F.H. Black & Company

The Securities and Exchange Commission has announced that  for public companies, interactive data financial reporting has been mandated on a phased-in schedule, beginning next year (2009).

"Interactive Data" allows report users who seek specific information from the source to quickly pinpoint the information, avoiding the manual, lengthy search process of corporate annual reports or mutual fund documents.

eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is the technical language for creating interactive data. It provides major benefits in the preparation, analysis and communication of business information.  It offers cost savings, greater efficiency and improved accuracy and reliability to all those involved in supplying or using financial data.

The largest companies who file using U.S. GAAP with a public float above $5 billion will be required to provide interactive data reports starting with their first quarterly report for fiscal periods ending on or after June 15, 2009. This will cover approximately 500 companies.

The remaining companies who file using U.S. GAAP will be required to file with interactive data on a phased-in schedule over the next two years. Companies reporting in IFRS issued by the International Accounting Standards Board will be required to provide their interactive data reports starting with fiscal years ending on or after June 15, 2011. Companies will be able to adopt interactive data earlier than their required start date. All U.S. public companies will have filed interactive data financial information by December 2011 for use by investors.

All SEC filers should look at CaseWare International's Working Papers software to automate their financial reporting and meet their XBRL filing needs.

The Canadian Association of Chemical Distributors (CACD) are holding their Annual General Meeting (AGM) May 27th to 29th 2009 in Kananaskis Alberta.

F.H. Black & Company has been invited to conduct a workshop for the Chemical Distribution industry leaders. Our topic is The Power of 1%.

It seems today that a conversation cannot be had without words buzzing in the air like “recession” and “economic slowdown”.  Management is becoming more cautious and is putting even more pressure onto the entire organization to help drive every last cent to the bottom line.

Our workshop will explore practical ways which will help CACD memebrs squeeze what would appear to be seemingly small changes into their operations, which will result in significant dollars to their bottom line.

Microsoft has announced an all-in-one solution for small businesses with under 15 employees who require access to line of business applications and terminal services. Known as “Foundation Server”, and coming in at under a $1000 price point, this new offering includes hardware and licensing based on the Windows 2008 code-base, without the bells and whistles such as Hyper-V. The new product will be available in 1-2 months and will allow small business to get many of the benefits that until now have been too expensive to justify.

Read more or contact us to discuss how Microsoft Foundation Server can benefit your business

If your organisation uses the Joomla! content management system (CMS) to operate your website, an important update to the CMS is now available.

On March 28^th, 2009, Joomla.org made the new Joomla! 1.5.10 Security Release available for download. This Security Release contains fixes for 66 bugs found in the earlier 1.5.9 version.

In addition to important bug fixes to Joomla's core components and modules, this release fixes 2 security bugs related to Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities. To learn more about XSS and how it can expose your company's website to attacks by malicious users, see the Wikipedia article here.

For more information about the list of bugs and issues which Joomla! 1.5.10 fixes, see the official release announcement here.

The Joomla! Project and F.H. Black & Company strongly recommend that all existing Joomla! users upgrade to this new version immediately.

To get help upgrading your current Joomla! website, or for more information about Joomla! and how it can help your organisation manage your online presence, please contact us online, or by telephone directly at 204-949-9113 ext. 0 or 778-785-3752 ext. 0 and our reception staff will direct you to a consultant who can advise you.

A study just released confirms something those of us in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation & support industry have known for many years - just because you pay more, does not mean you get more.

Panorama Consulting Group recently released the results of their years long survey of companies that implemented ERP systems.

"Our study of ERP implementations across the globe consists of a wide variety of leading ERP solutions (Figure A). In addition to Tier I vendors such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft, our study also includes Tier II solutions such as Baan, Epicor, Exact, IFS, Infor, Lawson, Netsuite, Sage, Syspro and others.There were 670 participants in this portion of our study and included data from organizations in the US, Europe, Australia and India."

Their findings (in summary):

• SAP & Oracle implementations cost on average $10 to $14 million dollars more than Microsoft implementations of similar size,
  
• SAP & Oracle implementations cost on average $9 to $13 million dollars more than Tier 2 vendor implementations of similar size,
  
• SAP & Oracle implementations took about the same amount of time to implement as Microsoft & Tier 2 vendors,
  But...
• SAP & Oracle products yielded lower (Oracle 62%) or marginally better (SAP 73%) satisfaction than Microsoft (69%) or Tier Two vendors (70%).

Meaning...

Selecting Microsoft for your ERP solution provides satisfaction levels equivalent to any other choice you may have made, but maximizes savings & minimizes implementation time.

Now as you look at these figures, you might assume that all implementations of these products cost of millions of dollars. This is not true. While there was no information related to the size of organizations surveyed, I suspect they were very large organizations. There are many factors to consider. Obviously there are a lot of issues to consider including required functionality, number of users etc. Specifically, for medium sized businesses with under a hundred users, your costs are likely to be a fraction of those reported in the survey.

Our experience in having conducted very similar surveys (much fewer companies surveyed however) on behalf of our clients agree with Panorama's findings, and do support this type of price disparity with smaller numbers of users as well! As with many purchases, because SAP & Oracle are very well know names, companies often assume that success is much more certain with these vendors.

One final point - interestingly a summary of this survey just released concluded that Tier 2 was the best solution. Odd considering that the Microsoft price was more than $700,000 less than Tier 2 with roughly equivalent scores on implementation time & satisfaction levels. Another consideration for many of our clients when choosing between Tier 2 and Microsoft is the increased comfort dealing with one of the world's largest, most stable software vendors versus a relative unknown.

If you have questions or would like to discuss ERP, feel free to contact the us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .