Introducing BaccS: All You Need To Manage Your Translation Business
14 May 2019
3 min read
Updated September 10th 2019: BaccS is now SDL Trados Business Manager. Learn more here.
With any business role, there are those tasks we clearly enjoy doing, the tasks where we employ our expertise and feel the most productive. Then there are the more administrative tasks that can interrupt our productivity but are just as important still need to be done.
The translation business is, of course, no exception. Whilst the pressures of delivering high-quality translations continue at pace, those administrative tasks don’t disappear, especially those that have a direct impact on your finances. These include invoicing & quoting for your work, maintaining your vendor and client information, tracking margins and costs and just the general visibility of your business financials. These are all areas that require constant attention, but where do you find the time?
SDL has for many years provided tools like SDL Trados Studio and SDL Trados GroupShare that help translators, LSPs and corporations speed up their translation work with increased consistency and quality. With the addition of BaccS to our product line up, we can now also offer the business management features that address many of those administrative tasks mentioned above. Not only that but BaccS also provides increased visibility on your business performance, providing you with invaluable data on your business health.
BaccS is a dedicated environment that speeds up and improves your day to day processes, giving you back time to focus on the core task of translation. It offers complete tracking of a translation job from start to finish, ensuring you effectively organize your work. It takes care of accounting tasks, reports on your business performance and helps to deliver insights that will help you work more efficiently. Another advantage of BaccS is its tight integration with both SDL Trados Studio and SDL Trados GroupShare, so the workflow remains streamlined giving users an easier way to work.
Let’s take a look at some of the specific benefits.
Centralize Your Data
BaccS allows you to centralize your data, in particular, your vendor and client details. This data could include contact information, customer logo’s, price lists or even individual preferences, which means you can speed up project management tasks by accessing information from one place.
As an LSP potentially working with separate systems for customer data, invoicing and quoting BaccS provides a much better experience. If you are a freelancer looking to expand your business, quoting and invoicing is now so much easier than before.
Fast and Easy Quoting
Quotes can be quickly prepared using the automatic analysis from your translation tool giving you back time to focus on revenue generation. Individual customer rate lists are automatically applied to the quote to simplify the quoting process. Your quotes can be sent out directly from an integrated email sender, ensuring they are handled efficiently. The quote design can also be completely customized with the template designer.Transparent Invoice Management and Tracking
BaccS provides streamlined, transparent invoice management and tracking. Your invoices can be created from a BaccS job in a few clicks according to your customer’s individual settings. You can then generate PDF files for all invoices from fully customizable and localizable templates and send them directly from BaccS. You also have the ability to monitor your accounting, with tracking of incoming and outgoing invoices and the option to manage your accounts in multiple currencies.Transparency Over Your Business
Without a business management solution such as BaccS, understanding what’s happening with all your projects can be a challenge. Current methods like custom in-house solutions, including Excel as a common example, can help but can only go so far. BaccS goes much further by providing you with a dashboard, giving you instant visibility and an overview of all your key translation project information from a central place.
The dashboard provides you with insights that will allow to keep track of jobs with upcoming deadlines, unpaid invoices, and sent quotes. You have full control of jobs, helping you to deliver every job on time and make it easier to manage multiple translation projects. Users will also benefit from dedicated translator and project manager dashboards, which only show relevant information and are customizable.
Powerful, Customizable Reporting
With all the information and data in BaccS it’s important you have access to it in the way you need. The built-in reports and analysis feature provides an easy way to get the statistics you require.
Each report is presented on an easy to read dashboard which can, among other things, include charts, summary tables, maps and gauges. Information vital to your business, such as profit margins, translation volumes and uninvoiced jobs per customer, can also be easily tracked. For complete flexibility, custom reports and dashboards can be created to allow you to get answers to queries and find interesting facts about your business's performance.
What Does the Future Hold for BaccS?
BaccS in its current form is already an incredibly powerful solution, available as a plugin for SDL Trados Studio with invoicing & quoting features, as a standalone desktop version for single users or Team version with added reporting capabilities and additional users and finally an online team version for advanced flexibility. Over the next few months, we will be working and listening hard to our users to improve things further.
Want to see BaccS in action? Join this introduction to BaccS webinar and see how this impressive translation business management tool can benefit your business.
Neil Ferguson
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