SMEs stands for small and medium-sized enterprises. The English equivalent is Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SME). Certain patterns in accounting, sales, and service are typical for SMEs.
SMEs in accounting
The accounting of a SME consists of opening entries, ongoing entries during the business year, and closing entries at the end of the business year. The ongoing entries are divided into entry, entry, bank, cash, and payroll entries, as well as other entries. Entry, entry, and bank entries are created as automatic entries. However, users usually create cash entries manually. However, cash entries are likely to occur repeatedly in a typical SME. Therefore, users are likely to be satisfied with a few recording patterns. The payroll and salary accounting is often outsourced to a tax advisor or similar service providers by SMEs. The accounting record of this payroll reimbursement is manually recorded in the main ledger by the accounting department.
As a rule of thumb, with integrated accounting and well-organized account reconciliation, 80 to 90 percent of the accounting data is generated automatically.
Person-dependent behavior in sales and service
Sales often takes place in SMEs in a highly person-centric manner. In addition, they often lack methods and tools that fit the size of the company. At the same time, SMEs are also increasingly seeing the need to manage sales as professionally and efficiently as in large companies. Standardization offers the opportunity to make sales independent of individuals and to transfer it to other employees. The service department is also often very person-oriented and strongly influenced by experience. However, the number of competent personnel is often low there.
Size of the company as a characteristic
In SAP Business One, the company size can be stored as a property of a business partner, for example. A possible scheme distinguishes small and medium-sized businesses, medium-sized enterprises, large enterprises, and multinational corporations. This scheme is an example of categorizing business partners.
Link to the post
The article „Why Open Source ERP is NOT an Alternative“ expresses the opinion that open source ERP is not a good alternative for small and medium-sized companies. Among the reasons cited by the article are the lack of expertise in the internal IT department. Furthermore, the article points out the risk that the responsibility for the system will be shifted to one or a few individuals within the company.
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