Your ERP knows what you invoiced. Your job system knows what was done. Your CRM knows what's coming.
None of them knows your job margin.
That isn't a criticism of any of those systems. Each one does its own job well, and the reporting that comes with your ERP is usually perfectly good at what it was built for: the ledger, the aged debt, the month-end close. The trouble is that the questions a finance or operations director actually gets asked rarely sit inside one system.
The questions that cut across systems
Think about the questions that come up in a board meeting or a monthly review:
- Which jobs made money last month, and which ones didn't?
- Which customers are worth more than they look, once you count the work as well as the invoices?
- How much of the pipeline will turn into work our engineers can actually deliver next quarter?
- Is overtime on a contract eating the margin we priced in?
Every one of those needs at least two systems. Job margin needs the invoice from the ERP and the labour and materials from the job system. Customer value needs the CRM, the job history and the ledger. Capacity needs the pipeline and the people.
So someone builds it by hand
In most businesses we meet, the answer is a spreadsheet. Every month someone exports from each system, pastes the results together, fixes the customers that are spelt three different ways, and builds the pack.
It works, after a fashion. But it has three costs that are easy to underestimate:
- It's late. By the time the pack is ready, the month it describes is long gone, and so is the chance to act on it.
- It depends on one person. When they're on holiday, or they leave, the pack goes with them.
- Nobody fully trusts it. Finance and operations bring different numbers to the same meeting, and the first half hour goes on working out which one is right.
Joining systems is harder than it looks
If it were just a matter of putting two exports side by side, nobody would still be doing it by hand. Joining systems properly means:
- Matching the same customer across systems, even when the accounts code, the CRM name and the job system's site name don't agree.
- Agreeing one definition of revenue, margin or a completed job, and applying it the same way every time.
- Keeping history, so you can see a trend rather than a snapshot.
- Keeping it up to date without anyone having to remember to run it.
That's a data job, not a reporting job. It's why many reporting projects stall: the dashboards are the easy part, and the joining underneath is the hard part.
How Vizora Data Forge does it
Vizora Data Forge is the managed data layer that does the joining for you. It reads each of your systems, cleans and matches the data, and keeps one certified set of numbers in your own private database on Microsoft Azure in the UK.
It works alongside the reporting you already have. Nothing in your ERP, job system or CRM is replaced or changed. Your ERP's own reports carry on as they are; Data Forge adds the numbers they can't see.
On top of that one set of numbers sit Vizora Reports, the Vizora AI Assistant and Vizora AI Alerts. Because they all read from the same certified tables, the dashboard, the assistant and the alert email give the same answer.
Data Forge connects today to Dynamics 365 Business Central, Sage, Xero and Access Dimensions; BigChange, Re-flow and FocalPoint; Pipedrive, Salesforce, SugarCRM and Dynamics 365 CRM; People HR; and Excel. The full list is on the integrations page.
Start with one question
The easiest way to see whether this would help is to start with the question that takes your team longest to answer today.
Our free reporting health check takes 30 minutes. We'll look at the systems you run and the questions you can't answer quickly, and send you a one-page summary within a day of what could be joined up and what it would cost. No cost and no obligation. Book your health check.