Cloud ERP Solution: SaaS Social Media Marketing Software Company

Cloud ERP Solution

A Cloud ERP solution is all the rage in the market right now. A cloud ERP solution is an enterprise resource planning system (ERP) based on the cloud of a vendor rather than on-premise. This allows the users/businesses the flexibility of being able to access and do businesses from anywhere and to be tied up.

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Versa Cloud ERP solution for SaaS Social Media Marketing Software Company

After a long career working for Fifth Avenue advertising icon, Erin decided to start a SaaS company providing marketers like herself with the next generation of Social Media Marketing tools. The company she set up has two subsidiaries ‐ one in the USA and another in Canada. Customers can subscribe to the company’s products through the company’s website. These products are offered à la carte allowing customers to pick and choose which service(s) fit their business needs. Billing is monthly based on use instead of fixed price.

To launch its service, the company needed a provisioning and billing system. This system would manage the signup process, provision the servers and software tools the customer would be using, track the customer’s usage, and finally bill the customers. They decided to build the provisioning and billing solution themselves and paired it with two Sage 50 systems for accounting (Sage 50 US – Peachtree Accounting Quantum, and Sage 50 Canada – Simply Accounting Enterprise).

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Each month customer usage data was manually transferred from the provisioning and billing system to Sage, after which invoices were manually created and sent to the customer.

Besides the independent financials that each company created in their respective Sage 50 systems, a consolidated set of financials were also created manually in a spreadsheet so that the proper group tax filings could be made in the USA.

In addition, because remote access was required to both systems, the company needed to have the Sage systems hosted by a local cloud hosting provider ‐ an additional cost of almost 3x the cost of the software itself.

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This approach worked well in the initial stages of the company’s life cycle. However, once the company’s product hit the market it quickly outgrew the system. It was no longer feasible to manually create each invoice every month and manually email it to the customer. Also, it was no longer feasible to create consolidated financials only once a month; these were needed in real-time, at any time. Finally, accessing the Sage systems via Microsoft Remote Desktop or Citrix was slow because the Sage systems were not designed to operate efficiently over the web.

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In an attempt to make the system work better, they tried integrating the Provisioning and Billing system with the Sage systems so that user data could be transferred electronically. It was impossible. It was also impossible to automate the creation of invoices in the Sage system. Sending invoices from Sage to the customers and having them paid online was also deemed infeasible.

The solution to these difficulties was to replace the two Sage 50 systems, as well as the many spreadsheets that the company had developed, with a single multi-entity Versa Cloud ERP.

It allowed both subsidiaries to operate independently in their home currencies and supported financial consolidation in real-time, eliminating the manual creation of consolidated reports and once-a-month reporting. Performance was snappy as the Versa Cloud ERP system is based on modern cloud technologies and operates natively in a browser without the need for access via Microsoft Remote Desktop or Citrix.

Why Versa Cloud ERP?

The deployment of the Versa Cloud ERP system was planned in phases. The focus of Phase 1 was consolidated financials in the Versa system. Phase 2 was focused on automating the delivery of invoices to customers via integrated email, as well as accepting online payments via integration with a credit card gateway. The focus of Phase 3 was on integrating the company’s proprietary Provisioning and Billing software so that the entire process of invoicing and getting paid could be 100% automated.

For Erin, scaling the business infrastructure was always a big worry. She knew manual processes were fine to start with however automation was required for growth.