A Tip for Your Year-End Budget

Find opportunities to spend now for work that can be delivered later. 

Adam Beck, Director of Marketing at CADENAS PARTsolutions, recently wrote:

“One thing that drives me crazy is seeing money go to waste. If you’re like me, you probably have some ‘use it or lose it’ budget left over for the last few weeks of the year. If you don’t use it, it goes to waste. If you throw it at something just for the sake of spending it, that can be pretty wasteful too.”

In his blog post, Adam shares a few tips that are good advice for all of us to take. One tip that resonates with Cincom Smalltalk customers and partners is the ability to find opportunities to spend now for work that can be delivered later. 

The end of the year is a critical time, and you are often preoccupied with closing deals and strategizing for a strong new year. An unexpected project in the coming year is the last thing you have time or energy for. So, look for ways to spend your extra budget on products or services that you can use when you need it most. As Adam says, consider this like a layaway for the future: paying with funds now for future maintenance time so you don’t have to find that money when a need arises.

As a Cincom Smalltalk customer or partner, we want to introduce several ways that you can create a “layaway” with us—wisely investing in the success of your company or application, while planning for the future. Consider this to be similar to an insurance plan. If something happens to your application and you want a proof of concept or need a specialized fix, you’ve already paid for that access and can pull from it without having to go through a new approval and justification process.

For example, this “layaway” can be used for things like:

• Product Upgrades
  Don’t risk a critical upgrade to a learn-as-you-go, in-house approach. Our senior consultants know the small, impossible-to-document steps that make the difference between an unresolved task and a completed process.
• Performance Enhancement
  A performance-enhancement service reveals how a team is using Cincom Smalltalk, which aspects of the tool they are not using and how they could energize so many more existing capabilities.
• Troubleshooting
  Whether it’s identifying and resolving a processing glitch or improving a performance drag, we have experts who can work with you remotely and/or on-site to re-create the problem and then provide an alternative viable approach.
• Mentoring
  It’s easy to learn the basics of installing and using Cincom Smalltalk. But the most productive use is best achieved through customized mentoring for your experience level, developed to meet your needs.
• Migrations
  Cincom Services can move your application suite to the most productive Cincom Smalltalk programming environment, giving you fully scalable, web-based and client-server development enhancements.
• Proof of Concept
  Not sure if Cincom® ObjectStudio® or Cincom® VisualWorks® is the tool you need? An on-site proof of concept that uses your data and meets your business goals will provide that last element of confirmation.

If you have questions, comments or want to discuss creating your own “layaway,” contact the Cincom Smalltalk Product Team.