As the New Year starts, many people find it the perfect time to identify areas of opportunity to improve themselves. In addition to making resolutions for their personal lives, many people also focus on creating resolutions for the workplace. To support this process, our team of Deltek Vision experts at Full Sail Partners has put together a list of New Year’s Resolutions for Vision users.  

Top Resolutions for Vision Users

1. Make sure your firm is using the most current version of Deltek Vision. The latest version is 7.6 and is full of new enhancements. Learn more about Vision 7.6 in this article.
2. Clean up duplicate records in your Vision database, specifically the Vendor and Client records, to prevent billing errors and other problems.
3. Go paperless for Accounts Payable (AP) Invoice Approvals that require consultant/project manager sign-off.
4. Setup a yearly reminder for the accounting department to run the 1099 Initialization process after all AP checks have been processed for the year and before any AP checks are processed in the next year. It can be run in either period since it is not period specific. This process transfers the “Paid This Year” amount to the “Paid Last Year” field on the Miscellaneous tab in the Vendor Table Maintenance and resets all vendor “Paid This Year” values to zero.
5. Start using Revenue Generation in Vision to allow for recognizing project revenue as it is earned, matching revenue with expenses incurred to data. Without this, Vision recognizes revenue only as it is billed.
6. Stop printing reports for directors and project managers. Instead, have them use the Vision Dashboard. Custom Dashparts can be created to give each user individualized information that is relevant to them.
7. Remember to never un-post or create journal entries to control accounts. This is more about accounting best practices.
8. Login to Vision more often than timesheet completion requires and manage your timesheet frequently to avoid over or under billing clients.
9. Take the time to understand and implement standard functions in Vision such as Expense Report Approvals, using Benefits Accruals, and Account Groups for General Ledger Reporting to decrease workload.
10. Plan to attend more Full Sail Partners’ webinars to learn helpful tips and new tricks in order to fully harness the power of Deltek Vision. Check out our past webinars here.   

Do More with Deltek Vision this New Year

With each New Year comes both potential opportunities as well as challenges. Begin this New Year by following these resolutions. Do more with Vision and save your firm much wasted time.

By the way, as you are closing up last year, check out our recent article about Year-End processes for Deltek Vision users here.

Do you have a tip of your own? Comment below with your New Year’s Resolutions for other Vision Users.

The Deltek Vision to Concur Connector allows both systems to work together seamlessly, automatically synchronizing finance data throughout the entire spending process, from pre-spend approval to reconciliation. Manage every expense and invoice transaction accurately and with ease, and get a complete view of your finances in one place. 

Gain Complete Visibility and Greater Control of Your Finances with the Deltek Vision to Concur Connector

The war for talent acquisition has experienced a major shift in recent years. Historically, the employer held all of the power and candidates vied for the opportunity to prove their worth to the employer. However, in recent years, this dynamic has changed. Human Resources leaders and executives around the globe are faced with both talent shortages and a lack of candidates who possess the required skills to fill critical roles. Whether we like it or not, we are now operating in a candidate-led hiring market.

In a world where demand exceeds supply, we must manage the war for talent. HR must learn how to fight and win this desirable talent through innovative strategies to attract, recruit and retain the skill sets that our businesses require. It’s time to refocus, to get creative and analytical, and to win this war.

Four Proven Strategies to Win the War for Talent

1. Build a Better Brand

Branding is typically thought of as a marketing function. However, what happens when companies apply the same branding principles to their recruiting tactics? It is simple, these companies effectively manage the market perception of what it is like to work for their organizations.

Successful firms stay aware of the perceived image that current and past employees have about their employment experience. Making sure the perceived image is on target involves evaluating specific details such as the company culture, employee benefits and work environment.

Building a strong and strategic employment brand will:

• Create a sense of excitement about working for your company
• Highlight the company mission and product/service offerings
• Provide clear and compelling reasons to work for your company
• Evoke feelings of attaining prestige and professional reward with your company

A strategic approach to employer branding requires a non-partisan examination of how your company attracts, engages and retains talent. It would be beneficial to undertake an employer brand audit. The results will hopefully inspire your leaders to invest time and effort into building a brand strategy to expand your talent recruitment pool.

Successful companies go above and beyond to create a great candidate experience during the talent acquisition process. Human Resources and Marketing can team up to create this great candidate experience by focusing on these tactics:

• Improve Your Application Process – When is the last time you reviewed your company’s application process? Most application forms are unnecessarily cumbersome and lead to a large portion of candidates not completing the process because of the time commitment involved. You can improve your candidate experience by keeping your application process to a minimum while meeting all of the firm’s essential requirements.
• Write More Compelling Job Advertisements – A marketing mindset can help improve one of the first touch points with a potential candidate, the job advertisement. When writing, focus on the job description and opportunity rather than stringing together a list of requirements and qualifications. The job description should be intriguing in order to elicit interest and make candidates want to take the next step in the recruitment process.

During the talent acquisition process, both Human Resources and Marketing should work together to emphasize the advantages of working for your company – the great company culture, the reasons your company is a great place to work and the benefits. Using these measures will ensure that those with the right cultural fit have a great candidate experience during recruitment.

3. Create a Culture of Developing Internal Talent

The offer of learning and development is vital for attracting new talent. So why don’t firms spend more time providing learning and development opportunities for their own internal talent? Current personnel can fill employment gaps fast if they are given the chance to pursue another direction in the firm. All internal staff should be given opportunities to learn new skills and develop alternate career paths within the firm. By providing development options to internal staff, the firm will have better longevity with its personnel and keep the skill sets internal.

4. Collect the Right Data to Support Talent Development

Relevant data is crucial to business leaders. Our financial metrics, KPIs and future growth reports are all dependent upon having access to quality data. Maintaining information on talent recruitment and retention are no different, and Human Resources Information Systems make this critical employee data much more accessible.

Just like the other areas of our businesses, we must first understand how to capture accurate information and then how to use this data within the context of our businesses. Before we concentrate on capturing this information, we must assess the accuracy of the data itself as well as find better ways of presenting the data.

Firms that remain competitive in the war for talent are able to contextually embed talent-related data within their business systems. For example, these firms are able to link their staff’s professional development and performance activities to project management and customer service goals and metrics. This data allows company leaders to see real results regarding talent development.

Learn More About the War for Talent

Want to learn more about staying competitive in the modern war for talent? Sign up for our upcoming webinar to learn how your firm can better attract and retain millennial talent for your professional services firm.

In the Deltek world, the Blackbox Connector is the trending topic. From marketing professionals gaining insight within Deltek Vision from their Constant Contact mailers, to finance managing risk and controlling expenses through Concur, people are asking about getting more out of their Deltek Vision system. Have you heard the buzz surrounding the Blackbox Connector? If you haven’t, your first question might be, so “what is the Blackbox Connector?" If so, then this blog is for you!

What is the Blackbox Connector?

The Blackbox Connector is a no-code, low cost, integration solution for your Deltek Vision system with an easy to use API wizard. The purpose of the solution is to eliminate data silos by providing a better and more powerful way to create, update, reference and report on critical business intelligence across multiple platforms using Deltek Vision as your master record set. Our goal is to bring data together in a low cost, easy to maintain manner.

What Makes Blackbox Different?

Historically, integrations meant ‘expensive’ and required a lot of technical involvement. Not anymore. So what are the key differences between a custom integration and the Blackbox Connector?

1. IT teams are no longer bogged down with costly development cycles or constant evolving maintenance updates.
2. Users can utilize Blackbox’s drag-and drop mapping wizard to link critical fields across systems to synchronize the two systems in a manner consistent with your business.
3. Data accuracy improves across your entire organization by eliminating manual imports and duplicated efforts because the integration is automatic.

The results? Providing a low, yearly cost that includes continued upgrade for both solutions and a seamless connection to Deltek Vision.

How Does the Blackbox Connector Work?

The Blackbox Connector’s API Wizard enables you to easily connect Deltek Vision to third-party software. The configuration is as easy as setting up your phone to your Outlook email. Users will need access and links to both solutions and in minutes your software is connected. IT is provided scripts and user documentation through our Blackbox Connector portal. Standard mapping is pre-configured and users can further configure their field mapping using Blackbox’s drag-and-drop mapping wizard. The Blackbox Connector portal handles the behind the scenes data processing, including advanced error handling and testing of your connectivity scenarios. 

The connections are all made over web secure communication channels using web services to feed data to and from Deltek Vision – whether you host your Vision system locally or in the cloud, the Blackbox Connector platform can help your firm bring data together.

Why Blackbox?

The Blackbox Connector is a critical game changer with how organizations work within their Deltek Vision system. Our programmers are continuing to invest in commonly requested integration programs and your feedback can impact the next solution. Combine the best features of Deltek Vision with your other critical business systems to save significant hours for your staff and provide them with the tools needed to make faster, more-informed decisions.

Learn More.

Could the Blackbox Connector bring data together for your firm? Check out our website or schedule a demo to see how Blackbox can help your firm save time and money, while improving your overall experience in Deltek Vision.

Document management in the AEC Industry is more critical than most. Union Square can help your firm integrate all relevant data, allowing you to spend less time organizing and more time executing projects. Union Square enables your firm to store and access critical firm-wide and project information, including documents, financial information, drawings, images, and emails in one central repository. As a result, your firm has the ability to:

• Ensure team members are working on the most up-to-date files
• Eliminate inconsistent file structures or displaced files
• Keep drawings, correspondence, submittals and more in one central location
• Log incoming documents from any source
• Provide auto-matching suggestions to improve the quality of records
• Document register that gives you all the answers you might need about the state of the project from anywhere

Email

Email easily represents the greatest volume of documents and must be managed effectively or your firm will be left with an expensive archive full of duplicates, difficult if not impossible to retrieve information, and significantly slowing down your ability to send critical information to your clients. Union Square will ensure no email can ever be lost and there are no duplicates by allowing your firm to:

• Save emails from Outlook in just two clicks
• Save just one copy of an email and avoid duplication of email storage
• Store all project correspondence and attachments centrally and permanently
• Strip attachments from email and log appropriately

Document Management

Union Square, combined with Deltek, now offers truly the most integrated platform in the world, reducing operational risk and increasing efficiency.

Other solutions simply are not complete and cannot provide adequate risk reduction and efficiencies. With the varying documents involved in the AEC Industry, basic document sharing provided by SharePoint does not offer a construction issuing system and has no integration with industry design packages. Custom development can be costly and virtually impossible to manage and keep up with future upgrades. A DMS overlay doesn’t provide true risk reduction and access to emails, client reports or company finance all in one location. Union Square will do all of the above and more:

• Documents, emails, finance, and design files all cross-referenced for rapid retrieval
• Detailed document audit and full history
• Documents stored in their native file formats
• Cache services keep documents local to each office to give a single virtual office across the company without compromising performance

An interactive drawing register provides version control, including:

• Links that allow the issuing of process control and distribution of drawings throughout their lifecycle
• Read and write access that provides version control to users based on security permissions

External File Sharing 

The exponential growth in file sizes has made sharing drawing packages a time consuming exercise which lacks company transparency. Manually uploading files to a client extranet or third party file sharing location is slow and requires keeping both an internal and external record of the documents.

Union Square’s design register, issue sheets, document packages and official company records are all exemplar quality and ISO 9001 compliant, fully automated and recorded. The system is unimpeded by file size limits, and documents can be shared internally and externally from the same location with specific user rights for read and write access of only the files or folders chosen. No more worrying about setting up dated FTP sites or emailing large files. Everyone is finally on the same page with one version of the truth.

Contract Administration

Contracts should be easily traceable to reduce the risk of costly legal disputes. All emails, queries, questions and responses are all legally admissible in court. By bringing together the contract communications with the Document Management System, your firm has better visibility of project issues before they arise. Union Square provides enhanced foresight and project management, mitigates risk, and enables your firm to offer detailed status updates to your clients.

Remember, just because you may be required to use someone else’s external system on some projects, these are your client’s records and not your own! You own internal records will be necessary in any legal dispute.

Revit Integration

Union Square has developed a bridge to integrate with Revit. With the industry’s move towards BIM (Building Information Modelling), the way information is exchanged with clients and project partners has to change. Information sharing can sometimes include everything from the native model or IFC file, COBie file to traditional 2D formats like PDF, DWG, DDWF, DWFX and DGN.

Together with the Union Square drawing control system, the Revit integration will help your firm realize significant efficiency gains and see improvements in quality of output and practice-wide consistency with document production through to distribution. Included in the Revit integration is:

• Bi-directional drawing register
• Revision and versions management
• Document issuing and rendition management
• Hard copy batch print control

With Union Square, your firm will finally have synchronized model sheet information with a live drawing register and the ability to monitor approval/issue status at the click of a button.

More Mobility with Union Square 

No more clipboards! With on-site mobile technology, Union Square automates the process of site data capture, task management and reporting. You can finally achieve a bulletproof audit trail and strengthen your position in contract disputes. With Union Square you will have also have access to Mobile Custom Forms which you can customize to comply with quality assurance processes and integrate your site processes.

Full Sail Partners today announced it joined the Concur Solution Provider program and can now refer clients, including those using Deltek, to Concur, the leading provider of spend management solutions and services.

This partnership expands the Full Sail Partners offering to include Concur solutions and allows Concur data to flow into Deltek Vision, helping professional services firms create a better expense reporting experience for their employees and also enable the firms to realize significant cost savings.

“We are ecstatic to introduce Concur to our clients,” said Tanya Drake, Full Sail Partners Technology Division’s Technical Consultant. “This partnership gives project-based clients the most efficient expense reporting solution ever. Our clients will experience firm-wide cost savings and eliminate mistakes and fraud with the automated controls and duplication verification. Employees will love the automatic pull of data to their expense reports, virtually eliminating manual entry of expense reports. It’s a win-win for both the firm and employees.”

Concur Travel, Expense and Invoice are the industry’s leading solutions to help businesses manage spend and gain insights that drive savings. Concur has more than 40 million users globally, and in 2015 the company processed transactions worth more than $70 billion in travel and expense spend.

Kelly Duquette, Principal Solutions Consultant at Full Sail Partners who has worked with the Concur product at a previous firm said, “We believe this is a great opportunity for the Deltek Vision community to leverage Concur to create a fast, efficient process that allows employees to spend less time on tedious tasks and more time focusing on their billable work.” 

Together, Full Sail Partners and Concur will enable HR and accounting professionals to better manage expenses and invoice processing from approval to payment posting. The expanded capabilities offered through Concur will enable professional services firms to capture paper and electronic invoices, enabling efficient, automated processing – from purchase request through payment, including 2-way and 3-way match capabilities. 

“Travel and expense is the second largest area of controllable business spend – a challenge especially significant to SMBs. With a partner-focused initiative like the Concur Solution Provider program, we can help partners like Full Sail Partners expand the value they provide SMBs while driving business growth and profitability,” said Christal Bemont, SVP and GM of SMB and National Accounts, Concur.

To receive details about this partnership and the Concur solutions offered through Full Sail Partners, please visit http://www.blackboxconnector.com.

Full Sail Partners provides technology services and solutions for more than 1,000 professional services firms nationwide. Blackbox Connector, a division of Full Sail Partners, helps bring data together with a no-code, low cost, integration solution connecting Deltek Vision users to any API-powered application within minutes. Full Sail Partners represents project-based products focused on integrating business processes by connecting front-end and back-end systems. We seek to help organizations identify the critical resources needed to create a faster, more efficient, and cohesive business infrastructure.

I don’t know anyone that actually enjoys completing their expense report. The process is arduous, and steals valuable time from your already hectic day. The fact is, if you want to get reimbursed for a company expenditure, you have to take the time to complete your expense report. No ifs ands or buts about it.  Luckily, Blackbox’s Deltek Vision and Concur Integration eliminates this pain staking process for your employees and frees them up to concentrate on client-focused, billable work.

So, how can the Blackbox Concur Connector help you combine the benefits or Concur's expense controls and management with Vision's financial and project management tools? Easy! See how below.

The Deltek Vision and Concur Integration Made My Life Easier:

As someone who travels a fair amount, the Deltek Vision and Concur integration has allowed me to get the most out of my business expenses. Before, I was overly focused on diligently taking a picture of every receipt and documenting every incurred cost. Now, when I am out with a client, I can focus on listening and cultivating our relationship.  Here is how:

No more expense report time dump! Concur’s credit card integration is freakin’ awesome. I’ll admit it, I am terrible at manually documenting receipts and deciphering between my credit card charges vs. cash expenses. I used to stress out when thinking about the time dump required to complete my expense reports. Now, the Deltek Vision and Concur integration allows me to complete and submit my expense reports faster, rather than waiting until the end of the month to begin the process.

User protection / fraud prevention. Recently after traveling in New York City, I submitted an expense report with duplicate charges for an Uber ride. This minor mistake held up the processing of my expense report as we internally worked out my error. Concur allows me to eliminate this time consuming process of going back and forth from submitter, management and accounting. Additionally, these controls protect the company from accidental or direct fraudulent activity.

Mobile is where it’s at! I’m constantly on the go and I rely on my smart phone for just about everything. I can honestly say that Concur’s mobile app has been a big reason that I have been more diligent with completing my expense reports.

The app utilizes OCR technology that allows me to automatically pull all relevant information off of receipts, including:

• Vendor
• Date
• Dollar amount
• And more

Additionally, the mobile app sends me alerts when I have new charges, reports to approve or notifications.

Real-time, Automatic, Transaction-based Integration.  No more waiting for new projects to show up so I can associate expenses.  No tedious manual uploads to share information between the two systems.  No more having to input the same information in multiple places.  The bi-directional connector allows the information I and my accounting team need to be available where and when it is needed.

Ready to See How Concur Integrates with Deltek Vision?

Are you ready to learn more about this turn-key integration of Deltek Vision and Concur? Join Pete Nuffer as he unveils how all Deltek Vision users can win with automated expense management.

Recently, Beaudin Ganze Consulting Engineers, Inc. embarked on a rebranding initiative, officially becoming BG Buildingworks. A critical element of this rebranding effort was to notify the company’s key constituents to reaffirm that the rebranding was primarily a cosmetic change, and that BG Buildingworks would maintain their personnel and technical expertise.

Hear directly from Karen Crilly, BG Buildingworks’ Director of Marketing & Client Development, about this process. See how the firm was able to overcome challenges with their contact data in time to announce the rebranding prior to their 25^th anniversary.

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For BG Buildingworks, innovative solutions are at the core of their business. BG Buildingworks provides mechanical, electrical, lighting, technology, commissioning, energy analysis and LEED consulting services for projects ranging from those in higher education to government, commercial, hospitality, healthcare and more. They are experts in REVIT modeling, employing state-of-the art technology and tools to optimize energy-efficient building systems and improve the owner’s bottom line.

Through early program definition, focused project management, expert systems design and engineering and highly experienced construction phase services, BG Buildingworks provides owners with low-risk, high-return solutions for their facilities.

If someone were to ask you what do you like least about your job, what would you say? Assuming you like your boss, your environment and co-workers, there is still always a task that you just wish you didn’t have to do. For me, it is my expenses. You would think, getting reimbursed would be motivation in itself. Yes, at some point it absolutely is. It has gotten much easier now that I can take a picture of my receipts and quickly upload through my Deltek Vision Touch application with my phone. However, I still have to fill out the details which takes time. Time I don’t always have. What if I told you it could get even easier? I was then introduced to the Concur expense solution.

I literally was giddy over expenses when I saw what the solution could do. The Concur expense solution automatically imports credit card charges and matches them to receipts and itinerary data. Instead of manually entering your expenses, I can simply take a picture of the receipt and it reads the information and fills out my expenses. Sounds too good to be true, right?

So how can this help Deltek Vision users you might ask? Well, there is an integration being finalized right now. I invite you to view the video below to begin to learn more about the Concur expense solution:

Learn more in the upcoming Concur webinar. This webinar will further show you how Concur expense reports write themselves and we will provide a sneak peek of the upcoming Deltek Vision integration.

As a first time attendee to SMPS Build Business, I want to make sure that I experience all there is to offer at the national conference for professional services marketers. So before I head off to the City of Brotherly Love I thought it would be a good idea to ask some long time attendees for their advice on how to get the most out of this conference. Here are the 5 tips I found most useful.

Keep in mind, these tips can be used when attending any conference.

Five Essential Tips for Conference Success

1. Make intros memorable. You are sure to meet more people than you can remember. The same is true for the people you hope to make an impression on. The key to being memorable is to practice how you will introduce yourself. Introduction should intrigue your connection to make them want to learn more. “Hi, I’m Graham I’m a marketer” won’t cut it. Focus on how you and your company add value to your clients. Give the discussion purpose. Perhaps your newfound contact is facing a challenge and you can help them overcome it. Stand out from the crowd by leaving each new contact with a feeling of time and energy well invested.
   
2. Identify the best way to capture contact info. Do you have a plan for capturing important details gathered from your networking efforts? Do you plan on jotting details down on a napkin to send off to someone else to enter in your CRM system? Or perhaps you are planning on entering everything immediately using your mobile device. Thinking this process through before the conference will allow you to have a system in place to get the most out of your networking efforts.
   
3. Pre-schedule meetings. Prescheduling meetings is my favorite tip for attending any I believe that the primary focus of attending a conference should be to network and connect with people. The number one way to do that is to begin networking and connecting before the conference even begins. Try sending out emails to contacts that you know will be on site, or even create a landing page on your website advertising your attendance to the conference. Better yet, pick up the phone and set-up meetings to have drinks or lunch with contacts.
   
4. Have a plan, be willing to adjust. Have you seen the program for this year’s SMPS Build Business? There are a ton of awesome programs! Take your time before the conference to map out your roadmap for sessions you want to attend. However, show up to the conference willing to pivot and adjust on the sessions you attend. You never know when the opportunity will arise to attend a session with an old client or new prospect.
   
5. Dress accordingly. You are set for some long days ahead -- between breakout sessions, networking breaks walking the exhibit hall and everything else that goes into attending a conference. Make sure to wear the right shoes – taking care of your feet will keep you mobile and ready to network. Also, don’t forget to dress appropriately to accommodate for changes in room temperature.