Smallest company you've seen use Epicor? Small business + Epicor financial guru?

Hello all,

My question is two-fold - First, what’s the smallest company you’ve seen use Epicor? Less than 10 employees? Did they use the financial modules as well?

We’re about 6 months into being live with Kinetic in the cloud. We’re a pretty small manufacturing company (9 people total at the moment) and while Epicor has been working for production, it’s been a nightmare for our poor bookkeeper. It’s starting to feel like the company we used for implementation is not used to working with smaller companies, and that’s causing a lot of difficulty.

So second question, is there anyone you’d recommend who’s experienced with financials and very small businesses? Someone who could help us get things working on the financial side?

I guess I’m partly looking for help and partly looking for a “Don’t worry, it can be done!” :sweat_smile:

Thank you!

Could you describe a bit about some of the problems you have been having? I’m not big in financials myself, but perhaps you could benefit from the following thread.

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@Thea_L I’ve implemented Epicor with some small companies, smaller than yours. Part of the issue is Epicor is designed to be Role based offering sophistication in each process. When users wear too many hats, that sophistication adds complexity.

With regards to your bookkeeper, I have empathy. I assume this person is handling AP, AR, collections and other accounting entries. Epicor is a little unforgiving when needing to make corrections.
Make sure they are trained on the tools to make fixes.
Cancellation and Correction invoices are AR’s best friend. Cancellation invoices can also be used to reopen an Invoiced shipment to be corrected and reinvoiced.
Reverse cash receipt is another important tool.
AP now has both tools with the release of 10.2.700.

Add some level of automation to the collections efforts. I like the tool from LockStep, used to be called Cash Collect.

I have worked with a consulting group on these smaller projects, happy to provide a recommendation in PM.

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@bderuvo Thank you! That’s reassuring at least.

Yes, she handles a lot of it. We have an outside accounting service that helps with some things. She went through a lot of training with the company that set Epicor up for us, but that’s a good thought, I’ll see if she was trained on tools to make fixes.

That would be amazing, thank you! I tried to find the message icon, but I must be missing something. I don’t see it.

Thanks for the link! I saw that thread a bit a go, I’ll take another look.

Well, I’ll try to keep this short. As far as I understand it, our bookkeeper and outside accountant spent about 4 hours with our Epicor financials consultant trying to figure out how to reconcile bank statements. He finally said it isn’t something he’s had to train people on and that we would have to get their tech team involved to go any further.

I started going through Epicor’s documentation to figure it out & test in Pilot. Meanwhile our bookkeeper started running into errors while doing normal tasks. After a few calls to EpicCare it seems like something? might have gotten messed up while the consultant was trying to figure things out. Then EpicCare said the issues we’re running into are setup issues and they couldn’t help us with them.

So even though I think I’m close to figuring out the reconciling part, it seems like we have bigger issues related to setup. We’re hoping that someone who’s familiar with financials for small businesses can help us move forward.

Don’t worry, it can be done! :slight_smile:

Yeah, I would say it must be pretty daunting for one person to do all that. We are not a small company (100+ on Epicor and many others outside of Epicor). There are a half dozen people directly or indirectly involved with accounting and it’s not nearly enough.

Also, I feel like our chart of accounts is unwieldy (about 1300 GL accounts to manage), but that’s a non-accountant speaking. But I do wonder if it could be pared down.

Some thoughts:

  1. Download the inventory transaction hierarchy guide from EpicWeb.
  2. Also get the ones for AP, AR, and job costing - but the inventory one comes up the most
  3. Create a suspense GL account (usually a bunch of 9s for the number portions)
  4. For all GL controls, any “contexts” that you think you are not using, set it to the suspense account
  5. Inventory WIP Reconciliation Report is 1000% necessary before doing a capture
  6. Use the edit lists before posting
  7. AP Invoices, AR Invoices and other financial tasks do not wait for the capture; they post when you say to post
  8. PE Log Viewer is a REALLY nerdy tool but it is invaluable when all these other tools fail you
  9. You don’t HAVE TO do a PO for everything payable. You can just do a straight misc AP invoice. Pros and cons to both, of course
  10. OPEN WITH! You can track down just about anything by right-clicking on the ID and choosing open with > XYZ Tracker
  11. SOMEBODY must learn how to do BAQs at your company. There is just no way to survive otherwise.
  12. On that note, the financial part of all transactions goes through the TranGLC table, but it is a bear to master it

I can send you my guide to Bank Recs that we use here. It has some barely sensitive info in it, so I won’t make it public. Maybe it will help.

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This is mostly good advice though I, personally, don’t recommend suspense accounts. I’m also not an accountant, but my impression is that it’s an old school way of doing things. If forces you to JE it out every month.

When setting up GL controls, if I’m not sure where something should be booked, I’ll leave it blank or (if it’s mandatory) put in a bogus acct. Then, when it comes up, the transaction will fail to the Review Journal. At that point, you can set the correct account and then you’ve not only fixed that one transaction, but all future ones of that type.

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Well right, I would not recommend blindly posting it. You’d review with IWR (thought #5) first. Then intercept it and fix it.

But, I can’t disagree about the review journal. It does seem to pinpoint things more clearly. Suspense is just how I learned it.

Perfect! Thank you :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

And I appreciate all of the suggestions, I’ll be sharing this thread with our bookkeeper.

That would be me. I’m the Epicor admin partly because I worked with Crystal Reports years ago. Started with learning how to modify Epicor’s SSRS reports, then moved on to BAQs. They’re great! Especially with Kinetic’s BAQ grids. Thanks to the helpful info from the community here, I even learned how to set up emailing an excel version out weekly. :grin:

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