Bay 12 Games Forum

Finally... => Life Advice => Topic started by: femmelf on January 09, 2016, 02:55:30 pm

Title: Learning a new software system for (hopefully) a job.
Post by: femmelf on January 09, 2016, 02:55:30 pm
I was lucky enough to get an interview with a trucking company for a back office position dealing with payroll and taxes and things like that. I've done some payroll before on  ADP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Data_Processing), but they use a completely different system. I thought ADP was the standard, but I guess not in trucking. They use:

 TMW (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMW_Systems)

The hiring guy seemed to really like me for the position and said he'd call me/very seriously consider me/talk to the owner about setting up a follow up interview.

I am worried about the differences in software packages, because I want to be able to get that under my belt fast if at all possible. Has anyone ever used this system or know of any type of tutorials online for it (preferably free)?

I am just dealing with some anxiety and yeah.... I would appreciate it a whole lot if anyone could consider helping me a bit here with learning this. Thank you.
Title: Re: Learning a new software system for (hopefully) a job.
Post by: nenjin on January 09, 2016, 05:30:33 pm
I work for a software company that could be considered a competitor to TMW in some areas. We do a lot of the same things from what I can see: inventory management, point of sale, fleet vehicle tracking, vehicle and part work orders for maintenance and repair, vehicle and part costing and all the A/R that comes with it. We have some of our software as mobile apps as well. I recognize several pieces of software being mentioned on that wiki page. Although to be fair, we're a ~25 person small business operation while TMW is a legit multi-million dollar software corporation. Our focus is more on the truck parts and salvage industries, remanufacturing and sales than municipal government or logistics. But there's a lot of overlap in processes.

Not sure what to tell you about how to get into it as quickly as possible. Our enterprise-level software is fairly complicated and I'd say it takes weeks and maybe even months of usage to understand the system in depth. (YEARS if the user doesn't honestly care about the software as it relates to their job.) That you have experience in ADP should help. Basic accounting is the same the world over I think, the principles are the same. It's really the software tools that help you do accounting that you need to understand.

You're going to want to familiarize yourself with the financial and asset reporting suite offered by the system. (We have somewhere on the order of 120+ reports for the average enterprise-level business. Why so many? Because they ask for them, or try to ask for the "ALLPORT" that tells them all the things they would ever want to know in one report. The ALLPORT is a myth.) Starting out you're going to need to learn how to do payments (customer payments to you and your payments to them and vendors), how to investigate accounting discrepancies (why does this report not match this report? The question to always ask is: are these reports actually looking at the same things? Our client's book keepers regularly call us to investigate accounting discrepancies, or to ask why report a (sales by terms for example) doesn't match another report (sales by tax type.)) The answer usually being: those report aren't going to give you a 1:1 comparison because they're not both trying to tell you the exact same thing. Many book keepers just want to print two separate reports for the same date range and have the numbers at the bottom agree, so they can say everything is on the level. That's a gross oversimplification but I've run into plenty of book keepers who think going any deeper into it than that isn't their job.

If you're dealing with payroll you may also need to understand commission since a lot of truck yards do it, and all the shenanigans people who work for commission get up to. (Like modifying each other's documents to steal commission from one another.) Maybe that's not part of transport and fleet services like it is part of heavy truck sales. You'll probably need to understand a little bit about state-to-state taxation if its an interstate trucking company. There's probably a lot of nuances to that side of it that aren't present in my day to day. To be honest our software doesn't really deal in freight and shipping other than providing some places for you to specify data. At most all we do is integrate with 3rd party company who does rate finding.

And I guess one general pointer I've learned from the job is: repetition of use is key to mastering the software. If you've only been siloed in your one little corner of the software, when it comes time to do an investigation knowing more than how your accounting and AR screens work helps in figuring out where the fuck up was because the problem likely happened there and the change has to happen there. If you only touch the purchase order screen once every few months, when it comes time to figure out a problem you're going to have to relearn the software to the extent you can do your job. Constantly interacting with complex software is what allows you to catch the subtleties and mistakes other people miss. (A drop down menu here, a flag there, a checkbox, the finalization step, that one part of the screen no one actually pays attention to.) As a gamer it's been instructive using a piece of software I don't find fun or interesting. You think you're pretty good with software until you have to use a program that you're not personally engaged with like you would be a video game. Now just imagine how people who don't play games at all approach a monolithic piece of business software, and how easy it is to ignore half a screen because you just want to get your job done and you just honestly don't give a shit. Treat the software you're working with as intensely as you would a new game you're in love with. Spare no configuration menu. Read, and I mean really read, each screen. Scrutinize its elements. Experiment. Test. Doing all that in a live business environment has risks, so learn how to void or undo your changes so you can see the cause and effect between what you click and what the system does.

That's not all very helpful, but if you have any specific questions about business practices (don't know if I can help you with the actual use of their software) feel free to post and I'll see what I can answer. I've been doing tech support in the heavy truck industry for everything from multi-million dollar corporations to mom and pop businesses for about 4 years now, so, I've got a little bit of experience under my belt.

One last thing I'd say is: PUSH FOR TRAINING. I can't count the # of new hires at our client's businesses that are just thrown into the deep end with the software without a formal training session with us, the people that make it, and without real training from the business that is using the software. (Especially accountants/office managers/book keepers. Many of them seem to leave in a huff instead of doing a formalized transition of knowledge to the new hire. Accountants are often asked to come in and make order and sense out of a real fucking mess. Bad practices that have gone on for months and gotten numbers off, incomplete or perhaps completely non-existent inventory and asset counts, lots of accounts that are in arrears because no one has tried to sort it out for months and months.)

So! If you have a good resource for training or if TMW offers live training in the software, push for it. Call TMW Tech Support and ask them if they offer training, and if so, for how much. A lot of businesses don't like to INVEST in training because it costs money. Either they pay the software vendor like us for a training session (we offer an hour of free training over the phone and over remote connection when new businesses sign up, and are constantly retraining people over the course of our relationship with them) or it takes someone else on payroll's time to do it. Hell, even we have a hard time training our employees sometimes because an hour to two hours a day times 4 months adds up to a lot of time you're not actually getting your other work done. So a lot of businesses just hire people and hope they're smart and motivated that the company gets to save on training them. While it's great to be that kind of hire, don't pass up on the gift of knowledge if it's available. We have (rather incomplete) wikis for most of our software. Figure out which software suites your new job is using and do some googling to see if TMW has the same.

You know your post actually reminded me of something I should have been keeping in mind too. I took the time to figure out how DF worked. Knowing that should make me feel better about my own level of understanding about my company's software. ;)

Good luck!
Title: Re: Learning a new software system for (hopefully) a job.
Post by: femmelf on January 10, 2016, 02:36:58 pm
Thank you so much for being willing to help. I do appreciate it a lot. I may take you up on that.

I'm sorry if this seems rushed but there appears to be a bit of a family emergency of late.
Title: Re: Learning a new software system for (hopefully) a job.
Post by: Truean on January 11, 2016, 07:36:55 pm
Not sure exactly what program suite they are using, but these might be of some help. I hope so, and apologize if not.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Nenjin is, once again, a scholar and an asset to our community.
Title: Re: Learning a new software system for (hopefully) a job.
Post by: femmelf on January 11, 2016, 11:54:20 pm
Um, I.... I don't know what to say. I guess all I can say is thank you.

I really hope I can learn this. I owe you one.
Title: Re: Learning a new software system for (hopefully) a job.
Post by: Truean on January 12, 2016, 09:36:14 am
You are welcome. You owe me nothing. Be the best person you can be.