This is the second post in a 6-part series on how Njevity’s core values show up in R&D. Start here if you missed the first one.
Everybody claims to care. Not everyone proves it.
PowerGP Banking was the deciding factor for several customers who moved to the Njevity cloud. Migrating is not a small decision. It takes time, planning, and trust that we would deliver. They had heard good things. They were ready to be done with manual reconciliation.
For most, it worked exactly as expected. For a handful of customers, nothing happened. No connection, no transactions, nothing flowing in. Their financial institution didn’t support direct downloads. The feature they moved for wasn’t working for them.
In my first post I used this as an example of how customers shape our roadmap. That’s true…and it’s also the tidy version. The real weight of it is that people made a big investment and changed a vital component of their operations, and then something outside our software stood between them and the reason they moved. The blocker wasn’t ours. We could have said so and been technically right. Being technically right doesn’t help someone who’s stuck.
So we built CSV import for PowerGP Banking. Export a statement from any bank, upload it, map the columns once, and PowerGP Online remembers that mapping every time after. From there it’s just another feed into Auto-Match. Doesn’t matter who you bank with.
Saying it is free. Meaning it requires action. Somebody had to build something…and it wasn’t going to be the financial institution.
Fanatical service isn't reactive
The bigger discipline is not waiting to be asked.
It’s easy to be responsive. A customer reports a problem, you fix the problem, everyone feels good about the exchange. What’s harder is looking at a workflow nobody has complained about and asking whether a customer should have to work this hard. You don’t file a ticket that says “this is mildly worse than it needs to be.” You absorb it, week after week, and quietly decide how you feel about the software.
So we go looking, because often it doesn’t arrive as a direct request. Our consultants are in front of customers constantly, walking them through the software for the first time. People say things in those sessions they would never file a ticket about. Our consultants pay attention to it and bring it back to R&D, and we decide what’s worth changing. Some of it we notice ourselves. Njevity runs on GP, so our month end looks like yours.
The Transaction Matching window is one result. Filters and sorts now stick. Set them once, work through as many matches as you want, and nothing resets on you. Nobody asked us for that. It isn’t a headline feature. It just means somebody’s month end is less of a grind. If you’ve ever re-applied the same filter forty times in one afternoon, you know exactly which forty minutes of your life we’re talking about.
Treating people the way you want to be treated
In R&D, Caring shows up in how we respond to feedback.
When a customer tells us something is broken, the pull toward defensiveness is real. We built the thing. We know why it works the way it works. Caring means overriding that instinct long enough to ask three questions: what were you trying to accomplish, where did it break down, and what are we going to do about it. In that order. The last question doesn’t get answered honestly if you skip the first two.
The customers who moved for PowerGP Banking are all using it now, whoever they bank with. That’s what Caring costs. It isn’t a slogan on a wall, it’s a line item on a sprint.
Up next: Courage. They Say GP Is Ending. Our R&D Roadmap Disagrees.
