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Project Budgeting and the Questions You Should Ask

Budgets are one of the 3 pillars that hold-up a project and they ensure that there is enough of “it” to support the other 2, viz. scope and time. All three are just as important but for a successful project implementation a smart budget is at its core.

The PMBOK talks about several methods we can use for budgeting but the one that is my favorite and is most accurate is “bottom-up estimating”. When using this method we break down each task into a smaller component and such a component can be assigned anywhere from 8-16 hours to complete. We then work our way up into estimates of higher-level deliverables.

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5 Common Sales Tax Remittance and Filing Errors

Sales tax filing and reporting rules vary between jurisdictions in material ways. Each state has unique filing schedules, forms, payment thresholds and other administrative requirements that can trip you up. Here are some common filing and registration errors and what you can do about them.  

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4 Ways to Maximize excel based budgeting in GP

Do you report actual to budget variance and always have a difficult time getting your budget into GP? Below are some suggestions on how to best use excel based budgeting within GP. There are options for users who have budget workbooks outside of GP and just need to load the data as well as users that are just starting the budgeting process and how to build templates and get historical data out of GP for budgeting.

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OWIN Specification.

The Open Web Server Interface for .Net or OWIN for short is a specification that is meant to decouple the dependency a web application has on a specific web server technology. It specifies a simple delegate function that is used to separate a server and application and to let the server know how to pass the responsibility of filling out the response data to the application.

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How to Analyze and Report on your Data

Part 2 of 2 in Data Warehousing series

Every business from startup to larger established businesses needs to track details about their customers, products, sales, purchases, social media, website logs to name a few.  By extracting, manipulating and analyzing this data you can determine key metrics to help you understand more about your customers and grow your business.  In part 1 we talked about how to kick start your data warehousing with BI360 and now we need to know what to do with all this data.

Basically you can use your Data Warehouse for financial statement reporting and analysis, dashboards and data mining. I previously went through how to use BI360’s One Stop Reporting here (link to Part 5 – BI Series Nov 2013) so I will be talking more about data mining and .

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Web-Series and the ERP Client

What am I doing? The same thing I have always done? The same thing that hasn’t given me the results that I wanted, that hasn’t helped me hit my goals?

These are the questions businesses are asking themselves all the time.  They know what they are doing, they know it’s not working, but they don’t know how to change it.  And in the world with budgets, time restraints, managers and employees to answer to the idea of changing what you are doing to get better results can leave you stagnant while you figure out what exactly it is you need to change.  And being stagnant means losing money.  Who has time for that?

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Where do Value Based Enable Rules get their data for the CRM 2013 ribbon?

A recent request tasked me with adding functionality to the form ribbon of an Order in CRM 2013. The goal was to capture information from two fields on the Order’s associated Account and based on that information enable or disable a button on the ribbon of the Order which for the purposes of this article we can call Has_Value. I was not able to pass the values to the Order when it was created as these values could change some time after it had been created. Additionally, if the associated Account were found to be a duplicate, it would have to be merged and updated on the Order that could also change the results of the information I was capturing. This left me with having to query for my information using Javascript when the Order form loaded. With this Javascript query, I then updated a hidden Boolean field on the Order if the criteria was met or left it blank if it was not. This might not seem important now but having to take these actions in order to meet the requirements affected how this customization had to be modified at later steps in the functionality.

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