Micro Force

Micro Force Case Study

• Case Study: Netsmart

   

  Netsmart gained a strategic business partner with Micro Force and Microsoft Dynamics GP.   

  Netsmart Technologies, Inc. is an established, leading supplier of enterprise-wide software solutions to health and human services providers and payers nationwide. Netsmart’s customers include mental health and substance abuse treatment providers, psychiatric hospitals, public health agencies, and managed care organizations. Netsmart software is designed for a variety of operating systems, hardware platforms, and mobile devices, and offers unlimited scalability.

  
  

  The Right Way To Succeed with Rapid Growth

  Netsmart Technologies was growing fast. They had implemented Microsoft Dynamics GP, but felt they weren’t getting the full benefit from this application. Their tremendous growth demanded automation amd they found in Micro Force a solutions provider who could make this happen.

   

  One of the first critical issues was to automate Netsmart’s maintenance billing. On average, Netsmart had over 300 invoices a month and the accounting department had created and tracked these invoices manually. They had file cabinets overflowing with paper! It was no small feat to migrate this significant amount of data into a Repository system. Now invoices can be electronically tracked, and by pressing Inquiry, information can be obtained instantly.

   

  Another requirement was to input thousands of customer contracts into the system, by which could be automatically filtered to alert when a maintanence contract was due on a particular day. In addition, GP now automatically creates invoices and handles the differed revenue components that each one requires. Since many contracts begin on different dates throughout the year, they need to be pro-rated over the current year and into the next. This process had formally been a huge amount of work, requiring two or three people more than a month to complete.

   

  Netsmart acquired companies in Ohio and South Carolina. We were able to migrate the data from those companies into GP and now the accounting department can view consolidated financials for all three companies.
  
  
  The Ohio company did not have a time keeping system. Micro Force implemented Business Portal Time and Expense Microsoft PDK which gives their employees the ability to track and submit their time in a web-based system… and it all integrates into GP. For New York, we customized GP to interface with their existing home-grown time keeping system.

   

  A Collections Management module was implemented for the entire company which allows them to proactively monitor all collections. This module gives Netsmart the ability to email and fax documents, a process that was done manually before.
  
  
  When the three companies came online, they realized that there was  redundancy within their customer base. Micro Force put this database through a process that normalized their customers across the companies, giving each customer a unique ID. The ID, as a used value, is a very important part of Netsmart’s daily business.
  
  
  All these processes were done in preparation for Salesforce.com, the ERP system of record for their customers. A master database is stored in the NY headquarters and is “triggered-out” to all Netsmart locations. By keeping everything central, files are updated once—a big savings in time and manpower.

   

  Additional implementations for Netsmart

  • Project Accounting, which is a repository for all their projects and automatically recongizes revenue generated. Micro Force developed a custom interface between Concur, an expense system, which automatically brings that information into GP and bills out expense transactions directly, capturing all the data from Netsmart’s employees.
  • Purchase Orders allow Netsmart to track and route goods and services. We installed third-party software, Avalara, which allows Netsmart to calculate the sales tax in the states it operates in. Online Analytical Process cubes (OLAP) were created when they upgraded to SQL server 2005 from SQL server 2000, in addition to SQL Reporting services. This allows their staff to analyze data more granularly than in Excel.
  
  

  Benefits

  
  Netsmart has been able to grow and expand, without many of the hiccups that companies experience, because they were able to fully utilize Dynamics GP to their benefit. They are able to analyze their business processes better with GP and we’ve been there, partnering with them each step of the way. We developed a seamless integration which allows their financial actuals to integrate with their forecasting and budgeting software, ProFex.
  
  
  More than half of Netsmart’s revenue comes from invoicing for maintenance, of which the collection process is now more than 50% automated.