Three Creative EDI Budget Management Solutions
Fall is the time of year when EDI managers start looking at what’s left in the current budget and what projects can be set aside for next year. If, at this time of the year, you find yourself with unspent money in your IT budget, we have a few ideas for smart EDI budget management tricks to help you put that surplus where it can do the most good.
EDI Budget Hack #1: Split Your Projects Between Fiscal Years
First in our little series on EDI and creative budgeting solutions, let’s suppose you have a big project scheduled for early next year but not enough capital in this year’s budget to cover it. If you play it smart, you can sometimes include both fiscal years for these bigger projects and come out looking like a rock star to your CFO.
Take, for example, the hypothetical company Random Client from Anywhere, USA, which wants to implement a mid-five figure enterprise-level integration platform that includes scale-out processing and failover. They don’t want the entire cost to come from this year or the next.
Here’s a simple budget hack for EDI – I advised him to buy the software licenses now, which can be installed later, and we can bill them for professional services whenever they are ready next year. This is the simplest way to split your project between two different fiscal years and is a scenario we see often.
EDI Budget Hack #2: Pick Your Battles Wisely
When it comes to finding a creative budget hack for EDI, it’s not always about splitting up a large project. Sometimes it’s simply about prioritizing which projects must be completed and which can wait until Q1.
Let’s look at another client who wants to start trading with Amazon, but Amazon has not given them an order commitment yet. But another smaller customer also wants to start trading EDI and is ready to send a healthy purchase order now.
The priority is obviously the customer that is ready to send a PO now and those implementation costs will need to come from this year’s budget. And Amazon can be prioritized for next year, especially when you consider how long Amazon implementation and testing can take.
EDI Budget Hack #3: Pay It Forward
Another bit of creative budgeting for EDI solutions is paying upfront for next year’s services before the end of the current fiscal year. This can be accomplished with a fixed fee managed services solution or even an annual VAN mailbox. Many of our solutions can be billed on an annual basis – it never hurts to ask. We even have clients who prefer to be billed quarterly or every six months.
Be careful, though, in terms of accounting practices. According to Investopedia, in GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles), prepaid expenses should not be counted in the books until the product or service is delivered, so be sure to do your homework on what is considered a prepaid expense and what is not before going for these sorts of EDI budget hacks.
Bigger Isn’t Always Better
Bottom line – don’t forget that working with a smaller company (such as, for example, GraceBlood) means there are more options for billing flexibility. This is in addition to our white-glove approach to onboarding, exceptional customer service, and best-of-breed solutions. There is a reason why our attrition rate is so low. What projects do you still have targeted for this year? Let us help.
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