Our Experience
Lefkowitz Systems has worked on business systems (accounting and operations) for small- to medium-sized businesses for over twenty-five years. We have worked for hundreds of companies in dozens of industries. Chances are good we have done some work (and perhaps a lot of work) in your industry.
We serve manufacturers, distributors, retailers, service providers, professional firms and other, hard-to-classify companies.
For manufacturers, we have helped companies with simple kit assemblies and with multi-level, multi-item bills of material. Some of our clients build for stock while other build custom configurations to order using work order configurators. Some are discrete manufacturers and others are process manufacturers. All of our manufacturing systems support MRP and some of our systems include plan order demand management and shop floor work-flow management (both finite and infinite capacity). If you are a manufacturer, these things will make sense to you.
For distributors, we work with importers, exporters and standard wholesalers selling a wide variety of products locally and shipped. Most operate with one currency but some use multiple currencies. Our systems can handle both. Our importers and exporters wrestle with cost management. We often help them track landed costs on their inventory. Our systems integrate with e-commerce web sites, EDI networks and warehouse shippers (UPS, Fedex, USPS and LTL).
Our systems handle related tasks such as warehouse management, common carrier shipping, bills of lading, demand forecasting, automatic replenishment, special orders and drop shipping. There is more but these are the things we see frequently.
We support “brick and mortar” companies, companies that operate on the web and those which operate in both spaces. Increasingly we see clients move more and more of their sales to their own web sites and also to 3rd-party web merchants such as Ebay and Amazon. For these clients, we are often asked to build import engines between the web stores and their back-office ERP and accounting systems, sometimes with EDI other times with custom interfaces.
We work on our clients’ core accounting functions and also help them improve their operations through custom software modifications. Most of our systems are integrated which means that, among other things, transactions post to the general ledger and sibling modules (e.g. purchasing and accounts payable, sales and accounts receivable) talk to one another.
We find that integrated systems are more efficient, less expensive and less prone to error than non-integrated, ‘best in breed’ systems. For this reason, we much prefer integrated, “end-to-end” systems. But we also have a lot of experience stitching together heterogeneous “best in breed” systems for our clients. With APIs, source code, open databases and custom programming, anything is possible.
We work with clients who run payroll in-house. We tend to discourage internal payroll but, for some, running internal payroll is a requirement.
We have job- and project-focused clients. Some, like engineering, advertising and architectural firms, track time and expenses and bill jobs in a variety of ways (fixed price, % complete, work in process) out of their job costing systems. Others simply ‘catch’ revenues and expenses from other modules in their job costing systems and have no need to bill from job costing. We have solutions for both.
In all cases and for all clients, we apply our experience towards one goal: making your company more profitable. Find out if our experience can your business more profitable. Contact Lefkowitz Systems.