty of accounting programs for large corporations. Manager is meant for us small business guys.
Manager needs to stay as a simple and user friendly program to maintain relevance to the market sector it is geared for.
@dalacor did you see will be optional. ?
The idea is not to take simplicity from Manager but to have the option to switch to that if a user wanted to. Not only large corporations require that, my example above was for small local NGOs.
Come on man! It will be optional for those who needs it, manager in it’s current form doesn’t have a bit of control or a mean to assure correctness of information entered
You are missing my point. It’s not whether these features are optional or not.
Firstly you are adding bloat to the program that is irrelevant for most business owners like myself. Bloat is the biggest problem with many programs.
Secondly, even if it is optional, the business owner when setting up his accounts in Manager for the first time, will need to know what all these extra settings mean. There are enough settings in Manager as it is without adding more.
Lastly, and most importantly, I would rather the developer focused on implementing features that small businesses like mine use, instead of wasting time adding functionality that will only benefit a small minority of users.
Just my tuppence-worth
Manager for me is an accounting suite, and IMHO a very good one at that.
It is not to my way of thinking an ERP or CRM suite, and if I personally wanted something to handle my ERP/CRM I would go and find one and use it.
Personally, I have never been able to understand why people try and use an accounting suite for ERP/CRM.
You are correct that such a feature does not exist in SAP, Oracle and similar. But if you look at Navision and the Scandinavian type of ledgers. This is a general and common feature that is much valued
The obvious drawback as pointed our by @Killa88 has already been raised by me in the forum in topic of user’s permission. The exposure of cost to users has really been a serious disadvantage. Even a user with permission of production order can view the cost supposedly a most confidential information of a company.
May be @lubos don’t consider this as a vital leakage of information in multiuser environment. So, he may not have bothered to put this item in to-do-list. If this would have been solved, a major secrecy of the company may have been restricted to users.
@Killa88@sonicgroup, I don’t know what kind of business you guys are running but keeping prices hidden from employees seems futile. I mean, everybody can get any price they want to know with little to no effort all without even having access to your system!
If you ever wanted to hide any piece of business information from anybody that would be:
Your proprietary methods; and
Your business contacts (i.e customers and suppliers)
If you these two pieces of information then knowing prices becomes trivial, wouldn’t you agree?
