Vivid Flex Delivers Valuable Reporting and Insights that Allow Acadiana Security Plus to Grow its Bottom Line
Based in Lafayette, Louisiana, Acadiana Security Plus, Inc. has been servicing all of Acadiana, its surrounding parishes and Lake Charles since 1997. Acadiana is locally-owned company and operates its own 24/7 monitoring facility to support its high-quality residential and commercial products and services. Throughout its history, the company’s focus has been on providing ultimate protection, backed up with world-class customer service.
One thing Acadiana was missing was the ability to easily extract reports from its accounting and business management software, which hampered the company’s ability to reach its full potential. Paul Courts, Acadiana’s President, wanted the ability to not only run key performance indicator (KPI) reports but also to look at those reports at a high level while also being able to drill down to glean greater insight into potential success and/or problem areas. Among the KPIs Court wanted to measure were attrition, creation multiples, job margins, AR history and aging, and RMR trends.
Getting that information out of SedonaOffice, the company’s accounting and business management software, was technically possible, but required labor-intensive manual efforts like entering data into Excel spreadsheets or writing SQL scripts – which would have to be redone each time someone needed to run a specific report.
“We had all this information available but without an easy way to view complete, up-to-date reports, there was no way to know which areas we should focus on,” Courts said. “We really didn’t have any type of reporting besides income statements and balance sheets because we just didn’t have the resources to do custom reporting. That’s not the way I want to run my business.”
To achieve its business reporting goals, Acadiana chose Vivid Flex from Astute Financial, a Microsoft Excel-based reporting tool that interfaces with SedonaOffice to provide a suite of security industry-specific reports and utilities, known as Astute Reports, which are available in bundles to suit the specific needs of a customer’s business. Eliminating manual data preparation, Vivid Flex simplifies complex reconciliation and schedules and automates report delivery, providing timely information that empowers users to take control and focus on information that is most important to them.
“When I saw what Vivid Flex could do, I didn’t hesitate to jump in,” Courts said.
Astute Financial handled nearly every aspect of deploying Vivid Flex, allowing Courts to continue to focus on running his business rather than having to wade into the nitty gritty of an implementation.
“I did virtually nothing. Astute loaded Flex and the report packs, and we were using it within a day or two. It’s so simple to use that learning it took no time at all,” Courts said. “I played with it all night long and ran reports I’d never seen before – I was just amazed.
“In some ways, we were taking a leap of faith when we decided to implement Vivid Flex, but Astute definitely softened the landing for us,” he added.
Courts has come to rely heavily on Vivid Flex for making decisions that affect his business based on the amount of information and insights the software provides.
“Flex has given me more data than I could ever have hoped for,” Courts said. “It’s very nice to be able to compare our numbers to others easily, especially on the RMR and attrition side. I use no other business reports or financial reporting other than Vivid Flex and Vivid CPM. Those are the only two reporting tools I use.”
Rather than having to create his own reports, Courts can take advantage of the solution’s flexibility to customize the report packs available in Flex. Within the job report pack, he can very easily modify groupings and to which areas jobs are allocated under his unique business model. He can also do this for RMR, attrition and other important items within those report packs.
“I don’t have to fumble around and I don’t have to have a person in-house to pull those reports together. I also don’t have to ask someone to run reports and then wait for them; I just do it when I want it,” Courts said. “Why would you want to continue to hire office staff when you don’t need to?”
The insights Acadiana has gleaned from Vivid Flex have allowed the company to proactively make changes to take advantage of emerging opportunities. For example, because Acadiana watches its attrition numbers very carefully, its customer service department and retention specialists have been given greater leeway to save customers. On top of that, the company has been able to focus efforts on growing business areas.