Kirby, Pezzack And Associates Inc.   905.884.5225

Home >  Products >  BVEssentials

BVEssentials - The Ultimate Add-On for BusinessVision

Latest news on Essentials (formerly BVEssentials)

Over recent years, many of our clients have purchased Essentials (formerly BVEssentials) to add functionality to Sage BusinessVision.

BVEssentials enhances or replaces order entry, sales analysis, inventory, requisitions and purchasing, customers / vendors, and more. Most recently, Essentials has added full AR, AR, GL and Payroll modules that can replace those in BusinessVision.

Ultimately, Essentials will be replaced by Spire, which will realistically become the future of Sage BusinessVision.

For now, though, you can combine BVEssentials with Sage BusinessVision, then use everything you've learned to run Spire whenever you're ready, since what the user sees in Spire will be almost exactly the same as Essentials.

Let's get started with an overview of what Essentials does.

What is Essentials (formerly BVEssentials)?

Essentials is a certified third-party add-on module for Sage BusinessVision.

BVEssentials Logo When it was developed in 2001, BVEssentials was initially an add-on to make Order Entry in BusinessVision simpler and more flexible, and it did that. Since then, many additional features have been added to BVEssentials as users requested more and more functionality.

Adding to the original Sales Manager module, BVEssentials added modules to assist with production (Production Manager), inventory (including Lot Numbers, Requisitions), rentals (Rental Manager), automotive service (Service Manager), and more.

Essentials essentials

The most important features of Essentials Sales Manager are these:

  • List views when you open each module, so you immediately see the basic info you need
  • Filters to let you instantly narrow down to the item, sales order, invoice, customer or other data you need to know about right now
  • Instant, Google-like free-text searches across the system. For example, open Inventory, and start typing any part of an item number, description, extended description, product code (category) or many other fields, and the list you're looking at will be immediately refined so you can find what you need, right now.
  • Move / remove columns in any view, by user
  • Easily restrict users from functions they don't need so they can stay on track
  • Restrict CSRs or sales reps to their own customers / sales orders only
  • Uses (mostly) your existing BusinessVision data, which you can keep forever
  • Where necessary, adds data tables for extra fields you need that are in Essentials but not in BusinessVision
  • Transaction tracking, so that any entry you post in Essentials will always post all the way through - no more partial postings
  • Easily e-mail any document to the applicable customer or vendor using customizable e-mail templates
  • Full tracking and reporting on Lot Numbers with expiry dates; enables almost instant retrieval of the full history of items in specific lots, for example if you have Health Canada audit or there's a recall
  • Requisitions module allows you to easily identify items that need to be ordered based on inventory, sales order and purchase order data; automatically generates Purchase Orders for any items you decide to include from the Requisitions list
  • Pop-up customer and Inventory Notes (Communications), including the ability to have them pop-up any time you perform certain functions. For example, every time you start an order for Customer X, a note can pop up indicating the most recent communication with that customer - great for customer service and credit management
  • Group Edits - highlight multiple items in a List View and edit them all at once. For example:
    • Highlight inventory item 1001 across all warehouses; right-click, select Edit, and you can change the description of all of them at once
    • Highlight all customers in Territory ABC; right-click, select Edit, and can the Territory codes for them ALL at one time
    • Highlight all invoices for 2014 in Territory ABC; right-click, select Edit, and can the Territory codes for them ALL (yes, you can edit non-financial history if the user is allowed!)
Optional BVEsentials add-on modules
  • Custom Fields - allows access to Workbook data from BusinessVision and extends the functionality beyond that
  • Production Manager - control your inventory with pinpoint accuracy, reduce unplanned shipping expenses, and even streamline production staff scheduling; commit raw material inventory before production begins; link production orders to sales orders; automatically requisition material shortages and create POs; track phases / status in production
  • Service Manager - originally for automotive service centres, but works equally well for computer / electronics / office equipment service or similar; see item service histories, set follow-up up dates, requireistion special order parts, create parts/labour packages, and more
  • Rental Manager - helps rental businesses rent their products using various rental cycles, track their rental inventory separately from regular stock (including serial numbers), see customer rental history, process partial returns, and more

Note: These modules will all be available in Spire as well.

There are literally hundreds of ways that Essentials makes things easier than BusinessVision by itself.

Essentials and its Future: Spire Software

Eventually, it became clear that Sage aren't really interested in keeping BusinessVision alive, but really just want to move users over to other Sage products. While this might be appropriate for some, most really like the overall workflow of BusinessVision, especially when enhanced with BVEssentials.

So, what to do? What the developers of BVEssentials decided to do was to extend BVEssentials to deliver ALL the functionality BusinessVision users need, update the database engine to a really modern platform, and set out to replace BusinessVision in the market. That BusinessVision replacement is now called Spire Accounting.

These are lofty goals, but they are on track to deliver.

Over the last couple of years, BVEssentials has grown rapidly, with new AR, AP, Payroll, GL and other modules that can (mostly) replace what BusinessVision does. Those features are now all in Spire, so once Spire has fully matured, it will be a complete replacement for Sage BusinessVision.

Spire has the same user interface & screens as BVEssentials, but the database engine has been replaced, as noted, so you won't have any incremental learning curve at all.

Spire is the Future for Sage BusinessVision users

To learn more, we suggest the following:

Recommended Additional Reading

contact us businessvision software businessvision services bvessentials/spire services home


headlines