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Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  00:00

Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab sponsored by CPA practice advisor, with your hosts, Randy Johnston, and Brian Tankersley.

Randy Johnston  00:10

Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. Well, I want to talk to you today about an accounting software product called Saima Cy MA and their payroll system. Now Simon has been around a long time since 1980. Good system, a lot of legacy SmartCode. Inside their strong job costing the owner is an ex cost accountant when he bought this company, he improved the the good cost accounting that was in there, but really went for a lot of different costing attributes and did a great, but they saw an opportunity in payroll. And I have frequently recommended Saima payroll as an alternative to into its payrolls and others. And of course, there’s a lot of conversation around the payroll processing that’s being done against the Intuit systems today. But Simon actually saw the payroll opportunity and then they expanded even further into p e o payroll software. So today, besides Saima handling, general accounting, distribution, light manufacturing, and not for profit accounting, well, I can’t think of another system that is more friendly for doing payroll at volume, particularly if you want to run it in house. Or if you’re going to run PEOs. Now that’s that sounds like a whole bunch of claims. But if you’ve got franchise payroll needs, regular payroll needs, PEO payroll, staffing, they pretty much do all of those things with great success. Now, Brian, again, you’ve been around Saima for a long time, you’ve made many trips with me to Tempe to meet with their management team, the the personnel that are involved, there are still much the same. So not a lot of turnover in the company, the innovation continues, I should stop and ask what you’d like our listeners to know about sign or payroll

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  02:10

and what it does multiclient multiclient? Well, it does fiscal and employer agent. And what’s that fiscal employer agent, let’s say that you are, you know, Randy and I both have lost our parents now. But you know, in their later days, both of us had people that had to come in, to help out, you know, kind of, to kind of to help our parents during their last few years with with needs and things like that. And so in many states, you can actually set it up where the payroll the amounts for it are paid by the by the, I guess by the state, okay, so there’s many states have programs for this. And so this can actually be used to handle people. Because again, as kind of agents in here with this, you can of course, do corporate payroll, franchise, payroll is another one in here. And then staffing payroll. But but you know, again, it’s a, it’s an interesting product at again, and they, they, they don’t play games with privacy of the data, which I think is one of the more important things begin to know about it.

Randy Johnston  03:24

So you know, when it comes to an overall system, the the cost of this product has always been conservative. And it turns out that they have maintained so much of this through the years, that they have very few exceptions or regulations at any state or any locality that they don’t process correctly. Now you got the big boys that they compete against, and they routinely will do things that many of the bigs can’t do. And they clearly do it at lower cost than most of the bigs can do. So that part is always, you know, very, very insightful. Now, I am just going to step back throughout a payroll for a minute, Brian, and just talk a little bit about some of the other versions that this platform has. There’s two distinct versions, and with the discontinuance of the QuickBooks Desktop products, in late July of 24. It is clear that, you know, users have been on QuickBooks Desktop a long time. Sometimes just can’t move over to QuickBooks Online or Xero, or any of their SAS competitors. They’re not feature rich enough. And we’ve talked about other prop products, process resource operation planning products like spire or like accountant, accounting suite, those types of products.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  04:51

And again, those products sit in the mezzanine kind of above the lobby of QuickBooks, that’s the entry level, but not quite up to the mid Mark. it or the enterprise level. So again, this this prop is, is really, again, kind of that weird mezzanine where you’ve graduated from QuickBooks but you haven’t quite been promoted all the way up to NetSuite or a sage intact.

Randy Johnston  05:13

Yeah. And so it is my belief that Simas financial management system can readily run businesses up into the 50 to 70 million range, which sounds amazingly large, but I have used it on businesses as small as a million. They also have a not for profit addition. But the accounting software modules are complete. You know, in the old days, we used to say glamper, General Ledger, AP and so forth. But they have accounts payable accounts receivable, after the fact accounting for right up work, bank reconciliations client billing, Employee Self Service modules, GL, they track grants, obviously, they’re not for profit effort. They do HR, and they’ve actually got a pretty good HR system, do inventory control, they do Job Costing payroll, we started this conversation about they do project tracking, they do purchase orders, sales, orders, staffing, and then run all of it through their system manager and user ports. Now they have other internal and third party add ons that they can use, they do a manage backup. In fact, they were one of the very first companies that agreed to backup in Seagate’s data centers down in Dallas. And they maintain that relationship for a long time. And they use a lot of different report writers. But I want you to get a flavor. That Saima is a very robust, small business accounting system, and a super strong payroll system that covers pretty much all different payroll needs. Now, again, I don’t want to make claims that the vendor can’t live up to, but I will just comment, like, Brian, I know you’ve done in another technology lab. When I first started my nmci businesses, we ran Saima, we were Simas largest reseller in Kansas, in in the early days. And it was a wonderful product, we put Simon in, in many, many places. And, uh, you know, I’ve never, never really thought that there were many replacements that were better than Simon. So when I sold my original operations, you know, that Simon authorization went with that business. And, you know, we tried a number of other products since then. And I’ll tell you, those were bad decisions that I made. I should have just stayed with Simon the whole bloody way. Because I was thinking, oh, we’ll try this. It sounds like it has more. And I won’t name the products that we tried that were not so good. But, you know, if I could have had a do over, I haven’t made too many business operational mistakes. But that’s one that I did make, and actually made it multiple times before I really became so focused on accounting software features and helping others pick accounting software. So that’s a long story brand you’ve probably never even heard me tell before. And, you know, as it turns out, you know, it’s summer season and Hutchinson municipal band plays, and I ran the band payroll on Saima

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  08:24

Sonos, who knows what the way QuickBooks is going to Pharaoh, maybe you need to go back.

Randy Johnston  08:30

lb. Anyway, that’s kind of a long side rant on the accounting side and the payroll side. But Brian, I just wanted our listeners to get a flavor that Saima, you know, as a company has been around since 1980. So this is a 45 year old company, roughly, that still has great accounting products and superb payroll products. What else should our listeners know about sign up?

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  08:59

You know, I think we’ve covered most of it. I think, again, the non for profits. And the grant tracking, I think is a particular thing that is that is problematic in a lot of our cloud applications. And so, you know, I don’t know where you can get good grant tracking in the cloud anywhere. And so this is this is one of the key needs, I think that we have and not for profits and even in governmental to, to manage grants and to do the costing related to those and allocations and things like that. And so I think that’s, you know, besides the payroll and the specialty payroll items we talked about, I think that that’s the major piece that that really strikes me you know, you know, I’ve I’ve done work with governmental and not for profits for years and years and years. And, and it’s, you know, I see so many deficiencies in how people manage grants and how they budget for them and how they, how they handle those things. And let’s be honest here, okay. If you do it right, grants are free. Money, this is somebody else paying your operating costs for a particular service, okay? And if you if you run it, well, you can do a great job and you don’t have any problems. And you can pass through all those costs. And if it doesn’t run, well, then you can’t pass through all those costs, and you get to eat them. And so I want you to get here that, that that grant thing, I think is one of the special things about Simon. Yeah,

Randy Johnston  10:25

so one other closing thought that I’d have on this, many of our counting technology labs are overviews of systems. And here’s a case where this product is so broad. We could have talked for the period of this podcast about general ledger capabilities alone, we could have talked about costing alone we could have talked about, and I don’t how many sessions we actually could have made on this one product. But

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  10:52

it wasn’t been pretty dry. Now, if you’d done, I get that. We

Randy Johnston  10:56

didn’t do it that way. But it is a great example of being able to get many of the functions you need from a single sole source supplier. And as opposed to me apologizing like I often do. This modules week, that module is weak. There’s not very many weak modules inside this product. The GL strong, the inventory strong, the costing is strong. There’s just a lot about it that I think is well done and has been for a long time. But they don’t spend a lot of marketing. So a lot of people don’t know about them. They just been quietly doing what they do, and having a good life along the way and helping lots of companies along the way. So I just want you to be aware that they’re still out there and they could be a fine alternative. For those of you who are, you know, suffering through the QuickBooks Desktop or have payroll needs, or not for profit needs. I mean, that’s all kind of a 123 punch on this particular product. So, we do appreciate you listening in on this version of the accounting Technology Lab about Simon and we’ll talk to you again real soon.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  12:07

Thank you for sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the technology lab, from CPA practice advisor. Have a great week.

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