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Microsoft Great Plains takes SARS service to a higher plane


Johannesburg, 01 Jul 2001

The South African Revenue Service (SARS) has significantly boosted its service levels to internal and external customers with the installation of heavyweight accounting software. The Microsoft Great Plains eEnterprise software is set to save the taxman time and money - and ease the woes of frustrated workers and creditors - by slashing fraud and increasing productivity.

The installation by Microsoft Great Plains Partner, Two Inc, has streamlined a process that would normally be tackled manually, reducing the number of erroneous entries and the time spent correcting the errors by centralising the data.

The Microsoft Great Plains system has seen SARS move away from a four-user General Ledger system using a Btrive database. The new system caters for 38 concurrent and more than 80 registered users, and data size of approximately 10 Gigabytes.

SARS is one of the biggest local Microsoft Great Plains eEnterprise sites on MS SQL, with about 12 000 employees in 75 branch offices around the country, 40 382 active General Ledger (GL) accounts, 12 000 active creditors, 2 255 active debtors and 2 315 active items.

"In an organisation as large as SARS, the sheer volume of transactions makes controlling accounts a hazard," said Chris Harris, MD of Microsoft Great Plains Africa. "One of its primary aims was to be able to significantly reduce the number of erroneous entries and the subsequent time spent correcting entries. This is now being achieved using Microsoft Great Plains Dynamics."

Running manual comparisons between its bank statements and Dynamics was impossible in the past due to the sheer volumes. SARS is now using the power of Open Database Connectivity on its Microsoft SQL database, which enables it to extract data directly from tables and perform automatic comparisons with electronic bank statements.

"When SARS adopted Microsoft Great Plains Dynamics as its financial system, it had to cater for the fact that financial information from its HR system had to be integrated into Microsoft Great Plains Dynamics. This was done using Integration Manager, and SARS has been integrating more than 18 000 entries per month since March 2000," said Harris.

A new HR system which currently runs more than four integrations per month into SARS` GL module, totalling approximately 4000 entries, has since been adopted. The Receiver is also automatically updating about 500 debtors and creditors with transactions from the HR system.

A further spin-off of the Microsoft Great Plains installation has been SARS moving away from manually processing cheques to Electronic Funds Transfer (ETF) - which not only allows creditors to be paid on time, but it also ensures lower bank charges, a reduced error rate, time saving and reduced fraud risk.

A measure of the success of the SARS implementation - by Microsoft Great Plains partner TwoInc - was that SARS was awarded the Great Plains Pinnacle award for Excellence In Customer Service. This award was made in recognition of how the business management solution has helped SARS measurably improve service levels.

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