Managing your suppliers and document management

Here is a little example I experienced today about the usefulness of a good document management system when it comes to negotiating with your suppliers:

Twelve months ago I got a new mobile phone on a 12 month contract. In fact I haggled and managed to get the same price and deal as an 18 month contract. Then, in order to keep up with the latest technology (or just because I like new gadgets?) I diarised a note to pop up 12 months later to remind me that my contract was finished. I could then upgrade to a nice new gadget/phone.

Today, the action popped up in my to-do-list so I rang my mobile supplier to find out what I could upgrade to. He looks at his records and says I'm on an 18 month contract. As I've just had my system remind me to ring up, I'm pretty confident that I'm right and they're wrong. So I browse down the document history for this supplier. I see a document from a year ago that I called 'despatch note'. I click it open and see a scanned copy of the despatch note and lo and behold it states in the description: 12 month contract. Another click and I can send him a copy by email.

A couple of minutes for the operative to now dig deeper into their records, and I'm offered a discount on my bill or a new phone. New gadget now in the mail, due to arrive tomorrow...

Using eLink to improve cashflow

I thought it would be useful to write a quick list of ways eLink can be used to help improve credit control and thus cash flow.

• Use invoice templates to get your invoices out faster. Setting up document templates that pull key fields from eLink, such as the Contact name, Company details and invoice references, amounts and product descriptions means faster more accurate generation of invoices;
• Project cost control 1 - use a query in your MyPortal (or receive an emailed report) to detail your gross margin summary per client project. this means you're always well informed and thus know when to invoice for further payments from your clients;
• Project cost control 2 - using the Timesheet module you are informed exactly when you have done the contracted for amount of work and hence when you can ask for more money;
• Customise your MyPortal to show recurring contracts that are due for renewal and ensure you invoice for the next year on time;
• Receive a daily list of your outstanding invoices/aged debtors automatically and you can chase up the tardy payers very quickly;
• Chase up late payers with emails sent to them automatically. Have a series of emails set up with different wordings that get harsher as time goes by. These emailed chase ups leave only the very worst payers to be chased up manually.

Swiss colleagues website revamp

My fellow eLink provider Valthicha in Switzerland has just relaunched their website. They tell me the new design was inspired by our own eLink UK website, blog and wiki :-)

I also let them use our own video tour of eLink on their site, I think they're pleased by the time saved the, even though that it is English rather than in French.

Please take a look: http://www.valthicha.ch/

An eLink User interview

I try and contact our customers regularly and discover what they are getting out of (or not getting) using eLink. My latest feedback was from Eliot Clarke, Risk Management Executive at ASG Risk Management Ltd.

I asked Eliot what he uses eLink for and he stated that he finds eLink's file management system: "Brilliant. It reduces the amount of [physical] storage I need, and I can quickly access my documents." Eliot accesses the system 95% of the time from his office, but occasionally looks up a key document from home or from a client's site.

Eliot's response to how he would rate our customer service?
"Very good, 9 out of 10. No complaints about the service, you always answer the phone, and I get a quick response."

SP3 for eLink 2008.2.0.0 now available

Service Pack 3 (SP3) for eLink 2008.2.0.0 has just been released. This fixes the following issues:

1. Correction of a bug in eLink: document merging was not functional with Office 2007.
2. Using AutoLookups with custom fields on relation tables is now functional.
3. Correction of a bug in eLink Trinity : windows positions were not always saved and loaded.
4. Correction of a bug in the DBQualityTool service which was unable to read its INI file.

Golden Image for eLink Lite servers

We have now added and successfully tested a new level of support for our eLink Lite servers. This is a useful bit of functionality that comes with our Cloud hosting called a 'golden image'. At least that's what it is called by our hosts Flexiscale. What we have done is taken a working eLink server (one with all the services configured and running and with links through to client databases) and taken an exact copy of the whole server, a software snapshot you might say.

This enables us to create an instant working eLink server at the flick of a switch, meaning we can add extra servers to cope with peak loads incredibly quickly. It also means that if there is a problem with a particular server we can now replace it almost instantly with one we know works, speeding up recovery times immensely.

New service status twitterfeed launched

We have now launched a new support feed where you can get the latest updates and status of our eLink service. This is available at http://twitter.com/elinkstatus.

It is also available as an RSS feed, the link to put into your RSS Reader (I use and recommend FeedDemon from Newsgator) is http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/16065290.rss.

This is also displayed in the right hand column of this blog http://elinkuk.blogspot.com/, however, this does seem to take longer before it shows the updates.