Linking is Good Thinking
Matching accounting and weigh-out software benefits Northwest Rock — and its customers.
By Mark S. Kuhar
While no two pit and quarry operations are exactly alike, they typically share a common problem: tracking and billing customers' materials purchases efficiently and accurately. At Northwest Rock, Aberdeen Wash., that's no longer an issue. Under the direction of Chuck Hulet, pit manager, that negative has become a positive for both the company and its customers.
Northwest Rock has seamlessly tied its accounting software to its scale software, so that tracking materials purchases, and invoicing them to the clients quickly, accurately and with plenty of detail, is as easy as a few keystrokes on the computer keyboard.
The net result is:
- Increased accuracy in billing.
- Greater details on customer invoices (which customers appreciate greatly).
- Enhanced productivity.
- Faster payment from customers.
"We previously used scale and accounting software that couldn't be linked," says Hulet. "We'd take a report generated by the scale software, accumulate the totals from the reports and hand-price everything, trying to keep track of things like different price lists for individual pits, as well as quantities. We'd try to keep all that straight among hundreds of customers and many thousands of loads per month. It was a nightmare."
Hulet, a Northwest Rock employee since 1986, viewed it as a challenge for which there was a solution. He researched scale and accounting software for six months—visiting or talking with more than 100 manufacturers throughout the United States—before finding software that could meet Northwest Rock's specific needs.
Since 1996, Northwest Rock has used Forefront Construction Accounting Software from Seattle-based Dexter + Chaney for company-wide accounting. That includes Forefront's scale-interface module, which "links" the quarry operations scattered throughout Grays Harbor County to corporate headquarters.
Using scale interface, Northwest Rock each day transfers information from its scale software at the pits and quarries to Forefront at the main office in seconds.
Chuck Hulet visited or talked to 100 manufacturers before deciding on software for Northwest Rock. Gail McDonald (inset) runs inventory like a retail store.
Fast Action
"All the pertinent data that we need to bill a customer—from the date and time of a load, the customer's truck that hauled the load, the destination, purchase order numbers, everything—is transferred from the scale software via modem to Forefront in the server at our office," says Hulet. "It happens in seconds."
That helps Gail McDonald, Northwest Rock's office manager, and her three-person office/accounting staff. "When I come in to the office each morning, I turn on my computer and the batch codes are here from different locations," says McDonald. "The billing is done within a day—which means that the turnaround for our revenues is a lot quicker. Plus, we're helping our customers with the level of billing detail that we're able to give them."
The information is sent each night via modem from the company's three full-time hard-rock quarries. At two other pits which operate on an as-needed basis, a company employee uses a lap-top computer and scale interface to obtain information from the pit's scale software and transfer it to Forefront.
With more than 300 truckloads per day leaving the company's pits during the height of the busy summer season, software plays a critical role in ensuring the company's profitability via accurate tracking and billing.
As Hulet explains, "We have a specially designed scale program that generates a ticket at the scale and keeps a record of every transaction and everything that we need to construct a customer's bill at a later date. The scale ticket has 17 different fields or pieces of information, including date, time, ticket number, weight, even special destinations or messages that a customer may want on the ticket.
"The scale program develops a special file, called a text file, which the scale interface module uses to transfer data from the scale software to the accounting software," Hulet says. "Once the information is in Forefront, we can do whatever the customer needs. We can separate different projects and phases per project on the customer's invoice, allowing them to see that they had X number of tons going to a job at a particular location, or even a particular phase of that job.
"It also will allow different price lists for individual pits or a particular job or a particular phase of a job," Hulet says. "So you can have multiple price breaks dictated by a special number that's entered in the scale software, which Forefront will interpret and take right on through to billing."
Linking
"The trick is to be able to tie [software] together," says Hulet, "and, more importantly, to make sure that they can change when they need to. For example: you might have scale and accounting software that, tied together, works great for you today, taking into account government regulations, taxes, your pricing and countless other factors.
"But what if something changes tomorrow?," Hulet says. "Do you rip out your accounting and scale software and start over? You need to use software that can be updated very quickly and painlessly to meet your constantly changing needs."
Hulet emphasized that both Forefront and the company's scale software are written in fourth-generation programming languages, which enables both Northwest Rock and the software vendors to revise and update the software simply.
Inventory
McDonald uses Forefront for all of Northwest Rock's accounting purposes, including accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, and, most importantly, inventory.
"Our inventory capability is similar to a retail store," says McDonald. "With each transaction, a retail store depletes inventory right there at the cash register. In essence, we're doing the same thing here. With each transaction, we know where our inventory is."
Neither McDonald nor Hulet can quantify—in dollars and cents—the exact benefits of the scale interface connection between Forefront and the company's scale software, but the increases in productivity and office efficiency have been "tremendous," according to McDonald. "We can now do in minutes the tracking and billing work that used to require perhaps 20 hours per week," she says.
Reproduced by permission from: Pit & Quarry, April, 1998.
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