Bluefort, a leading Microsoft Global ISV based in Malta, with US operations based in Atlanta, is pleased to announce its teaming up with TeamCentral, an innovative integration platform as a service (iPaaS) company.

This team-up will empower businesses with enhanced integrations, simplifying their data management across various systems and maximizing subscription-driven growth.

TeamCentral was created to solve the serious need for data management that is efficient across a variety of systems.

Specifically, with the rise in fragmented and disconnected data due to the proliferation of SaaS applications, TeamCentral developed the iPaaS solution Central. Central simplifies both data movement and management, cutting both costs and risks along the way.

The partnership between Bluefort and TeamCentral not only brings better integrations to customers, but allows joint customers of Bluefort’s solutions and TeamCentral integrations to re-sell the subscriptions they’ve bought from leading global cloud vendors. The partnership will also enable complex bundling scenarios, making it seamless for clients. And it will also result in better integration scenarios with custom SaaS platforms.

“At Bluefort, we constantly strive to enhance the experience for our customers and offer them the best solutions in the industry,” says Edward Borg Grech, CEO of Bluefort. “Our collaboration with TeamCentral aligns perfectly with this commitment. This collaboration is rooted in our shared vision to provide our customers with unparalleled integrations and bundling options. By teaming up with TeamCentral, we are poised to deliver a new level of innovation and value to our joint customers, particularly those utilizing our cutting-edge LISA platform in conjunction with TeamCentral.”

“We are thrilled to announce our partnership with Bluefort, a company that shares our unwavering commitment to customer success and innovation. At TeamCentral, our mission has always been to empower businesses with the tools they need to thrive in the digital age. This collaboration with Bluefort represents a significant step towards achieving that mission,” says Andy Park, Chief Growth Officer and Co-Founder at Team Central. “Our focus on providing better integration scenarios with custom SaaS platforms aligns perfectly with the evolving landscape of business technology. This partnership with Bluefort will open up new horizons for our customers, allowing them to harness the full potential of their SaaS solutions.”

To learn more about Bluefort and their subscription management software, visit www.bluefort.eu. For information on TeamCentral and their integration platform, visit www.teamcentral.ai.
 

About Bluefort
Bluefort is a leading Global Microsoft ISV that specializes in innovative subscription management solutions for B2B businesses. Strongly customer and collaboration-focused, Bluefort helps organizations leverage the power of Microsoft technologies to drive digital transformation, foster profitability and scalability, and achieve their business goals.

About TeamCentral
TeamCentral is a company focused on optimizing productivity through improvements in how data is managed and governed across business systems. Their IPaaS platform, called Central, is the next generation in automation technology that pairs a low code integration platform with personalized “virtual assistants” that perform common (and sometimes complex) business tasks. Their low-code platform allows systems to talk to each other within days or weeks vs. months of coding, which is a more traditional approach to integration.

Bluefort is thrilled to announce its partnership with Queue Associates, Inc, a provider renowned for both enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.

This strategic collaboration will deliver cutting-edge, streamlined experiences to businesses across the US to help them thrive in today's ever-changing digital landscape.

With a common vision of bringing innovation and value to customers, both Bluefort and Queue Associates solve problems and help businesses harness the full potential of Microsoft technologies.

“We’re delighted to partner up with a major player in the US market like Queue Associates,” says Edward Borg Grech, CEO of Bluefort. “Their ongoing success in high-level consulting and solutions is a clear indicator of the exciting days ahead for this partnership.”

The partnership will extend their Dynamics 365 F&O offerings for the marketplace by including end-to-end subscription management solutions from Bluefort. 

Queue Associates is renowned for its deep industry knowledge, extensive experience, and a consistent commitment to providing Microsoft 365 consulting and implementation solutions. They have built their influence over the last 31 years.

"The partnership with Bluefort is an incredible opportunity to expand our solutions across the United States,” said Chris Bowler, Director of Queue Associates Southeast. "Bluefort's reputation as a fellow leading Microsoft ISV partner, coupled with their dedication to B2B subscription customer satisfaction, aligns perfectly with our values. We’re looking forward to co-creating transformative solutions that drive business growth."

Bluefort's partnership program features a collaborative approach that builds long-term relationships and helps partners expand their reach, increase operational efficiency, and enhance customer satisfaction in the tech landscape.

Bluefort and Queue Associates will revolutionize the Microsoft Enterprise subscription business landscape by combining digital expertise, innovation, and commitment to cutting-edge software consultation and solutions.

For more information about Bluefort's partnership program and the services your business could enjoy, visit www.bluefort.eu.

About Bluefort
Bluefort is a leading Global Microsoft ISV that specializes in innovative subscription management solutions for B2B businesses. Strongly customer and collaboration-focused, Bluefort helps organizations leverage the power of Microsoft technologies to drive digital transformation, foster profitability and scalability, and achieve their business goals.

About Queue Associates
Queue Associates, a Microsoft Solution Partner, is a full-service consulting firm that specializes in Microsoft ERP, CRM, cloud, and related solutions to organizations of all sizes. With expertise in all modules of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite, Queue offers services from pre-implementation consulting to installation, customization, and ongoing technical support. The award-winning Queue team of business and tech experts is dedicated to delivering tailored and integrated solutions and unparalleled support for each client.

Bluefort announces its groundbreaking payment collection automation product suite that fully integrates with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and provides merchants with a seamless, automated payment process.

Bluefort, the subscription and automation software vendor, is thrilled to announce the launch of Bluefort TAPP, the payment collection automation product that uniquely and seamlessly integrates popular payment providers with Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Bluefort TAPP is designed to revolutionize the way businesses handle payment collections and allocations with minimal manual intervention. And the best part is it’s absolutely FREE.

Bluefort TAPP offers an array of benefits to merchants including:

• Automating payment processing, generated payment journals, and settling invoices significantly reduce overhead expenses.
• Easy payment options encourage long-term customer relationships.
• Transaction methods for daily payments that are safe and secure.
• Automated payment collection and reconciliation for customer accounts using sales orders.
• Automated refunds for credit notes and fee reconciliation with payment providers.
• Native integration with Dynamics 365 Finance subscription billing capabilities.
• Improving cashflow
• Native integration with Bluefort’s LISA subscription management product suite.

Merchants’ end-users will also enjoy a seamless, hassle-free experience with any kind of payments. No more errors in payments and billing, or the need to chase payments.

Bluefort TAPP is free to use and easy to install by following simple steps.

The initial launch of Bluefort TAPP includes Direct Debit and bank transaction automation with GoCardless for all Dynamics 365 business applications. Subsequent releases will also include integrations with major credit/debit card payment services, including Stripe.

For more information on Bluefort TAPP, and to download yours free, visit www.bluefort.eu/tapp.

About Bluefort

Bluefort is the go-to partner for subscription management and payment automation software that transforms your problems into profits. We have one aim- to remove the roadblocks that stop your business from flourishing.

We’re a software-plus-services company, underpinned by Microsoft Dynamics, proud to power more and more processes every day for our customers worldwide. But working with us doesn’t stop at award-winning technology- our industry insights will help you discover and unlock hidden value.

We solve the problems that keep you up at night. Imagine a modernized operation with sky-high sign-ups, hyper-automated back-office processes, and industry-beating retention rates. It can be yours.

Take your business to the next level. Let us show you how.

Software solution provider Bluefort and leading digital transformation expert Sigma Dynamics® have partnered to bring Bluefort’s innovative Microsoft Dynamics 365-based subscription software solution to the UK for the first time.

Bluefort’s innovative Licence and Subscription Management App (LISA) has now been added to Sigma Dynamics’ portfolio of products and services, offering its clients a smarter and more elegant way to manage their license subscriptions or managed services business model.

The subscription economy has outperformed every leading market growth indicator in terms of revenue growth for more than five years, leading more and more businesses to re-evaluate their business models.

However, the increased administrative tasks associated with a subscription model can be burdensome and negatively impact adoption, with unrealised revenue and manual intervention crippling its success. LISA offers a simplified approach to these problems within the familiarity of Dynamics 365.

Shaun McKay, Director of Operations at Bluefort UK, commented: “We’re excited to partner with Sigma Dynamics on this initiative. The Bluefort LISA is embedded within the Dynamics 365 framework and delivers significant value to customers who are managing subscriptions.”

Thanks to the partnership, Sigma Dynamics can now help clients across all industries to simplify and improve every aspect of subscription management, including process automation, data analytics, customer experience and compliance with GDPR, IFRS 15 and ASC 606.

Colin Crow, Managing Director at Sigma Dynamics, added: “The partnership with Bluefort strengthens our offering and value add to our customers. Bluefort’s products, services and culture perfectly align to the needs of our clients and I’m looking forward to an exciting future working together.”

Learn more about Bluefort’s subscription software and partnership model at:

https://bluefort.com.mt/industries/subscriptions

Fantastic new features to extend pricing capabilities, improve analytics and performance

A preferred solution on Microsoft AppSource, Bluefort’s License and Subscription App (LISA) enables you to modernise, automate and optimise your licencing and subscription processes. LISA is purpose-built in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and operates seamlessly with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and Commerce.

We’re proud to share new features available now in addition to the already-powerful capabilities of LISA:

Subscription and Price management

• Discount functionality on subscription plan lines – We’re excited that customers can now inherit discounts from standard Trade Agreements or specify a discount on the subscription plan line itself. Trade Agreements are a powerful capability within Dynamics 365 which enables you to work with specific agreed pricing between one or more customers.
• Price and Discount Indexing - This feature provides more advanced and granular management of prices and discounts by allowing scenarios such as price-grandfathering and trials. This capability adds real value to drive customer-focused needs and differentiate from your competitors.
• Subscription templates - It is now possible to save a subscription plan (and its lines) as templates and to create subscription plans from existing templates. This new feature takes bundled offerings to new heights for businesses wanting to replicate certain offerings for more customers.
• Subscription copy functionality - It is now possible to copy a subscription plan (and its lines) from the same customer or another customer. This is particularly helpful when you need to configure a subscription for a new customer, using a similar subscription as your starting point.
• Improved renewal functionality - Subscriptions terms can be created on a subscription plan level. These can be configured to auto-renew to other subscription plans using a subscription chain. Auto-cancellation of the subscription plan line level remains available. This feature extends the already powerful capabilities which LISA has in easily managing complex subscriptions.

Enhancements for Dynamics 365 Project related subscriptions

• Project hours entitlements - It is now possible to set project hours entitlements for subscription plans linked to a project. Project hours can be linked to a specific role, a specific activity or for all roles and activities within a project.
• Standard subscription plans for projects - On the product level it is now possible to configure whether standard or project subscription plans are generated from a project
• Enhancements to subscription plan creation from projects - It is now possible to see which subscription products configured in a Project's Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) has already been published to a subscription plan. A parameter also controls whether the same WBS product can be transferred more than once.

Security, Performance and Notifications

• Enhanced granular security configuration – There are two new roles available for LISA: Subscription Manager and Subscription Project Manager. The introduction of these additional roles help business further refine their security and policies within the Dynamics 365 framework.
• Subscription notifications – We’re excited about subscription notifications which enable Business Event triggers in Dynamics 365. Business events provide a mechanism that lets external systems receive notifications from Finance and Operations applications. In this way, the systems can perform business actions in response to the business event. Subsequently this new feature provides great opportunities to enable the integration with the Power Platform, Dataflex, Azure Functions and more!
• We’ve added more Inquiry forms for enhanced analysis of subscription data – this delivers improved contextual information where you need it most.
• Enhanced Forecasting functionality drives insights into future cashflow scenarios of your subscriptions.
• Enhanced Power BI dashboards and reports deliver improved analytics to make better decisions, faster!
• Overall Performance improvements and enhanced Integration functionality from external systems or online stores.

Are you ready to modernise your subscription management processes and scale up? Contact us here for a meaningful discussion about supportive technologies that drive subscription success.

Streamlining financial processes between outright ownership and subscription success.

Moving your business towards a recurring revenue model can be challenging when you consider your existing customer base as well as new customers you will entering into agreements with.

If you’ve traditionally sold your products or services outright, it can be difficult to navigate the pitfalls of trading ownership for experience. Managing various subscription types can be daunting: How do we transition our existing customers to a new subscription type? How do we manage various subscription types from a financial perspective without overburdening our finance team? How can we ensure accuracy?

To navigate these complexities, we explore 3 key financial areas that can streamline the process between outright ownership and subscription success.

Subscription types

There are so many subscription types to consider and you might have several that you need to manage: it could be based on per-unit or consumption. It could be software subscriptions or linked to a physical asset or product. It could include the provision of a service linked to mileage or hours used from equipment or facilities, provided by project resources or locations. It’s imperative that the underlying billing technology can support your subscription types. It also needs to provide the flexibility to handle a change in approach should you decide to adapt your subscription offerings over time as your business evolves.

Aligning existing customers

This is where many businesses get stuck. Typical recurring technologies can’t take “legacy” customers into account where the provision of goods or services on your existing customers aren’t aligned with your new offerings. For this reason, it’s important in your selection that existing customers’ perpetual agreements can be translated to a subscription type.

A good example includes the historic purchase of software licenses. Many companies traditionally offered software as a once-off upfront purchase with a recurring annual fee. To streamline this process of transition, you need to align this annual fee with an end-date in order to transition your customer to your new offering (with the ability to pro-rate if you’re working with a fixed start date on the new agreement). The subscription technology should be able to support this alignment of your existing customer base to prevent errors and manual intervention which can hamper your revenue efforts.

Timelines

Billing periods is often a topic which causes many headaches. Depending on our offerings there could be a combination of calendar periods and rolling periods. Whilst calendar periods are generally easy to manage some per-unit subscription or consumption-based subscription types could require rolling periods. As the core concept of subscription models are rooted in the notion of “it never ends”, it can be really hard for businesses to transition their existing customers easily from an existing billing period (pro-rated) to a new billing period or billing period type based on the new agreement.

In order to ramp-up your subscription business, adequately planning your subscription road map provides you with the blueprint you need to define key factors that will play a large role in your success as a subscription-based business. When you consider a technology road map for your subscription model, you need to focus on customer billing, the complexities of your subscription and the related financials with your business strategy in mind.

Contact us here for a meaningful discussion about supportive technologies that drive subscription success.

Streamlining financial processes between outright ownership and subscription success in your projects

Moving your business towards a recurring revenue model can be challenging especially if your core services are managed as projects.

If you’ve traditionally sold your products or services outright, it can be difficult to navigate the pitfalls of trading ownership for experience. Managing subscriptions as part of your project delivery can seem daunting: How do I easily distinguish outright from subscription services or items in my project quotation? How do I ensure that these subscriptions are activated at the right time during project delivery? How do I manage and track subscriptions as part of my project budget?

To navigate these challenges, we explore 3 key financial areas in the project module of Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain that can streamline the process between outright ownership and subscription success.

Project Quotations

Projects within Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply chain are utilised across many industries including manufacturing, construction, legal, consulting and accounting. Some companies also use to drive marketing and advertising projects and deliverables. Many businesses leverage project quotations, which you can use to make an attractive offer to a customer as the first step of the project phase. A project quotation might include the items and services that are quoted, basic contact information, special trade agreements and discounts, and possible taxes and surcharges. It is here where you can easily add your subscription products or services from the start to the WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) and start to effectively manage the potential subscription in one seamless experience.

Project Initiation

Many organisations struggle with initiating their projects. This is due to the administrative effort required to identify the subscriptions for activation from the overall project. Ideally these subscription items or services should easily be converted into the subscription agreement with the customer, adhering to the project timelines as defined in the WBS.

Invoicing Project Subscriptions

Project billing is often a topic which causes many headaches. Depending on the project WBS there could milestones for invoicing as well as recurring subscription charges. Once the subscription agreement has been activated, from here the Project Sales Orders (and related Purchase Orders) should be automatically generated and posted, reducing the administrative overhead and revenue leaks of managing project financials.

In order to ramp-up your subscription business, adequately planning your subscription road map provides you with the blueprint you need to define key factors that will play a large role in your success as a subscription-based business. When you consider a technology road map for your subscription model, you need to focus on customer billing, the complexities of your subscription and the related financials with your business strategy in mind.

Contact us here for a meaningful discussion about supportive technologies that drive subscription success.

Deferring revenue and tracking it over the life cycle of your subscriptions

If you’ve never dealt with revenue recognition from a recurring billing perspective, moving your business towards subscription offerings can be challenging.

If your subscription model is founded on the principle of upfront payments whilst you deliver good and services over a longer period of time, tracking the revenue correctly is an integral part of your business model.

Let’s look at a simple example: We provide a monthly boxed subscription service to our customers at $10 a month, paid annually in advance. Customers pay $ 120 for the year and we have a small sign-up fee of $ 5. We receive payment of $ 125. We can’t recognise the entire $125 as revenue because we’re still to deliver the 12 boxes from their annual subscription. According to IFRS standards, at signup we can only recognise the $5 sign-up fee, even though we’ve received the full year’s subscription payment upfront ($125).

What does deferred revenue look like?

From an Accounting perspective our ledger entries look like this:

Account                                    Debit      Credit

Accounts Receivable       125.00

Earned Revenue                                         5.00

Deferred Revenue                               120.00

Following the AR entries, a credit is then written to the cash or bank account. Once we’ve delivered our box for the first time, we can say that we’ve fulfilled month one of this contract and we can recognise the value of month one which is $10:

Account                                    Debit        Credit

Earned Revenue                  110.00                                

Deferred Revenue                                   10.00

Every month that we continue to fulfil the contract, $10 moves from the deferred revenue to the earned revenue, decreasing our liability and increasing our earned revenue.

Keep in mind that different businesses could have different recognition schedules and you might need to accrue revenue on a daily or monthly basis depending on the accuracy you require. If your model is based on month-to-month payments with immediate cancellation, you’ll likely be managing accruals daily in order to facilitate more efficient and accurate cancellations. You also need to factor in VAT calculations at the time of invoicing and this could differ depending on your country and your customer’s country.

Why do subscription businesses track this?

Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) encourage companies to track revenue in this manner as it provides visibility to external parties that might need access to financials statement like your bank, investors, board of directors or shareholders. Corporate tax calculations can be impacted by the amount of deferred revenue carried into future periods. Deferred revenue is a liability because it’s dependent on your business to deliver the contracted services or goods. Refunds for cancellation, especially for annual subscriptions makes handling this much more efficient if you’re accurately tracking deferred revenue.

What are my options for tracking deferred revenue?

Some businesses use manual spreadsheets or standalone revenue recognition software. Neither are ideal as manual calculations are error-prone and standalone systems aren’t centralised within your Financials solution. Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain has built-in revenue recognition and if combined with Bluefort’s License and Subscription App (LISA), you have a powerful solution that not only recognises revenue at the appropriate times, but also fully automates subscription billing and purchasing process across various plan types and models.

In order to ramp-up your subscription business, tracking revenue accurately will play a big role in how successful you are in making the shift to recurring revenue.

When you consider a technology road map for your subscription model, you need to focus on customer billing, the complexities of your subscription and the related financials with your business strategy in mind. Contact us here for a meaningful discussion about supportive technologies that drive subscription success.