Learn it in the week you start using it
Nobody sends a storekeeper on a course. The people who will use this every day learn it at their own desk, on their own work, in the first week — and everything they were shown stays written down where they can look it up again at four o'clock on a Friday.
Four ways your team picks this up
Each one answers a different kind of question, and all four are available from the day you start. Three of them work without anybody being free to take your call.
Every screen has a page behind it, arranged by what somebody is trying to do rather than by where it sits in a menu. It is the same documentation we work from, which is the reason it stays accurate.
Half an hour on your own figures with whoever asks the questions in your office. Recorded if you want it, so the people who were serving a customer can watch it afterwards.
Questions answered in public, so the second person to ask finds the answer already sitting there. Anything asked twice becomes a documentation page.
A question typed where the work is happening, answered from the documentation and from the screen you are on. It stays inside the software rather than sending you out to a website to look.
What the first four weeks look like
The shape is the same whether you are five people or fifty. What changes is how many of each session there are, and that is what the implementation band on your quotation is measuring.
- Week one — set it up
Your chart of accounts, your tax components, your branches and your people. An administrator does this with us on the call rather than filling in a form and waiting to hear back.
- Week two — one department
Sales, or stores, or the ledger — whichever hurts most. One department uses it on real work while everybody else carries on exactly as they were.
- Week three — the rest
The departments either side of the first one, so a job can travel the whole way through. This is the week the hand-offs are found, and the week the training actually sticks.
- Week four — close a period
A month closed here with the old system still running beside it. When the two agree, the training is over and the software is in use.
Up to 5 people, 6 to 25, or 26 and above — the three bands this software is quoted against. The band sets the number of sessions, never the content of them.
What each person learns, and how long it takes them
A training manager is costing people's time, so this is in hours rather than in modules. Add them up for the people you actually have rather than for a headcount.
| Who | What they learn | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Whoever answers the phone | Quotations, customers, and where a job has got to | Half a day |
| Whoever is on the floor | The terminal: all taps, no typing, and what to do when the network drops | An hour, standing at the machine |
| Whoever keeps the store | Receipts, issues, counts and the reorder position | Half a day |
| Whoever keeps the books | Posting, the VAT components, withholding, payroll and the close | Two days, spread across a month |
| The administrator | People and access, settings, branches, and reading the audit trail | One day, plus the configuration call |
The five questions a training manager asks
Answered here because they are the five that decide whether the first month is budgeted properly, and a budget built on an assumption is the one that goes wrong.
Do you come to our office?
For the configuration call and the first department, yes, anywhere we can reach in a day. The rest is done remotely, because the people being trained are at their own desks and that is where they will be using it.
What happens when somebody leaves?
Their access is withdrawn by your own administrator in the console, and the next person learns from the same documentation. None of the training depends on one person remembering it.
Can we train our own trainers?
Yes, and most organisations above twenty-five people do. The administrator session is the one to send them to; after it they can configure and teach the rest themselves.
Is the training charged separately?
The implementation is quoted with the plan, and the band it falls into is set by how many people use it. Support afterwards is included; retraining a whole department a year later is quoted when you ask for it.
What if we are already running something?
Then week four is the one that matters — a period closed in both and compared line by line. The accountants page sets out how that is done and who signs it off.
Three pieces of this that are still being built
Each of these is something a larger supplier would already have. They are listed because a training manager comparing suppliers deserves to know which boxes we tick today and which we will.
Short recordings per screen, so somebody joining in month six learns the same way as the people who were there on day one. Being recorded as the screens settle, because recording a screen twice is worse than recording it late.
Something an administrator can put on a file: what was covered, by whom and when. That is the form an auditor asks for, so that is the form it will take.
Sessions on fixed dates that anybody can join, rather than a session arranged for one organisation at a time. It waits on there being enough organisations to fill one properly.
Each appears on this page the day it exists, because this page is read from the database rather than written into the software.
Bring the person who will actually use it
Half an hour, your own work on the screen, and the people who will be doing the job in the room. They ask better questions than the people who sign.