On Demand. Straight Up. The Demand Solutions Group Newsletter

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Latest Revenue Recognition Rules are the Tip of the International Iceberg

As those of you who deal with revenue recognition will know, the recent rule changes around revenue recognition are the first stage of a process that will replace the country-by-country accounting rules that have historically dominated worldwide accounting. These changes will create a standard set of international accounting and reporting rules. This process dubbed IFRS, short for the International Finance Reporting Standards, has been developed by the London-based International Accounting Standards Board (IASB).

To date, over 100 countries have adopted or committed to adopt IFRS although there are some notable hold-outs (e.g. China) and even those countries that plan to adopt IFRS are struggling to agree to standards and funding for the overseeing body. Within the US there is still enough opposition to IFRS that the recently appointed IASB chairman warned of a significant risk to the June 2011 deadline for bringing international and US standards into line. However, the political wrangling about rules and funding will (eventually) get sorted out, so it’s time for companies to get a better understanding of how IFRS will impact their accounting operations and reporting.

One of the most interesting aspects about IFRS is that, at a time when US companies are used to increasingly tight financial and compliance rules, IFRS provides a framework rather than a detailed set of rules. This puts the onus on you, your accounting advisors and your financial solutions provider to ensure that your accounting and reporting processes are IFRS compliant. For more information on the subject, the AICPA has some useful content on the impact of IFRS rules at www.ifrs.com.

Although this may sound like it could be a major headache, the good news is that DSG and NetSuite are committed to working with you to meet both GAAP and IFRS reporting requirements and to making the migration to IFRS as seamless as possible. NetSuite has expressed their commitment to supporting the necessary changes as the GAAP and IFRS rules merge and they are one of the first financial solution providers to announce support for the new IFRS based Revenue Recognition rules. This is great news for current NetSuite users and it provides another good reason for companies who have been considering NetSuite to get off the fence and implement NetSuite’s SaaS based solution with its proven ability to react quickly to accounting rule changes.

Todd Fitzwater, Principal and Co-founder


		DSG Wins Top 100 VAR Award DSG has recently been named one of Accounting Today’s Top 100 VARs. In the August issue of Accounting Today, Editor Seth Fineberg clearly identified that many VARs are struggling to find new customers and are being forced to cut staff and product lines. Many of these struggling VARs have failed to embrace the movement to the Cloud an opportunity that DSG identified back in 2004. We understood the potential of the Cloud to bring the benefits of agility, flexibility and lower TCO to customers and have invested in the people and partnerships to enable us to deliver these high-value business solutions to our customers.

This month, we have snapshots of two DSG customers both of whom have leveraged DSG’s Optimize service to help close the value-gap between their business needs and the capabilities of the initial implementation of their NetSuite solutions.

DSG Customer Success Update — Incase

Incase creates products that protect the laptops, phones and devices that are proliferating in our professional, personal and family lives. When DSG first met them, they were an existing NetSuite user but, despite having engaged with several consultants and NetSuite Solution Providers, there was a significant gap between their business needs and the capabilities that their NetSuite configuration delivered.

DSG’s Optimize service brought a best-practice approach to identifying and solving key operational inefficiencies and creating business value for Incase. For example, DSG developed a custom script in NetSuite that automatically populates the dimension and weight fields in the fulfillment record eliminating manual intervention and resulting in order fulfillment time being reduced by
50%.

DSG Customer Success Snapshot — Inmagic

Inmagic provides web-based solutions for social knowledge, library and information management needs but sometimes even knowledge management need help with their information needs. DSG initially engaged with Inmagic to implement Salesforce.com and, DSG’s success in enabling Inmagic to extract full-value from their Salesforce solution led Inmagic to sign up for DSG Optimize for both Salesforce.com and NetSuite.

Inmagic uses NetSuite’s Software Edition which DSG has optimized to ensure that it is delivering maximum business value by, for example, implementing a project dashboard system that enables Inmagic consultants and executives to track detailed progress against fixed cost professional services engagements.

NetSuite 2010.2
NetSuite have released 2010.2 to beta testers and for sneak preview. In DSG’s opinion, this is a significant release, not least because it features a new user interface that is a combination of a skin change and a new layout to make screens more consistent, less cluttered and accelerate navigation to transactions. One of the most useful aspects of the new UI is the ability to sub-divide the main section of a form and lock important information (e.g. account contact information) in the header of a screen and retain this as you move between detailed screens.
NetSuite is calling this concept “field groupings”.

When it comes to user interfaces, a picture is definitely worth a thousand words so, rather than try to describe the new UI, we’d like to invite you to see it and discuss how to take advantage of it at a webinar on Wednesday October 6th. By default, NetSuite will be upgrading all customers to the new UI so it’s important that the relevant person from your company attends this event. Please register here

In addition to this new look and feel, NetSuite has introduced several useful new features as follows:

New Customer Hold Process – this enables customers to be placed "on hold" during order entry and management which stops any additional sales order activity until the hold has been cleared.

Enhanced Inter-Company Transactions - for One World customers, this is a significant new feature that will save them time and effort in managing intercompany inventory manually.

EITF 08-01 Revenue Recognition - NetSuite is now providing the ability to report on and set estimated selling price.

Salesforce Winter 2011
SalesCloud - the Outlook for Salesforce Add-In now supports single-click email addition; centralized permissions control and near real-time syncing. An upgraded Quotes Template feature now allows rich text including images to be added to templates to create, for example, custom headers, footers, and terms and conditions text.

ServiceCloud Console – you can now create a new tab for each support case enabling you to keep the data that your customer service agents need immediately on tap. There is also a new toolkit that allows CTI vendors to build adapters to enable their applications to work with this console.

Dashboards and Reporting Analytics - in their last release, Salesforce announced Drag and Drop dashboard editing and this is expanded in Winter 2011 with new features including click-through to a specific record and a new Drag and Drop report builder.

Chatter – Chatter is a major focus for Salesforce and has gained a full search capability in Winter 2011. Additionally, Chatter will be turned on as the default and you will have the ability to stay logged into Chatter even when you are not logged into Salesforce. These options can be reset and DSG will review this with our Salesforce customers.

Force.com - enhancements to the platform including Single Sign-On: Sites URL Redirect; and new Developer Tools.

Adaptive Planning
Adaptive Planning has added several important new features particularly in the areas of reporting and integration, for example: add multiple dimensions to each axis; enhanced expand/collapse elements to improve report building efficiency and a new search capability to help find reporting elements quicker.

New Import and Export APIs – this release features the following new APIs: an import API for Cube Sheets; an import API for Modeled Sheets and an export API for Standard, Cube and Modeled Sheets

Validate Formulas – allows you to search for all formula errors in a particular version and view them on a single screen. The Validate Formulas link in the Build and Customize Model section will run an error checking procedure and return a page listing any formula errors.

Drag and Drop – easy to use Drag and Drop features in Plan, Account and Dimension Administration make it quick to move elements within these screens.


		Demand Solutions Group is a privately owned consulting firm that sells and tailors on-demand ERP, CRM, and eBusiness solutions to deliver maximum business value for clients. The company provides a range of road-mapping, launch, revitalization, and optimization services for leading on-demand software packages. Demand Solutions Group serves businesses that range from start-up companies to members of the Fortune 100, and is based in Silicon Valley, California. For more information, please visit www.demandsolutionsgroup.com.