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Best practices for using Macola®

Adapted from the Leahy Consulting paper "Best Practices for Using the Macola® Software", updated September 2024.

Best practices apply to every department, not just accounting, and they are a way of working rather than a project with an end date. The list below was built while working with Macola® customers over the past thirty years.

People and ownership

Top management leadership. Management has to set the example and support a culture of continuous improvement and self-responsibility. Nothing further down this list survives without it.

Ownership of data. Name individuals responsible for the accuracy of the inventory, bill of material, customer, vendor and selling price files. Ownership extends to monitoring customer, purchase and manufacturing orders — not just keying them.

Training. Someone should be assigned to conduct each employee's initial and ongoing training, so the workflow runs smoothly. Each manager should know the Macola® software and how to use it to help them.

Written procedures. Document in writing how day-to-day work is to be processed — including, for example, how to create new inventory item numbers.

Data

Dates. Agree as a company how the Macola® order dates are to be used. Which field documents when a customer order needs to be shipped? Which field is the purchase order due date? See What each date field on an order means.

Data clean-up and accuracy. Close out purchase and production orders regularly. Open order reports are only as accurate as the closing habit behind them.

Coding. Decide on a small number of customer types, product categories and material cost types — few enough that you can actually analyze operations by them.

Record retention. Establish a retention policy for critical transactions and purge or archive each month. Two years of inventory transactions and five years of sales transactions is a common shape.

Inventory and costing

Inventory accuracy. Aim for 98% accuracy on on-hand quantities and 100% on on-order quantities.

Inventory replenishment. When it is time to replenish by purchase or production order, have a policy for how much to order. Vendor lead times, reorder levels and safety stock levels need continuous review.

Product costing and margin analysis. Roll actual product costs up monthly so product margin analysis is possible.

Operations

Real-time reporting and posting. Shipments, purchase order receipts and production need to be posted by the end of each day.

Timely wrap-up of physical inventories and month-end closings. Allow next-month transactions to be posted while the prior month's general ledger is being closed. Set a goal of reconciling your physical inventory in two days.

Performance metrics. Develop metrics — on-time shipping is the obvious one — to evaluate daily performance, and encourage improvement suggestions. This includes monitoring past-due customer, purchase and production orders.

Systems

Computer network and the Macola® SQL database. Keep the network and database software up to date to avoid slowness and downtime. The SQL database should be re-indexed at least weekly and optimized periodically. Nightly back-ups must be off-site, and old data should be purged or archived monthly. Test database recoveries annually.

Macola® advanced features. Managers should keep evaluating whether further automation is applicable and cost-justified — bar coding, ACH vendor payments, importing customer payments, EDI, automated emailing of customer invoices, production scheduling.

Where to go next

Questions and comments on these practices are welcome. Contact Mike Leahy at (513) 723-8103 or [email protected].

Support & contact

Our team is glad to help with anything from a quick question to a full implementation.