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Hidden Figures & Visual ERP

I was very excited to see a post from Charles Phillips, about the movie Hidden Figures – the story of African American female mathematicians that worked for NASA.  It’s a great movie and even better book.  It was amazing to see not only how the workplace and society has changed but also how computers have changed.  These women were referred to as computers, and their math skills were exemplary, even out of this world (excuse the pun).  The progression of the workplace, from elimination of coloured washrooms, allowing women to co-author technical documents, and these days, computers with enough processing power to run multi-billion dollar companies made me realize how far this world has changed in 60 years.

What does this have to do with Visual ERP?  Well, where would we be without our computers and software like Visual ERP?  There are aspects of Visual ERP that are not commonly used, let’s call them “Hidden Figures”.  They may not launch you into outer space but the windows, reports or sub-windows can be extremely useful.

  1. The Throughput Window (Eng./Mfg. Menu) is full of helpful information on manufacturing decision based on the constraint within the plant. The information is based on the Theory of Constraints which was presented in another great book, The Goal, by Eli Goldratt.
  2. Payable Inquiry Window (Payables Menu) is one stop shopping for vendor information but a few of my favorites are:
    • Average # of days to pay the AP Invoices.
    • Summary showing Invoices/Memos, Payments, Net Change and Year to Date purchases for every year since you started using Visual.
  3. Receivable Inquiry Window (Receivable Menu) is similar to Payable Inquiry. Lots of good information for assessing a customer for collection purposes:
    • Average # of days to pay the AR Invoices.
    • Summary showing Invoices/Memos, Cash Receipts, Net Change and Year to Date sales for every year since you started using Visual.
    • Print Overdue Invoice Report where you can define the # of days late you want to review. I have even had the last collection note added to this report so that you can monitor collection calls.
  4. The Cash Management Window (Bank Menu) which can be used to forecast cash flow also has these helpful reports that show:
    • The # of days a customer pays beyond their terms. This is similar to Receivable Inquiry but allows you to specify the # of invoices to review to come up with the days early or late.
    • The # of days a customer order is early or late compared to the required shipped dates.
    • The # of days a vendor goods are received compared to the desired receipt date.
  5. The Vendor Inquiry Window (Purchases menu) has the MTD/YTD purchases to show the value or PO’s placed by month. Again, this is helpful to see if there are any trends that need watching.
  6. The Customer Inquiry Window (Sales menu) again similar to Vendor Inquiry has MTD/YTD status to show the orders for the year.
  7. One of my all-time favorites is Native transaction values. This can be found with Account-At-Native in the Accounting Window.  This will show the value based on the transaction currency.   But it doesn’t stop there, you can also look at the posting for non-system currencies by selecting the currency ID when viewing the posting. Again, handy for various postings types and any type of account.

Do you have any Hidden Figures that you use in Visual that you would like to share?