Millennium Service Desk Outsourced Unit4 Financials (previously known as Coda Financials) Support & Maintenance

“For two years we are able to rely on Millennium’s Service Desk and are happy that we found a highly competent and responsive partner to work with.

Their ability to apply their knowledge about systems and finance and accounting requirements to our needs are second to none.”

Stefan KlotzManager Accounting and Controlling, Thermo Fisher

“We have used Millennium’s Service Desk for a number of years. In our experience, the service received has been excellent. The staff are responsive and their knowledge is exceptional”.

Matthew CappsFinancial Controller, Kingsley Healthcare

“Working as part of an internal IT support team, covering many applications, keeping focus across all bases to provide an effective level of support to colleagues can be difficult. Knowledge can also become a limiting factor. Having Millennium Consulting on board to assist with this; not only provides the ability to increase my knowledge from system experts, it can take away some concern of being unable to support my colleagues in the very busy times. This does not mean they should be the backup option as they can also assist with many proactive tasks for system maintenance.

Use of the support portal is easy and effective – offering that one focal point for sharing and updating information for all to see. The service desk team are very efficient, knowledgeable, and on hand to assist with any requirement asked of them.”

Matthew BrettIT Application Support Lead, The Orders of St John Care Trust

“We have found Millennium Consulting to be very professional and very knowledgeable in the field of Financial Application consultancy. They have helped us implement Coda Procurement and Invoice Matching in a competent and efficient manner. I would have no qualms in recommending this organization.”

Nancy RomancePurchasing Manager, Ohio CAT

Contents

The Support Problem Pages 4 - 5

The Solution Page 6

Our Clients Page 7

Benefits Page 8

The Team Page 9

Supported Products Page 10

Application Support Page 11

Application Maintenance Pages 12 - 13

Technical Support Page 14

Training Page 15

Technical Maintenance Page 16 - 17

Carbon Footprint Page 18

Next Steps Page 19

The Support Problem

Unit4 Financials (previously known as Coda) is one of the most flexible and powerful “best-of-breed” accounting systems in the world, but like all highly configurable applications, to keep up with organisational growth and regulatory changes, clients need application support experts to keep the system running, ensure that end users are fully supported and to make/implement any configuration changes they require.

Typically, client’s employ in-house Coda Financials application support specialist(s) to support the finance system but as these staff move on in their careers, get promoted or leave the business, the in-depth application, technical and process knowledge left behind in the business can deteriorate.

Unfortunately, it’s also often the case that ongoing investment to support re-configuration of the finance system gets put to the bottom of the pile when it comes to updates and maintenance, so before long clients can find themselves in a variety of difficult positions.

Some may find that they are now being forced to operate with a finance system that is performing inefficiently as it was configured years ago for a different or smaller

This is where Millennium’s outsourced Service Desk can help

business. It may not have been kept up with current working practices and so is not fit for their current requirements, or perhaps they are running on an unsupported version of the application and may perhaps be putting themselves at risk of technology failure with no/limited in-house skills to improve the situation.

In all these cases, our experience has shown that the client’s finance team often have to develop laborious and unnecessary workarounds where users are hindered from operating efficiently and effectively. The result – a lot of wasted time and effort that could be better deployed on more value added activities.

In other cases it may be that clients already have excellent in-house support skills but there might be specific areas of the application that they are not familiar with so may need some specific technical advice and help on the application and need a helping hand/expert to call on? Or it might be that the clients in-house support team are fully tied up on day-to-day support matters and so are unable to help the business implement important change projects? Or maybe they just want some holiday back-up or cover for other forms of absence.

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The Solution

Millennium Consulting established the Customer Service Desk in 2015 and currently supports organisations using Unit4 Financials (previously known as Coda Financials) across the world.

The Millennium Service Desk team currently consists of consultant grade application and technical experts who have many years of experience of working with the UNIT4 Coda Financials system and are available to help answer any questions that you or your users have.

The Millennium Service Desk can be engaged to complement your current Unit4 Financials support & maintenance agreement (which provides for error logging, product fixes and new releases) by giving you access to accounting and technical experts who can answer any of your “How to” and Set-up/configuration questions and assist you with your ongoing system maintenance tasks.

Using a state-of-the-art ticketed support management system, Millennium’s team of experts are at end of a phone, email or remote dial-in, in a matter of minutes to assist you with your system. Their prompt involvement can help you resolve problems quickly and with the minimum of lost time and with client portal access to our ticketing system you will always have full visibility over the status of all calls logged including full SLA monitoring and issue escalation features.

Our Clients

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Benefits

• Minimised headcount

• Lower operational and labour costs

• Improved business focus

• Business process streamlining

• Increased expertise (250+ years of experience)

• Immediate support for all modules from an accredited Unit4 partner

• Quicker response and resolution times

• Optimal system performance

• Reduced systems risk

• Increased technology landscape awareness

• New user training

• Reduced carbon footprint

• Resilience

• Peace of mind

The Team

Managed by the Service Desk Manager based at Millennium Head Office in Hythe Kent, the current service desk team consists of 10 UNIT4 Financials Application and 6 Unit4 Financials Technical consultants.

Each consultant has between 8 and 30 years experience of working with Unit4 Financials, giving a combined team experience of 282 years.

For clients with international support needs then Millennium’s UK and Europe team service desk team provide support from 8.00am GMT until 6.00pm, then the US service desk team take over until 10.00pm GMT (5.00pm EST) Monday to Friday. (Note that out of hours and weekend support is also available on request). Our consultants are based out of the following locations and where necessary can provide on-site assistance.

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UK Head OfficeHythe, KentService Desk ManagerApplication Consultant X 1Technical Consultant X 1

LondonApplication Consultant X 1

Midlands/NorthApplication Consultant X 4Technical Consultant X 3

US Head OfficeBoston, MAApplication Consultant X2

EU Head OfficeMilan, ItalyTechnical Consultant X 1Application Consultant X 2

BudapestTechnical Consultant X 1

Supported Products

• Unit4 Financials V4 - V15 (previously known as Coda Financials)

• Unit4 Purchase Order Processing (POP)• Unit4 Purchase Invoice Matching (PIM)• Unit4 Financials Billing• Unit4 Financials Fixed Assets• Unit4XL (CodaXL)• Unit4 Financials Workflow• Unit4 Financials Flex-fields• Unit4 Financials Analyser• Unit4 Travel & Expenses• Unit4 People Planning• Unit4 Time Management• Unit4 Italian Localisation• Unit4 Financial Performance Management • Unit4 RAMS (Retail)• Millennium - AutoCash• Millennium - Interface Manager• Millennium - B2C• Millennium - RA4C• Millennium Italian Digital Invoicing

Application Support

Free up your key resources, reduce risk and keep up to date with change.

The Millennium Application Consulting team are not only experts in Unit4 Financials (previously known as Coda Financials) but also work with finance teams. They will support your finance/business users with advice on “Best Practice” set-up and answer their ‘How to?’ questions.

At busy times such as the month-end or during staff holidays, sickness leave or maternity, our team are at hand to take over and assist with tasks. Users can also shadow the service desk consultant to learn how to perform these tasks themselves in future.

Typical application support tasks include:

Unit4 Financials

• Add new users

• Train new users

• Add new companies

• Acquisitions/mergers and new chart of

accounts

• Add supplier / customer

• Security profile administration

• Portal customisation

• Report creation & maintenance

• Left / right rule set-up

• Hierarchy grouping

• Workflow set-up - documents and

elements

• Allocations – basis and proportional

• Multi company combined reporting

• Create remittances using print formatter

• Create payfiles (eg BACS/SEPA)

Unit4 Assets

• Bulk load assets

• Copy asset config. across companies

• Configure asset masters

Unit4XL (CodaXL)

• Setup journal loader

• Setup browse details

• Setup browse reports

• Setup balance (budget) loader

• Setup master data

Purchasing & Invoice Matching

• Bulk load Items

• Copy company

• Set up self billing

• Set up deferred matching

• Create PO’s using print formatter

Billing

• Bulk load Items

• Copy company

• Create sales invoices using print

formatter

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Application Maintenance

Our Application team will work with you to put together a schedule to ensure that all the required maintenance tasks are carried out by either the Millennium Service Desk Applications team, or your own team with our support. Tasks typically include:

Running the Year-End and System Integrity

Running year-end is essential to close off the year and lock down the information for that year so that it can not be changed in future. It also helps with system performance. If you have not run a year-end, when carrying out tasks like background matching, the system will be trying to match all the data since the last time you ran a month or year-end. If this was many years ago, there could be huge amounts of data and this may take more processing power than your system was designed to handle and can cause your server to shut down. Includes running Document and Balance Audits an integral part of year-end processing.

Running the year-end is not a particularly difficult process, but many of our clients prefer to have one of our expert Application team on hand to assist them through the process.

Reports Maintenance

Organisations are continually growing and evolving and new regulatory requirements are regularly being released across the world. As a result your Unit4 Financials and Unit4XL reports may need updating. The Millennium Application team can develop or amend reports for you, or assist and train you how to do this yourself.

Workflow Hierarchy Maintenance

As people leave and join your organisation, or get promoted or have a change of responsibility, you will need to amend the workflow hierarchy. This requires a good understanding of Unit4 Financials workflow.

Archiving

Depending on your specific requirements, or the amount of data input to your Unit4 Financials database, archiving should be scheduled every 1, 3 or 6 months.

If archiving is not carried out, the response time for queries/searches/browses/transactional reports could start slowing down over time. This may be because your users are searching through millions of lines of data containing transactions paid/matched over a year ago, which may be irrelevant to their day to day reporting requirements.

Within Financials, archiving data does not mean that you can no longer browse it. When running a query, you have the option to search the live data, or include archived data. The majority of your browse requests are probably required to search only on active and most recent data so if you are regularly archiving, your searches of data will only view relevant live data, maintain optimal search response times and not slow down over time.

The Millennium Application team can help you set up the archiving feature in your Unit4 Financials system, then train the users to run the archiving at the agreed scheduled time.

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Technical Support

With a combined experience of over 65 years supporting Unit4 Financials (previously known as Coda Financials), there aren’t many technical issues our team have not seen and resolved in the past. If your system goes down, or becomes unresponsive, runs slowly or interfaces fail, our technical team can be remoted onto your system within minutes to investigate and help you resolve the issue.

Typical technical issues and resolutions include:

• Server restarts

• Application re-installations

• Error log checking

• Interface errors

• Unit4XL (CodaXL) connection to Unit4

Financials

• Unit4 Financials services have ceased

running

• Deploy web server (Wildfly/Glassfish/

Tomcat) updates

• Trouble shooting Unit4 Financials

Application services

• Custom font deployments for the

cheques

• Custom scripts to automate

production to test database copy

• On demand production company

copy to the test database

• Language pack deployment

• Develop, setup and deploy Unit4

structure output API for multi formatted

data extraction (csv, xml, txt etc)

Training

Many of the Service Desk team are also experienced trainers and can provide remote training for your staff. Whether the training you require is applications or technical, or for new staff/beginner, intermediate or advance, or for a particular specialist module or simply for something you do not know; just raise a training request via a support ticket and one of our team will contact you to arrange an agenda and a convenient time for the training.

Typical training sessions include:

Basic• Starting to use Financials• Home page & menu• Favourites & history• Icons & navigation• Dates• Enquiries• Running a report

Accounts AssistantEntry clerk training plus:• Creating a journal• Posting a journal• Intercompany• Reconciliation• Changing periods• Reversing journals• Audit reports• Year end process• Designing reports• Create asset type• Asset depreciation• Disposing of assets• Unit4XL journal loader• Unit4XL browse details• Unit4XL browse reports• Unit4XL balance loader• Unit4XL master data

Entry Clerk• Dates• Intray & management• Enquiries• Accounts receivable• Add customer• Enter customer invoice• Accepting receipts• Accounts payable• Add supplier• Enter supplier invoice• Posting to the intray• Posting to the books• Creating a payment run

Super User / IT Sysyems• Customisation• Administration• Company creation• Archiving• Masters• Reports• Workflow• Unit4XL• Dashboard design and modifications• Creating data selectors and presenters• Creating dataviews and metadata for Unit4 Financials internal or external tables

AccountantAccounts Assistant plus:• Company creation• Archiving• Elements• Selectors & presenters• Currency & exchange rates• Banks• Tax codes• Documents• Changing periods• Reversing journals• Audit reports• Running a report

Technical Maintenance• Releases installations• Log table maintenance• Link table maintenance• Web server log maintenance• App server log maintenance• Refresh TEST environment• Database re-indexing• performance tuning• App re-installations• On demand production company copy to the Test database• Language pack deployment• Develop/setup/deploy Unit4 structure output API for data extraction (csv, xml, txt etc)

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Technical Maintenance

Millennium’s expert Technical Unit4 Financials Consultants can monitor and maintain your system so you don’t have to. It is essential that your system is kept up-to-date, error free and performing at optimal speeds. For this to be achieved, the required systems maintenance may include:

• New release installs

Previously known as service packs, Unit4 provide new Releases for the latest two versions of Unit4 Financials every 6 weeks.

New releases contain bug fixes and also new functionally.

• Unit4 Financials environment monitoring, including:

◊ Log table maintenance◊ Link table maintenance◊ Application and web server log

maintenance

• Back-up LIVE and refresh to TEST

Taking a backup of your LIVE system and refreshing your TEST system should be carried out periodically, depending on how much development you carry out on your system.

Having an identical TEST and LIVE system is important as whenever you amend or develop your system, or add new modules or install Releases, you need to be certain that even though your testing was successful in TEST, it will be the same in LIVE.

• Database re-indexing and performance tuning

It ensures that Unit4 Financials continues to perform at optimal speeds when querying data from the database.

• SSL Certificates

• Certificate conversion and deployment activities

• Web server Upgrades (Wildfly)

Applying patches and upgrade the Wildfly software as approved by UNIT4

• Microsoft Updates support

You should not set your Microsoft updates to automatic. When installing Microsoft updates, you must first install on your TEST system to ensure everything still works as it should. Unit4’s releases contain updates to ensure your system is compatible with the Microsoft updates.

• Regular Technical Reviews to cover

• Technical set up

◊ Database and application server performance

◊ RDBMS update review◊ Operating system environment error

checking◊ Releases/service pack check◊ Database maintenance check◊ Database local disk backup check◊ Web servers check◊ Core thick client configuration check◊ Test environment set up◊ Disaster recovery review◊ Reporting server check◊ License audit◊ Bespoke software review

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Carbon Footprint

There are two reasons why outsourcing work to Millennium Service Desk and help towards reducing your carbon footprint.

1. Millennium is a carbon neutral organisation.

As of 2019, Millennium Consulting has taken steps to ensure that the company is carbon neutral.

Millennium has achieved this by offsetting all of it’s energy and staff travel carbon emissions by taking part in a scheme to plant native trees in Kenya.

Millennium appointed an internal environmental team who has developed Sustainability Work Policies and invested time in training employees on the importance of sustaining the environment.

Some of these activities include, the elimination of single use plastics from offices, the introduction of more plants into offices, paperless work practices and also the head office team has organised local beach clean littler pick events on the South Kent Coast.

2. Reduced headcount or consultancy requirements.

Every person in the workplace has a carbon foot print, their travel to work, energy consumption, and indirect organisational processes associated with employing a permanent member of staff. Or when you hire contractors, this typically involves even more travel and the use of extra equipment and resources.

By utilising Millennium Outsourced Service Desk, 100% of support is carried out remotely. The consultants work from their home offices so there is no travel required to either Millennium offices or the customers.

The only indirect organisational process is agreeing and purchasing a Service Desk contract every 6, 12 or 24 months.

Next Steps

If you are interested in Millennium’s Service Desk, your Millennium Account Manager will work with you to assess your support requirement. This is to identify how many hours of support per month you require and if you require just a few hours to help your team out when they need it, or if you require a fully outsourced support team, or somewhere in between.

Once the estimate has been agreed, your Service Desk contract will be drawn up and sent to you for approval.

Typically Service Desk contracts start with an initial duration of 3 months. When the first 3 month period is complete, we review the usage to identify if our estimate of required hours was correct, or if you require more or less hours going forward.

If you use up your hours before the end of the contract, we will continue to provide your support and invoice you for any overtime at the end of each month, or we can renew the contract early. If you reach the contract end date with a number of unused hours, you do not lose them, we either roll them into the next contract, or you can use them for consultancy.

Depending on the complexity of your system and processes, we will either carry out an on-site systems and process review and support handover documentation project, or will send you a support handover web-form to complete. The information provided in either scenario provides Millennium’s Service Desk team

with the knowledge required to provide a fast issues resolution service.

Once we have you set-up on our internal Support/Ticketing system, a kick-off online meeting will be arranged to introduce your nominated users to our team and a demo of how the service works will be provided, with a walkthrough of the ticketing and on-line portal process. During this meeting we will also discuss your maintenance and account management requirements and a schedule will be agreed.

You will then be LIVE on Millennium Service Desk system and all your nominated users will be able to access the Millennium team by email, telephone or through your online portal. All information will be logged in the Service Desk ticketing system available to view at any time through the portal.

Millennium’s consultants will answer queries via phone or email, and when required access your system (adhering to your organisation security protocols) via a direct VPN or using a web meeting service such as WebEx or TeamViewer.

At the end of every month our Service Desk Manager will email you with a usage report. You can also view your usage and tickets by logging into your on-line portal.

At the end of the first contract period, If we are happy that the estimate of required hours was correct, then the contract can be renewed for a further period of 6, 12 or 24 months.

UK & APACPhil Jacobsservicedesk@millenniumconsulting.com+44 (0) 845 604 4262

Contact your local rep:

US & CanadaMike Robinsonservicedesk@millenniumconsulting.com+39 (603) 657 0634

EuropeDaniel Acton-Bondservicedesk@millenniumconsulting.com+39 348 8912 800

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www.unit4financials-millennium.com