Connected Accounting with Business Central
JCS Fish Ltd is an independent, family-owned seafood business based in Grimsby, sourcing fine fish and producing high-quality seafood products.
The business needed to move beyond Sage 50 Accounts, improve the interface with its industry-specific software and reduce manual input through greater automation.
Qi migrated JCS to Dynamics 365 Business Central using its JustMigrate toolkit, with full Sage 50 history moved intact and a tailored link to its bespoke software. The result was a more modern Microsoft platform, automated data entry via Continia OCR, and significant time savings in purchase ledger processing.
The Challenge
See the video case study here
JCS were seeking to improve the interface between their industry specific application and the external accounting application in use. Sage 50 Accounts having been used for many years had increasing limitations over more modern, cloud-based solutions and limited the use of more progressive applications.
The vendors of their industry specific software had also discussed a roadmap for their application that could not effectively be supported by Sage 50 Accounts in the coming years.
Following discussions with their industry specific software provider, JCS opted to explore Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Moving to Business Central made further logical sense as JCS were existing users of Dynamics CRM (Customer Relationship Management).
JCS viewed the project to move them away from Sage 50 to a further commitment to Microsoft technology as a great opportunity to move their business applications infrastructure forward and into modern computing.
JCS wished to explore how to automate processes still further using OCR solutions, allowing text documents to be recognised and created in Business Central without the need for manual input.
The leadership team at JCS wanted to find a business partner that could implement Business Central and develop a link to their industry specific bespoke software. Their ideal business partner would offer comprehensive services to migrate their Sage 50 Accounts data in full and intact and display a willingness to tailor a project to the meet the logical needs of their customers.
The Solution
After engaging with several business partners JCS opted to partner with Qi.
Rosie Knight-Coulbeck (FD of JCS) commented:
We approached lots of different potential partners to help us with this implementation, but we felt the offering from Qi was especially attractive due to the amount of information received in advance, which was tailored to our needs as well as being affordable (lots of other companies oversell the amount of consultancy hours required in a project such as this).
The Process
Qi created the necessary link from the industry specific software to Business Central ensuring that data was validated prior to being automatically uploaded to the required Business Central fields.
Using the Qi JustMigrate toolkit, unique to Qi Ltd, Sage 50 Accounts data was migrated in full and intact, including full history, thus making the changeover to Business Central to Sage 50 Accounts straightforward and without the need to tie into key accounting periods.
Qi partnered with JCS and Continia, an industry leader in OCR technology for Business Central to implement Continia products which automated data entry, accurately.
The Outcome
Business Central & OCR return valuable time savings
Rosie commented:
The addition of Continia with this project was a massive win for JCS Fish as the automation of our purchase ledger was a key objective. Qi was there to assist and ensure a smooth Go Live.
Qi is currently working with JCS to enable the synchronisation of data from Dynamics CRM to Business Central and looks forward to continuing to partner with JCS as they optimise their use of Business Central moving forward.