subject: Adding Functionality Has Never Been Easier Than With FileMaker [print this page] Adding Functionality Has Never Been Easier Than With FileMaker
The accounts payable group tracks hundreds of invoices a month, matching together amounts, vendors and receipt dates in order to follow good accounting practices. Concerned over the volume of invoices and the potential need to hire more staff, the company controller requests software that will streamline the collection, distribution and reconciliation of all invoices. After conversations with the current financial systems vendor and third-party integrators, the conclusion is that the costs to install the software solution seem prohibitive to implement, and would require a software upgrade before implementation could even begin. A better solution would be to enhance the current accounts payable screen by adding a few fields as part of a template that could be used by everyone in accounts payable. Then, another template could be created for approvers. After identifying who should input the invoices and how they should be sent and approved, the software would map each event and create an approval workflow with updates to the templates. What would even be better is if all these features were already created and a business could simply plug them into the existing software. FileMaker software is built on the idea of ease of use, and attempts to put the software into the hands of the end user with a minimum of technology consulting. Taking the complexity out of adding features to software, FileMaker Pro templates allow businesses to take advantage of pre-existing forms for common tasks like inventory, payables, invoicing and more. Templates can be added on the fly, so the system does not need to be shut down to add functionality. Extending the technology, FileMaker plug-ins add versatility to the FileMaker software with automation tools like workflow. The software is so versatile that developers from around the world can share their ideas and tools in the form of plug-ins that customers can download and add to their system sometimes free of charge.
