Microsoft’s decision to drop Microsoft Office Accounting and hand over support to Mamut came as a ‘bolt out of the blue’ for dedicated users of Microsoft’s SME product, many of whom had dipped their toes into business accounting systems for the very first time. Of course there is no compulsion to move away from MOA since Mamut has pledged to maintain support in accordance with Microsoft’s own support policy. But now that the dust has settled on the news and we are approaching a new calendar year, now seems a good time to consider what Mamut Office Professional has to offer existing users of Microsoft Office Professional, seeking a solution for the longer term, says, Gary Simon, FSN’s managing editor.
For many organisations, a high dependency on business systems creates a unique set of demands and expectations between software supplier and customer. Whereas businesses can move premises, change their fleet of delivery vans, choose a new firm of accountants or a retail bank at the drop of a hat, business systems and processes are so deeply engrained that it is impossible to make instant decisions. The relationship with a provider of business software is necessarily for the long term, underpinned by dependability and trust. Most small businesses have ambitions to grow and they want their business software to grow in sympathy.
It is an interesting place to start a comparison between MOA and Mamut since MOA was very much designed with the small business in mind, with limited scalability and upgrade potential. To all intents and purposes Microsoft Office Professional was the top of the stack (unless a business was prepared to leap to Microsoft Dynamics) with no obvious headroom for growth if a customer outgrew the functionality of MOA or the number of concurrent users that the system could support. By contrast Mamut’s approach is very different. The same source code underpins the applications from a single user Mamut Office application through to the fully blown Mamut Enterprise E5 supporting up to 20 users - all very comforting for a small business with an eye to the future.
In broad terms, users of Microsoft Office Professional will be considering a move to Mamut Office Professional the closest equivalent product within the Mamut range. However, even a cursory glance will confirm that Mamut has considerably more to offer.
Users making the migration will quickly feel at home with the Mamut interface, with both products sharing a common approach to systems navigation. For example, both products offer a process or workflow driven approach using a flowchart style diagram as the most obvious means of launching a program, closely followed by more traditional drop down menus.
But Mamut takes a more logical approach. For example, the “order to cash” workflow or sales cycle anticipates that businesses may need to view, add or amend products before generating a sales quotation whereas product management is hidden from view in MOA, nested in the “customers” and “suppliers” menu structures which share the product file.
The workflow itself is more realistically crafted in Mamut with arrows (process flows) clearly depicting the possibility that the sales cycle could start with a sales quotation or a sales order or both. It may be a relatively minor point, but the inclusion of stock management and a better workflow presentation illustrates Mamut’s deep appreciation of business practice. Throughout the system each menu item (Sales, Purchases, Product & Warehouse) is accompanied by its own relevant dashboard. For example, the Sales home page shows quotations outstanding and unprocessed orders giving immediate insight into workloads, potential backlogs and transactions that need chasing.
One of the most noticeable differences in Mamut is that the entire system revolves around contact management, deeply embedding customer, potential customer and supplier interactions within the application suite. (MOA of course provided integration with Business Contact Manager, but these activities felt like an adjunct to the business system held in a separate area rather than an integral part of the overall system). Every interaction, such as an email, telephone conversation and related documents, transactions and web links can be captured within the system and used to make a small business more responsive and competitive. User defined follow up tasks or automated systems generated tasks add to the richness of the Mamut environment, ensuring that key activities such as the following up a quotation or collecting a customer payment in a timely way.
Users moving away from MOA will also notice the richness of Mamut’s functionality in other areas. For example, a customer quote shows the gross profit and gross margin at the time that the transaction is generated and Mamut offers much more sophisticated options around delivery methods, units of measure, packaging and labelling. In fact the stock system as a whole in Mamut offers much broader functionality, around recording warehouse, locations, pricing and margins as well as the impact of price changes.
Job or project costing is another area in which Mamut leads from the front (rather than being relegated to the customer menus as it is in MOA). Like other areas of the product it offers deeper functionality, such as sub-projects, better insight into profitability and the full panoply of activity/contact management which is particularly important in a project setting. (If timesheet processing is a requirement then Mamut users will need to use the Enterprise edition of the software)
The integrated web shop application is a welcome addition with no comparable functionality within MOA. Designed for a small business the E-commerce functionality takes the complexity out of creating a web site by allowing the Mamut Office Professional database to serve as the ‘engine’ of a web shop hosted by Mamut as a service. This means that product and sales information, such as items for sale, amounts in stock, sales orders and payments taken over the web can be shared automatically between the web presence and the local Mamut system installed on a network.
So if the move to Mamut provides a great deal of upside is there any downside? The answer seems to be no. In almost every area Mamut outshines MOA. Integration is also not a stumbling block. Mamut integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Office and Outlook providing tight links for Excel, Word and email in a way that offers parity with MOA. Of course the pricing and support arrangements around Mamut are different but there are a variety of offers and incentives available to make a permanent switch to Mamut an attractive proposition. For those users that do not require the full sophistication of Mamut Office Professional then there is the Standard version and other offerings within the Mamut stable that are less expensive. Of course there is nothing to stop MOA users sitting tight but with development effectively at an end then planning for the future seems like a sensible move.
