Archive for the ‘RPA and DMS’ category

Filehold – what do customers think?

June 9th, 2023

  • FileHold Document Management Software has all of the essential features organizations need to make their documents secure, organized and compliant right “out of the box”.
  • FileHold delivers essential, document, records and workflow management.
  • FileHold scales to support thousands of users and millions of documents.

Ease of use

The FileHold filing structure mirrors the physical office filing environment. Document cabinets contain drawers that contain folder groups and or folders that contain documents. This familiar document filing approach ensures that users can easily browse for documents in a logical and efficient fashion.

Web browser access

FileHold software can be accessed from anywhere in the world via a web browser. Multiple browsers are supported and all functionality is available including system administration and library administration.

Mobile FileHold

Manage your documents while out of the office with the easiest mobile document management software you will ever use.

Search

Search documents from a simple Google-like search or an advanced search using metadata. Save the searches to create reports whenever you need.

Document viewers

A FileHold Level 1 viewer comes with every registered user license and allows users to see an image of a document without the need to have the native software installed on their computer the viewers work with both the web client and the desktop application.

Microsoft Office integration

Tight integration with Microsoft Office is provided that gives direct access from the document software to: Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Visio.

Records management software

Manage both short and long term working and archived documents. 

Advanced Record retention and disposition policies for both electronic and paper based records are standard in the software.  Document, data and usage history is fully captured to stay in compliance.

Electronic forms (e-Forms)

Metadata information can be extracted from electronic forms created using the standard Microsoft Word tools found in Office or PDF forms.  Once created the form data can be automatically extracted into FileHold metadata when the form is added to the system.

Courier

FileHold Courier allows you to transmit documents for viewing or approving to people inside or outside the document management system. Courier is a “proof of delivery” system where unlike email it is a secure method of sending documents. With email there is no way to know if the documents ever arrived or whether the attachment could be opened by the recipient. With Courier, recipients are notified by email containing a secure link which is then fully tracked and logged in FileHold.

Calendar

Differentiate your daily tasks and become more proficient at accomplishing your document management goals using the FileHold calendar.

Document version control

Document version control software provides: check in / checkout ability to prevent documents from being overwritten or deleted when documents are updated by more than one party. All versions of a document are maintained by the software.

Document scanning and imaging

FileHold ships with scanning and imaging software that support all scanners types to allow organizations to “go paperless”.  Basic and advanced third party scanning software is supported for both simple and complex document scanning operations.  Partner software to process scanned documents, to  look for text using zonal OCR, and pre-populating metadata fields before import into FileHold. This is particularly powerful with standardized forms like invoices as part of the AP process. We offer a complimentary license of this software with installs, which can be installed on multiple workstations, although only one copy can be running at a time.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and indexing

Using the scanning software that ships with the paperless office software users can convert the text on typed paper documents into editable and searchable information using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The information that is zonally OCR’ed can be imported into the metadata fields of FileHold.

Synergy Software Systems can further assist you to further automate your document based processes with our RPA tools

Check documents out / Check documents in

Users are able to check in and check out documents from the software from within Microsoft Office applications, or from the Desktop Application or from anywhere in the world using the web interface.  

Document “tagging” or metadata capture

Capturing metadata or “tagging” (key data about the document) is the key to successful search and document  organization. The software has easy to use controlled document tagging to ensure documents are classified.

Virtual folders

The Virtual Folders feature in the software allows limitless aggregation of documents throughout the library into personal “views“. A Project Manager might have a virtual folder containing project documentation, project legal contract documents, invoices, design documentation and emails even though each document is stored in different locations of the library.

Language packs

FileHold offers two language packs as standard features: French and  Spanish. The user interface can be translated into any language by customers or partners. Some languages that have been translated by customers include Polish, Arabic and Chinese.

Work offline

If you are travelling or out of the office and are not connected to the FileHold document management server, then you can still work on your important documents offline. The software will recognize the document changes and can be synchronized with the Library once you are back online.

Document linking

Document to document linking builds parent or child relationships between documents and allows users to link and organize documents in logical groups.  Linking provides the ability to create document shortcuts to documents frequently needed.

Matter-centric filing (Auto-tagging)

Metadata is automatically applied to a document when added to a specific destination folder.  Matter Centric filing is a feature / term commonly used in the legal industry.

User roles and security

FileHold ships with a choice out of 11 different user security roles ranging from “read only” to “System Administration” to provide an appropriate level of user access permissions for workers at all levels.  Users see only documents that  administrators want them to see.

FIPS compliance

The US Federal Government requires compliance in order to meet security and interoperability standards. Filehold Licenses and passwords are encrypted using a FIPS-140 compliant algorithm to meet full compliance.

Watched folders

FileHold software can be configured so that certain folders on the local computer or network are “watched” by FileHold and then automatically moved into the library. The documents imported into FileHold by the watched folder functionality can be automatically tagged and destination folder pre-configured.

User audit logging and tracking

FileHold tracks and records every user activity to ensure a complete audit trail of document activity in the software.  This document auditing capability ensures compliance and protects intellectual property.

Email

Email documents via attachments or links.

Document subscriptions

FileHold software allows users to subscribe to and to be notified of edits to documents or changes to folders they have subscribed to.  When an existing document is updated or a document is added to a folder, the user receives email notification that the change has occurred, who has changed it, and receives a secure link to directly access the document.

Document naming standards

The software can be configured to automatically create document names to enforce adherence to document or record naming conventions.

Third-party integration

A well documented Web Services API allows direct integration with third party applications and flexible integration with existing back office systems. These web services are available to third parties to provide easy integration with other enterprise solutions and productivity applications.

URL support

Provides the ability to send a secured link to a document, rather than emailing the document and cluttering up the mail inbox. This link can then be clicked on to launch the Web Client or Desktop Client to work on the document in a few seconds.

Document control numbering

This feature provides for the automatic application of document control numbers to documents.

Reporting and document compliance

FileHold comes with many built in reports to give administrators information about the usage of documents and users.

Quickly identify and fix your performance bottleneck

May 4th, 2021

Are you responsible for a busy SQL server, for example, the Finance Department’s systems, documentation management, CRM, BI, or a Web Server; perhaps a busy file and print server, or something else entirely.

Were you responsible for installing the application running the workload for your company? Is the workload business critical, i.e. TOO BIG TO FAIL?

Do users, or even worse, customers, complain about performance?

If you are responsible to keep the workloads running in your organization that would benefit from additional performance, please read on – even if you don’t consider yourself a “Techie”.

Windows and VMs are both factors of high latency that impacts performance.

Variables Affecting the Performance of the Applications

There are many variables that affect the performance of those applications. The slowest, i.e. the most restrictive of these is the “Bottleneck”. Think of water being poured from a bottle. The water can only flow as fast as the neck of the bottle, the ‘slowest’ part of the bottle.

In a computer hardware the bottleneck will almost always fit into one of the following categories:

  • CPU
  • DISK
  • MEMORY
  • NETWORK

With Windows, it is usually very easy to find out which one the bottleneck is in, and here is how to do it (like an IT Engineer):

  • To open Resource Monitor – click the Start menu, and type “resource monitor”, and press Enter. Microsoft includes this as part of the Windows operating system and it is already installed.
  • Notice the graphs in the right-hand pane. When your computer is running at peak load, or users are complaining about performance, which of the graphs are ‘maxing out’? This is a great indicator of where your workload’s bottleneck is to be found.
Resource monitor

What You Can Do to Improve Application Performance

Once you have identified your bottleneck – the slowest part of your ‘compute environment’ then, what can you do to improve it?

The traditional approach to solving computer performance issues is to throw bigger and more powerful hardware at the solution like an extra disk or a new laptop, or putting more RAM into your workstation, or on the more extreme end, buying new servers or expensive storage solutions.

How do you decide when it is appropriate to spend money on new or additional hardware, and when it isn’t. Well the obvious answer is; ‘when you can get the performance that you need’, with the existing hardware infrastructure that you have already bought.

You don’t replace your car, just because it needs a service or tuning?

Let’s take disk speed as an example. Look at the response time column in Resource Monitor. Open the monitor to full screen or large enough to see the data. On the Overview tab, open the Disk Activity section so that you can see the Response Time column.

Do it now on the computer you’re using to read this. (You didn’t close Resource Monitor yet, did you?) This shows the Disk Response Time, or , how long is the storage taking to read and write data? Of course, a slower disk speed = a slower performance, but what is considered a good disk speed or a bad speed?

Scott Lowe, has written a great post that you can read here…TechRepublic: Use Resource Monitor to monitor storage performance that perfectly describes what to expect from faster and slower Disk Response Times:

Response Time (ms). Disk response time in milliseconds. For this metric, a lower number is definitely better; in general, anything less than 10 ms is considered good performance. If you occasionally go beyond 10 ms, you should be okay, but if the system is consistently waiting more than 20 ms for response from the storage, then you may have a problem that needs attention, and it’s likely that users will notice performance degradation. At 50 ms and greater, the problem is serious.”

I hope when you check on your computer, the Disk Response Time is below 20 milliseconds. What about those other workloads that you were thinking about earlier. What’s the Disk Response Times on that busy SQL server, the CRM or BI platform, or those Windows servers that the users complain about?

Your Two Options

When the Disk Response Times are often higher than 20 milliseconds, and you need to improve the application performance, then it’s choice time and there are two main options:

  • Storage workload reduction software like DymaxIO™ fast data (Diskeeper®, SSDkeeper®, and V-locity® are now new DymaxIO fast data software). This tool will reduce Disk Storage Times by allowing much e of the data that your applications need to read, to come from a RAM cache, rather than be read slower disk storage. RAM is much faster than the media in your disk storage.
  • Contact us to trial this. You don’t even need to reboot.
  • If you have tried the DymaxIO software, and you still need faster disk access, then, it’s time to start getting quotations for new hardware. It does make sense though, to take a couple of minutes to install DymaxIO first, to see if that can be avoided. The software solution to remove storage inefficiencies is typically a much more cost-effective solution than having to buy hardware! A software solution to a software problem.

Improve Your Application Performance by Decreasing Disk Latency like an IT Engineer – call us to learn more 0097143365589

Snaplogic iPaaS now even better – ask Synergy Software Systems

April 29th, 2021

We’re excited to announce the ‘February 2021’ release of the SnapLogic Intelligent Integration Platform. In this release, there are a number of new Snap Packs: for Marketo and Hubspot. for Marketing Automation, for Microsoft Teams and Power BI for team communication and analytics rly, and OpenAPI to connect to any OpenAPI compliant endpoints.

There is also support for Azure Synapse analytics to our ELT capability. Platform enhancements include :

  • higher productivity through expanded Universal search,
  • platform notifications to Slack,
  • better reliability through Snaplex level scheduling, and more.

Hassle-free connectivity with NEW Snap Packs

New Snap Packs provide out-of-the-box connectivity to key enterprise endpoints.  For example the new Marketo and Hubspot Snap Packs allow you to connect seamlessly to these marketing automation systems. Easily manage marketing assets/campaigns or leads that enter your marketing funnel. While HubSpot Snap Pack supports CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations, the Marketo Snap Pack allows you to do bulk operations on leads.

With these Snap Packs, quickly sync your assets and leads data across Marketing, Sales, and other functional areas and easily connect to event/survey applications such as Eventbrite, SurveyMonkey, or to Demand Generation tools such as Google Ads, Linkedin, and Analytics endpoints such as Microsoft Power BI and Tableau.

The  Microsoft Power BI Snap Pack is also new and allows you to connect your Power BI instance to hundreds of data sources to bring your data to life with live dashboards and reports. Visualize your data and share insights across teams or embed these in your app or website. The Snap Pack helps you to post, push datasets, read, and edit so that you can easily query data, create/bind entities, import files, and update entities.

For an organization that has a heavy investment in the Microsoft ecosystem, the next Snap Pack the new Microsoft Teams Snap Pack allows you to easily integrate your Microsoft Teams into your enterprise workflows for customers, employees, and teams. This Snap Pack supports accounts such as OAuth2 User, Application, and Dynamic accounts to adhere to your enterprise security standards. Use it to send messages, perform channel operations, and perform team operations. . 

Another key new Snap Pack with this release is the OpenAPI Snap Pack. Most API endpoints today adhere to the OpenAPI specification version 2 or 3. Leverage this Snap Pack to connect to any API endpoint with the published OpenAPI specification so that users can get all the needed documentation while they build their automated workflows. More efficiently connect to any generic endpoint without the need for specific Snaps.

Improved connectivity with other Snap Pack enhancements

Google Sheets Snap Pack now supports JSON based version 4 of the API rather than XML based version 3

Kafka Snap Pack updates now support reading/writing record headers and timestamps, provide option to choose one output document per batch. The later feature allows systems that don’t natively support streaming data to effectively work with Kafka messages by batching them together.

Amazon Redshift and Amazon SQS Snap Packs provide cross-account IAM support that allows organizations to trust and allocate roles with specific access privileges to specific groups or users.

Pushdown to any cloud data warehouse including Azure Synapse 

Over previous releases, Snaplogic has introduced ELT support for Snowflake, Redshift cloud data warehouses so that you can do both ETL and ELT on a single platform. The ELT support is extended to Azure Synapse with this release. With ELT for Azure Synapse, you can accelerate data loading into Azure Synapse to provide ultimate flexibility to transform data by use of all computing resources across SnapLogic and Azure Synpase, thus reducing TCO and enabling a faster time-to-value. 

With the SnapLogic platform yextract data from SaaS applications and databases with a vast number of Snaps. Once the data is in the staging area in Azure Cloud Storage, visually define data transformations, no need to write SQL. These visual transformations are converted into SQL statements and pushed to Azure Synapse for execution.

New features added to SnapLogic ELT make it easy to discover schema and SQL functions in the target cloud data warehouse. The platform provides suggestions for column names during LOAD, INSERT SELECT or MERGE INTO operations. The platform also provides SQL function suggestions when working with your target cloud data warehouse. To deal with large number of SQL functions various cloud data warehouses support, are grouped into different categories to simplify discovery.

Better Ease of Use and improved resiliency with the Platform Updates

The SnapLogic Intelligent Integration platform continues to evolve to make it easy for integration developers, whether they are technical or non-technical, to build and monitor integrations. 

Universal Search, as the name suggests helps you search everything related to SnapLogic, all from a single search box. With the February release, it now performs pipeline searches in addition to the searches in Community, Configured Snaps and Documentation. This is not just a simple text based search. The Iris AI integration assistant provides more relevant search results across generic content (in community and documentation) and specific content from your org (such as pipelines or configured Snaps that you have access to). T

Figure 1: Universal search now supports pipeline searches

To efficiently monitor your integrations use the platform notifications to Slack. Users then get notified via Slack for any notifications from SnapLogic platform such as Daily API Usage, Snaplex Congestion, CPU usage, user activity, in addition to email notifications. Send notifications either on Slack Channels or directly to users.

Figure 2: Configuring Notifications to Slack

Enable Snaplex levels scheduling for all the scheduled tasks. This update reduces the time difference between the scheduled time of task execution and the actual time of task execution. With this update, your scheduled tasks won’t be affected by network disruption of the control plane helping your reliably deliver data that advances business processes and delivers insights.

10 X Faster Reports on SQL! Run Time from 30 Mins to 3 Mins! Ask Synergy Software Systems

April 27th, 2021

The performance degradation of applications running on Windows, and VMs is getting inherently worse. This includes latency issues, queries or reports timing out, crashes, missed SLAs, back office batch jobs bleeding over into production hours, and the litany of “shadow IT” problems that wreak havoc.

Even after migrating to a brand-new flash array, performance problems return because the root source of the problem still exists. The fact is, 30-40% of performance is being robbed by small, fractured, random I/O being generated due to operating system I/O inefficiencies. This is a software problem that is solved by our software.

DymaxIO™ fast data software will quickly:

  • Increase performance automatically – no tuning required. Simply install and watch performance problems disappear.
  • Optimizes writes so maximum payload is carried with every I/O operation.
  • Speed up I/O intensive applications like MS-SQL/Oracle, CRM, ERP, File Servers, Imaging, Web Servers, Backups, VDI.

Install our software on your most troublesome servers and see 30-50% or more of the noisy, garbage I/O offloaded and performance dramatically improved.

UiPath recognised again as RPA leader – ask UIpath Gold Partner Synergy Software Systems,

April 14th, 2021

Hyperautomation was trend number one on Gartner’s list of  Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020Recognised as the RPA leader for the last 2 years by Gartner .The idea is to automate more and more knowledge work, and engage everyone in an organization to be part of the transformation.  This is the driver behind the 5th Industrial revolution when knowledge workers will leverage RPA and AI.

UiPath has also recently been recognised again in the Forrester Wave™: Robotic Process Automation, Q1 2021 which was released last month. UiPath was again ranked a Leader, with the highest rankings in the Strategy, Market Presence, and Current Offering categories, of all evaluated robotic process automation (RPA) vendors.

The ability of automation to help humans remove the mundane parts of their jobs has led to significant growth in the past few years. UiPath has a vision to deliver the fully automated enterprise™, one where companies think ‘automation first’ and apply automation where it makes the most sense and can have the greatest impact.

We believe that automation as a boardroom priority shouldn’t be new or surprising anymore. Now the race is on towards a greater vision for automation’s role across the entire enterprise: scaling and scope extension.

UiPath offers an end-to-end platform for automation, combining the leading RPA solution with a full suite of capabilities that enable every organization to rapidly scale digital business operations. We’re incredibly proud of our recognition from Forrester, and we believe it validates automation’s role in the world.

RPA customers, and their employees alike, want more out of vendors than simple desktop-based task enablement. The world has changed and so have the needs of customers. The report states, with more people working from home, “RPA software must be scalable and therefore suitable and appealing to business users to get damaged processes back into operations rapidly.”

According to this Forrester Wave report, RPA customers should focus on providers that:

  • Deliver broad and rich experiences for business leaders
  • Integrate RPA-adjacent automation technologies
  • Empower a superior scaling experience

When you look at these three areas together, it’s easy to see the technological side of automation’s role in the changing future of work: expanding integrated tools, enabling more complex use cases, providing more robust user experience and insight. It is also important to realize that digital transformation is not just about technology. Success in automation is really all about people. By putting people at the center of your scaling strategy and enabling every employee with a robot, you assure the resiliency and productivity of your business and shift operations toward higher efficiency.
When software robots can reason over data and use artificial intelligence (AI) to make decisions, it is possible to unlock new possibilities that transform entire industries. We see the symbiotic growth of AI and RPA technologies inside businesses because, together, these automate large areas of routine work when tasks are fast, known, and repeatable.

AI is built into every part of the UiPath Platform. the Process Mining features, collaborative discovery, assessment tools, and graphical visualizations provide all you need to analyze and track automation ROI and its realization.

What is the true cost of software development?

January 9th, 2021

There ahs been much talk of both devops and citizen developers.
While these new paradigms are welcome and bring many benefits that does not mean that they replace other proven systems of software development.

There are reason why some consultancies quote significantly lower times to develop than other- usually tis lack of knowledge/awareness of what needs to be considered or they deliberately cut corners in areas like security, validation, documentation, testing, and so on.

If that sounds harsh then take a look a this recent post:
A report published last week by the Consortium for Information & Software Quality (CISQ) estimates poor software quality collectively cost companies in the U.S. an estimated $2.08 trillion in 2020.

OMAN VAT update November 2020 -ask Synergy Software Systems

November 27th, 2020

The International Monetary Fund, Oman’s economy is expected to shrink by 10 percent this year, the biggest contraction in the Gulf, and its fiscal deficit could widen to 18.3 percent of GDP from 7.1 percent last year.

Last year Oman enacted on June 15 an electronic system for registering excise taxpayers, setting the stage for residents to be taxed on products deemed harmful to public health and the environment after a 90-day grace period. The Omani “sin tax” involves a 100% levy on tobacco, pork, alcohol and energy drinks and a 50% tax on carbonated drinks. This year it increased the tax on alcohol to 100%

Oman announced that it expects to introduce an income tax on high earners in 2022, the finance ministry said in a 2020-2024 economic plan, new details of which were published late on Sunday, as the Gulf state seeks to restore finances battered by low oil prices.

The plan also aims to redirect state subsidies to those groups who need it, rather than subsidize all users. Electricity and water tariffs will be changed gradually in the coming years, the document said.

Meanwhile Oman Royal Decree No. 121/2020 was passed, and the VAT Law was published by the Official Gazette of Oman on 18 October 2020. The date of implementation is expected to be 16 April 2021 (i.e. 180 days from the date of publication of the VAT Law). The Executive Regulations will clarify certain aspects of the VAT Law and those are expected to be published soon by the Official Gazette.
In the next 4-5 months’ time, businesses in Oman should consider the implementation impacts on the entire business, operations, procurement, sales, administration, human resources, information technology, etc. We advise an internal steering committee with a representative from each function.

The VAT Law published is exhaustive with the benefit of the experience of other GCC VAT Laws.

Registration
Muscat has set a voluntary registration threshold of 19,250 Omani riyals and mandatory registration for businesses and individuals with turnover of at least 38,500 riyals.
Non-resident businesses that provide taxable supplies will be required to VAT register. Unlike resident businesses, there will be no minimum threshold that needs to be met before nonresident businesses must register for VAT with Omani authorities. A non-resident business will probably have an option to appoint an agent in Oman – that does not have to be jointly and severally liable, nor a fiscal representative of the principal. More detail is expected in the executive regulations.
Rules for digital service providers based outside of Oman are still in development. Digital service providers based outside of Oman, as well as e-commerce services, will need to pay careful attention to regulations over the coming months to ensure compliance.

VAT impact assessment,
Administration:

• VAT registration and gathering information from customers
• VAT recovery issues and VAT grouping
• VAT litigation avoidance strategies

The VAT fiscal impact,
• budgets, cash-flow, working capital, etc. Financial record keeping it is to be expected, that any company found to have kept inadequate records or issued incomplete invoices may be subject to potentially severe fines.
IT impact,
Ascertain the impact on the accounting system software and hardware such as gathering and loading data, developing statutory reports, amending other financial reports.
• The law sets out rules for proper record keeping and invoicing. All VAT-registered entities must keep specified records, including customs and invoicing documentation, and retain these records for at least 10 years. Archive storage space/cost and the impact of future planned system upgrades needs to be considered.
• The law specifies mandatory filing requirements, including documentation required when filing VAT returns. Now might be a good time to look at both document management systems and RPA e.g. for data entry validation, or VAT reconciliation or for data entry to government websites.

Process and documentation impact,
Redefine the processes under VAT – quotes, contracts and terms and conditions will need revision. Update your process documents for audit purposes.
VAT is a transaction-based tax, so the underlying legal documentation (ie, the contract or terms) detailing the supply of a good or service is the start of the review process. Review your contracts to determine the Omani VAT impact. Does the contract account for VAT (and/or other taxes)? When a contract is ‘silent on VAT’, this could well mean that the amounts specified therein are treated as inclusive of VAT. To avoid misunderstanding, such “silent” contracts should ideally be updated. Parties may need to (re)negotiate the considerations to account for non-recoverable VAT.
Businesses should also review the contracts to determine whether they reflect economic reality. Are the parties to the contracts the actual supplier and recipient of the service or goods? This is important in relation to the invoices issued by the supplier and, the right of the recipient to potentially recover VAT.
To apply the correct VAT treatment of the supply of a service or good, the supplier may need to obtain additional information from the recipient.
Contracts and/or terms and conditions may need to be revised in order to collect or store such information and to ascertain the correct Omani VAT treatment of the services or goods supplied.

Invoicing
Chapter 8 of the law outlines invoicing requirements. Any person making a taxable supply of goods or services will be required to issue a tax invoice, which may be in the form of an e-invoice rather than in paper format.
The details required to be disclosed on a tax invoice, the language in which invoices must be issued, rules for simplified tax invoices, and other similar requirements are expected to be set out in the executive regulations. Currently, it is expected that invoicing will be permitted in English and that use of Arabic will not be compulsory. The executive regulations are expected to specify when a business will be exempt from issuing tax invoices.
The requirement to issue tax invoices is also triggered in other circumstances, e.g., the receipt of advance payments that generate a requirement to account for VAT, or the making of deemed supplies.
For businesses issuing invoices in a foreign currency, the VAT amount must be stated in Omani Rials (OMR) and be converted using the average purchase and sale price of the relevant currency published by the Central Bank of Oman on the date on which the VAT is due. The tax authorities are expected to clarify whether any other conversion methods will be permitted.
This may affect your accounting system because you may sue different rates contractually or for corporate budgets or period end revaluation.
User training
e.g.
– how to add a customer TRN,
– how file a return,
– how to draft anew quote or contract.
– system changes

Transition management
Based on the VAT implementation in other GCC countries, there are challenges to be expected during the process. Complacency is a major risk, as is starting the implementation and transition activity late, and not allowing adequate time to test system and process changes.
Consider for example instances in which goods or services are paid for prior to the law coming into effect, but are only delivered once the law is in place?
The regulations indicate that VAT will have to be paid in such circumstances. However, further questions are raised in terms of invoicing and filing. More details are expected to be provided on precisely how compliance will function under these transitional circumstances
Appoint a proven implementation expert, to walk you through each type of business transaction and its treatment to avoid penal consequences.

Place of Supply
Understanding the concepts of “Supply”, “Place of Supply” and “Time of Supply” is critically important for effective implementation of Oman VAT. The place of supply shall be determined on the basis of the final consumption place of the supply, regardless of the product originating place,. When the supplies are consumed within Oman, they shall be levied to VAT. Services supplied outside of Oman to its residents will be treated as supplies in Oman. Some exemptions will apply to certain services provided to end-users outside of Oman.

For services, the place of supply depends on (i) the type of recipient (is the service business-to-business or business-to-consumer?) and (ii) the type of service. Special rules may apply to certain services such as real estate related services or electronically supplied services (or e-services). Real estate related services and e-services are always deemed to be supplied where the real estate is located respectively where the recipient is located. Particularly, overseas business-to-consumer suppliers of e-services should be aware that they will need to charge, collect and remit Omani VAT to the tax authorities.

Businesses in Oman which import services or goods may need to account for Omani VAT by means of a reverse charge mechanism. Such VAT would in principle be recoverable if and to the extent the business renders VAT taxable activities.
e-services are subject to VAT when the recipient of such services is located or residing in Oman. A reverse charge mechanism applies in case of business-to-business supplies of e-services, under which the burden of VAT is shifted from an overseas supplier to the Omani recipient. As of April 1, 2021, foreign and domestic e-service suppliers should obtain customer information (ie, verified VAT number) to determine their customers’ status (business or consumer).

Free zones
Businesses operating within free zones, special economic zones and duty free zones are likely to be subject to special VAT rules. Concessional VAT treatments are likely to be applicable for supplies within, to and from the customs duty suspension zones, free zones or special zones. Importers, who avail themselves of customs duty suspension benefits under the GCC Common Customs Law, would also likely be eligible for similar benefits under VAT. Dealing with this may require your accounting system to be able to handle a ‘reverse charge’ process.
Responsible person
All businesses will be required to have a responsible person who oversees VAT compliance. This person is liable to any penalties for failures to comply. This is similar to the UK’s Senior Accounting Officer concept, where a person can be fined up to £5,000 for not taking appropriate actions to stay compliant.
In Oman, the responsible person can personally be fined up to 10,000 OMR (nearly £20,000) with a prison sentence of up to one year. The fine can be doubled and the jail sentence doubled for repeat offenders. Any late submissions are subject to a 1% fine on the owed tax every month.
The severity of the punishments put the responsible person under considerable pressure to get things right. In a complex business, multiple users make VAT decisions, often with minimal VAT training and if you are relying on others to input data correctly then it’s imperative they do it correctly as the consequences of non-compliance are life changing.
If I were in this position, I would be doing everything in my power to achieve full compliance by using the best resources and tax technology available to me. I would also document all my recommendations.
The sensible way to mitigate the possibility of non-compliance is to minimise the risk of human error. For large businesses this means automating their VAT determination. Integrated finance/erp systems and RPA are two obvious solutions.
Most enterprise level businesses will be processing thousands of transactions a day, so human error will naturally occur when choosing tax codes, especially while VAT is a new concept in the country and wider region. Eventually staff become complacent or change jobs and new hires induction and training is less risky with automated systems.
Contact us for more information on systems we have already localised for VAT compliance, and how RPA automation can reduce cost and risk.

Exemptions:
Supply of foodstuffs, medicines and medical equipment is to be determined by the decision of the President, after coordination with the competent authorities. Some of the basic foodstuff will also be exempted from five per cent VAT. In addition to financial services, provisions of healthcare and education and their related goods and services, other exemptions are undeveloped lands (bare lands); resale of residential properties; local passenger transport; and renting real estate for residential purposes, Investment gold, silver and platinum, supplies of international goods and passenger transport and related services; supply of rescue aircrafts, boats and auxiliary ships; supply of crude oil and its oil derivatives and natural gas; import of maritime, air and land transport vehicles for transport of goods for commercial purposes as well as import of related services; and supplies for the disabled and charity organisation have been designated as zero rated.

Sector challenges

Retail sector: Certain food items may be zero-rated as per the VAT Law. The list of items which are zero-rated is not yet published. Businesses need to map the product with the list (consider the composition of the product, purpose, etc.). Incorrect classification could lead to a wrong zero-rating position.

Pharma sector: Medicines and medical equipment are zero-rated. However, the zero-rating is expected to apply in cases where the medicines are approved by / registered with the Competent authorities. The approval could be generic, or it may apply for certain period / certain class of medicines. For each sale / purchase there may need to be validation whether the medicine is approved to apply zero-rating.
Financial services: Banks and large financial institutions should classify their products into margin / fee-based income because margin is exempt from VAT and fee-based income is subject to VAT. Businesses must also consider the customer location because margins earned from a customer outside Oman will be zero-rated.
Certain charges which are penal may have a different VAT treatment. In the majority of the transactions, Islamic finance products will follow the treatment of non-Islamic finance products; however, there are some exceptions. The financial services sector may have a substantial portion of income which could be exempt, input tax apportionment.
Logistics sector: International transportation, i.e. movement from Oman to outside Oman and vice-versa is zero-rated whereas local passenger transport is exempt and local transport of goods is subject to VAT at 5%.
However the entire transportation journey involves freight forwarder, agent, shipping line, feeder operator, etc,. so ascertain the VAT impact on different charges for providing services. More clarity is expected from the Executive Regulations.
Export of services: Providing services to a customer based outside Oman is zero-rated subject to certain conditions. One important condition is that the benefit of services should accrue to the customer outside Oman. In other words, benefit should not be received by any other person in Oman. This may be subjective and depend on the arrangement with the customer and the nature of charge / services. It is advisable to identify such arrangements and to evaluate the VAT treatment. Other GCC countries are divided in terms of VAT treatment on such transactions.
It is likely that sector-specific guidance will be issued by the Oman Tax Authority to clarify the VAT treatment for different industry verticals.

Exempted Supplies from VAT
Some supplies based on transactions and others on nature will be exempted from VAT.
Supplies exempted based on transaction include:
• Any supplies transacted between the same group of the VAT group (e.g. a parent company and subsidiary or branches)
• Any supplies transacted between the same group of the VAT group (e.g. a parent company and subsidiary or branches)
• Business ownership transferred by one taxable person to another
• Any insurance claims made within the Sultanate of Oman
• All imports made by Armed forces, Army, and Air force in Oman
• All imports made by diplomats, embassies, consular bodies, international organizations. (subject to conditions)
• Supplies imported for charities and not-for-profit organizations
• Supplies brought to Oman by travellers and passengers as gifts or personal use only
• All supplies imported for people with special needs including medical aid equipmentIn addition to receivers’ or person utilizing the supplies, some supplies will be exempted from VAT by nature of product/service:
• Financial Services
• All Health Care services including the imports of medical supplies and equipment
• All educational services including the import of supplies for educational purpose
• Resale of the Real-estate and leasing of real estate properties for residential purposes only
• Non-developed land i.e. empty or barren land
• All local means of transportation for passengers

Registration process

The registration process is likely to start in January 2021 according to the Tax Authority in Oman. All registration process will be through its online e-services portal. The Applicant will have to provide the company ownership and business-related information. The necessary information required to register with the portal may include:
• Copy of trade license
• ID card and Passport copies of business owner and partners
• Company’s Memorandum of Association
• Contact details, E-mail for registration and other contact details
• Bank account details
• The income statement for the last 12 months
• Nature of business and activities performed
Each registering entity will be allotted a VAT registration identification number other than their currently held tax number.

Filing returns
Article 72 of the law prescribes the following minimum information to be provided in the periodical return:
• Value of taxable and exempt supplies;
• Total value of imported goods;
• Amount of output VAT on revenue transactions;
• Amount of recoverable input VAT on costs; and
• Net VAT due for the period.
Article 73 provides an option to amend tax returns within a period of 30 days from the date of discovery of any error or omission.

VAT payment
VAT will be payable to the tax authorities within 30 days from the end of the VAT period, together with the filing of the return. Unpaid VAT will be subject to a penalty of 1% of the tax due per month or part month, unless waived by the tax authorities in accordance with article 82 of the law

Mode of Payment
All entities entitled against the VAT requirements will have to deposit the VAT returns electronically through the E-Services portal.

VAT recovery
VAT recovery will normally only be possible in the case when the recipient has received a tax invoice which adheres to the Omani VAT invoice requirements. These requirements include details on the supplier and recipient. Any incurred VAT on incorrectly issued invoices (e.g, wrong issuing party, wrong VAT rate and/or other missing requirements) may not be recoverable. Businesses operating in Oman should define policies to ensure a proper VAT administration and invoicing.

A VAT group is a facility that allows two or more taxpayers to be registered for VAT purposes as a single taxpayer. The VAT group scheme is of interest to taxpayers with a restricted VAT recovery rate which is part of a group with non-restricted businesses. Inclusion of such payers in the VAT group may provide for (additional) VAT recovery.
Although VAT may be recoverable, the recovery itself generally takes a certain period of time. This cash flow aspect should be one of the considerations during the (re)negotiation process, particularly with large supply contracts spanning several years.

If you need advice on preparing for VAT and updating and automating your financial or erp systems then we have implemented VAT for more than a hundred companies in UAE, KSA and Bahrain. we are gold Partners for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fiinance, Infor Sunsystems and UiPAth RPA.

Call u son 0097143365589

DymaxIO Subscription Licensing -all Condusiv products now rolled into one for fast data.

October 21st, 2020

All of the technologies in V-locity®, Diskeeper®, and SSDkeeper® have been rolled into one new product – DymaxIO™.

New DymaxIO is fast data software. Whether on-premises or in the Cloud, DymaxIO returns more than 40%+ of your hroughput that is being robbed due to I/O inefficiencies of Windows, SQl and virtualisation.

Fix your application slows, freezes, timeouts, slow SQL queries, reduce cloud compute costs, and more, at the source – no new hardware needed.
A software solutlion to a software performance problem.

DymaxIO is sold as an annual subscription which saves you money. Subscriptions are available for client, server, and host systems.

A new DymaxIO site license is also available to conveniently and cost-effectively optimize the performance of all Windows systems.

To improve performance across your systems callus on 009714 3365589

SSD performance degrades over time- prevent this with DymaxIO

September 29th, 2020

Can SSD performance degrade over time and is there a way to prevent this? The answer is YES and YES. the same solution that addresses the inefficiencies of iops in Windows , SQL and VMs can also help you to maintain the performance of your solid state disks.

The reason for this degradation is an undesirable SSD phenomenon called the Write Amplification Factor (WAF), . This is a numerical value that indicates the actual amount of data that was written to an SSD in relation to the amount of data that was requested to be written from the Host (i.e. Windows OS System)

WAF = the data written to the SSD / the data written by the host

For example, an application on the Windows Server system writes out 128kb of data to the SSD, but internally on the SSD, 512kb of data is written on the SSD for this to occur. This will degrade SSDs write performance.

In this example, the WAF = 512kb/128kb = 4 ! This is bad, a 128kb write from the host that resulted in 512kb of internal writes on the SSD

Ideally, you want a WAF = 128KB/128KB = 1

Why does this occur. Unlike HDDs, data cannot be directly overwritten on a disk. On SSDs, data can only be written to erased spaces. When you have a brand new initialized SSD, all of the pages are in a free/erased state, and there is no problem for it to find free/erased spaces to write new data. But as the SSD starts to fill up with data, resulting in erased spaces having to be created that causes the WAF to increase. I can go into more detail on this but will save it for another time. Suffice to say, a higher WAF value means SSD performance degradation.

Do SSDs degrade over time?

The answer is YES but this has to do more with the SSDs filling up over time. Some recommendations on the web advise to keep free space on SSDs anywhere from 10% to 30% to avoid this degradation. With less free space on a highly I/O intensive system, a couple of things occur:

-There are less free spaces to write to, extra overhead may have to occur like block erasures to allow the new updates to occur. This increases the WAF – Not a good thing.
– With less free space, file data may get spread out to different locations on the SSD. For example, in the best case, 10 pages of file data that is being updated are all on the same block.
– When the block needs to be erased to be updated, then just that one block needs to be updated. If those 10 pages are on 10 different blocks, then in the worst case, those 10 blocks have to be erased and re-written – More overhead and a higher WAF.

The result is

➣SSDs are overprovisioned. For example, a 1TB SSD actually contains 1.1TB of data space. This extra space (seen only by the SSD internals) helps to allow the WAF to remain low.
➣SSD Garbage collection and Trim. Both of these processes include freeing/erasing spaces in the background so new writes can occur quickly on these newly erased spaces.

How doies DymaxIO™ help with SSDs Degrading?

DymaxIO has technology to keep the WAF low.

The patented IntelliWrite® technology enforces efficient Sequential Writes to occur rather than smaller Random Writes from the Windows Host. Sequential writes are more likely to place data in the same blocks which can decrease the WAF

Optimization engines keep the free space contiguous when needed on the host logical side. This will help enforce larger sequential writes to occur which decrease the WAF.

There are also a few more benefits of enforcing larger sequential writes.
– Sequential I/Os out-perform Random I/Os on storage, both HDDs and SSDs, so this ensures you are getting the optimal performance from your storage.
– Keeping the WAF low and writes lower on the SSD helps to extend the lifetime of the SSD.

IntelliWrite technology in DymaxIO does both of these functions automatically
– Keep sufficient free space on your SSDs
– Enforce Sequential Writes rather than Random Writes.

Fix at the source. 2X SQL application performance, accelerate Windows throughput 40+%, extend hardware life 2 to 3 years, reduce timeouts, crashes, and more. A software solution to software problems Just install, DymaxIOno code changes, no reboot necessary.

Call Synergy Software Systems 0097143365589

SnapLogic and rapid integration with SAP, Concur, Ariba, Fieldglass, Cloud Analytics….

September 15th, 2020

On 16th September, SnapLogic and SAP will present the very latest in Citizen-Integration IPaaS simplifying integration of SAP Ariba, SAP Concur, SAP Fieldglass, multiple data sources and apps with SAP Cloud Analytics and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.

You will also hear from Siemens AG, how they drove their integration vision successfully.
Learn how, by adding SnapLogic to your SAP data and application fabric, you can better:
• Maximise your SAP investments and reduce IT debt
• Optimise procurement operations and accelerate SCM delivery by 10X
• Create smooth paths to your other best-of-breed applications and solutions
• Align your business with application delivery and initiatives
Speakers:
– Thomas Hecht, Head of Technology at Siemens AG
– Klaus-Peter Sauer, Senior Director Data Warehousing EMEA at SAP
– Roger Coles, Director of Alliances and Channels, EMEA at SnapLogic
– John Landells, Solutions Engineer, EMEA at SnapLogic

Contact Snaplogic partner Synergy Software Systems us for information on how to register.