Effectively Use Information

The profitability of a business is largely determined by its ability to effectively use information. Increasingly businesses are relying on computer applications to mange core operations such as sales, inventory management, logistics, point-of-sale and payroll.

However to increase productivity and reduce costs, businesses must effectively and easily transfer operational data to their financial system.

Integration Options

The integration options available to a business are to build an integration solution in-house or to buy a packaged integration solution. In most cases a packaged solution will have lower initial cost, difficulty and risk than in-house development.

Furthermore, the cost of in-house integration solutions will continue to increase as programming modifications are required to cope with changing business requirements or as applications are upgraded. A well designed packaged integration solution will provide a flexible configuration environment for non-programmers, robust processing, a comprehensive audit trail and a range of other productivity features.

Extract and Process Your Data

Missing Link Software specialise in developing cost effective integration solutions for small to medium sized businesses. FinLink has been developed by Missing Link Software for converting operational information into financial records. Without modification to existing systems FinLink can extract and process information from one or more data source for automated posting into financial and/or other operational systems.

Share Information with Multiple Systems

FinLink allows you to leverage your current operational and financial system by enabling information to be shared between systems such as point-of-sale, order management, order entry, warehousing, supply chain, inventory or almost any other operational systems. FinLink provides seamless tracking of inventory, sales, stock movements and other operational activities such as timekeeping and payroll.

Reduce Ongoing Costs

FinLink improves staff productivity through automating data transfer, and can be configured by internal staff rather than requiring low level programming which will significantly reduce ongoing costs. The intuitive, user-friendly interface utilises ìpoint & clickî and wizard-based configuration as opposed to complex lines of code.

Intelligent Transaction Processing

FinLink enables the application of sophisticated business rules to operational records, including operational database queries and accessing lookups. Business processing can incorporate a wide range of financial system data such as customer information, part information, terms and tax codes. Account strings are assigned based on user defined business logic.

Maximum Flexibility

Businesses are often constrained by inflexible fixed integration solutions which need to be rebuilt when operational or financial systems are upgraded or replaced. FinLink maximises flexibility through providing an upgrade path to different versions and new releases of financial applications. The configuration of FinLink can be easily adapted when upgrading or replacing operational applications, thereby reducing on-going costs and operational difficulties. Furthermore FinLink is able to process records from multiple data sources enabling businesses to add additional operational applications to the configuration.

Data Conversion

Data conversion tasks such as transformation and processing from ODBC data sources, text files and comma separated value files are easily handled by FinLink. Conversion and importation routines can be configured by internal staff as ongoing scheduled tasks or ad-hoc.

Data Warehousing

FinLink Enterprise allows mining, extraction and processing of data from multiple systems into a single database for reporting or other business intelligence activities.

Other Features

• Connects to MS SQL2000, MS Access, Oracle or any other ODBC compliant source
• Pre-validated/predefined MYOB, QuickBooks, and Arrow output/account mappings.
• Integration can be scheduled on an hourly, daily, weekly or month end basis.
• Sophisticated online testing/debugging, exception handling & user generated error messages
• Record restart functionality
• Based on proven Microsoft .NET and SQL2000 (MSDE) technology
• Full version control
• Leverage existing technology
• Low total cost of ownership (TCO)
• Faster time to market
• Flexible, scalable implementations
• Higher level of integration with third-party technology
• Integrated business functional processes
• Automated, standardised design processes
• Optimisation of development resources
• High reliability through proven performance
• Self-documenting

In most cases, a packaged integration application can overcome the challenges presented by custom built solutions.