Chennai based Gofrugal Technologies is a GSP (GST Suvidha providers), one among the 34 companies in the GSTN formed by the government for the easy rollout of the GST system across the country. The company that offers both on-premise and cloud hosted SaaS services, is currently working on a backup and restore service as part of helping customers comply with Section 57, Generation and maintenance of electronic records of CGST Rules, 2017 by Central Board of Excise and Customs.
When this service is ready, customers data will be automatically backed up in GoFrugal cloud and customers can restore the data in any new system in a secure manner in just one click. This pricing starts at Rs.3,000/- per annum for this service.
Kumar Vembu, Founder/CEO of Gofrugal technologies, explains to Channel Times their channel roadmap and the situation of India post-GST.
GoFrugal believes that servicing MSMEs ERP needs requires a global solution built
with latest technology and engineering practices but local presence. So, for them, partners are the last mile connect with market and customers and they play a very important role in
demand creation to implementation and support for customers.
“GoFrugal is a partner-centric company as it believes that is the best way to increase market reach and improve market penetration and market share. By partnering with GoFrugal, partners not only enjoy representing the best product in its category in the market but also the most future ready product. A customer acquired by the partner is a customer forever,” explained Vembu further adding that partners work jointly in the field with GoFrugal, as one team GoFrugal, continuously getting skilled up on the product improvements and best practices.
Partner-lead activities
GoFrugal offers ‘myDelight’ mobile app to go 100% digital in their engagement with GoFrugal and makes the sales and implementation easy by letting customers experience every aspect of GoFrugal solution. This results in faster order closure, happier customers, higher reference business and most importantly higher income for the partners GoFrugal has a proven and standardized Assure Returns Partner Program (ARPP).
For each category of partner, the roles and responsibilities and return on investments are clearly defined for the partner. Once a partner signs-up, GoFrugal works in the field closely with the partner in incubating and nurturing the partner so that they take wings and fly high “In summary, GoFrugal treats its partners as extended team GoFrugal and works closely with them to ensure there is a win-win-win long term relationship between customer,partner and GoFruga”, Kumar avers.
Partner classification and certification levels:
Speaking on the partner classification and certification, Kumar says that GoFrugal engages the channel partners in two ways- sales and solution. The sales partner is responsible for lead generation, prospecting, demonstration and order closure.
In addition to these, the solution partner is also responsible for implementation GoFrugal also has a referral partner program for those partners who do not want to actively market, sell and implement GoFrugal solutions but just want to refer GoFrugal when they come across any opportunity.
“For partners who want to build their own service business in their area, GoFrugal offers a
dealership program. When a partner signs-up as a dealer, they can white label the
GoFrugal solution and can market, sell, implement and support the customers. This way,
dealer’s own the customer 100% and GoFrugal is the R&D arm for the dealer offering them
the product and the product updates,” Kumar explains.
GST Disciplines Business Operations:
According to Kumar, GST disciplines business operations and disciplines the entire business ecosystem. “Business should be disciplined in their own interest but most businesses are not as
disciplined as they should be in their operations either due to lack of time or due to lack
of systems or due to lack of trained manpower or simply due to the lack of attention of
the management in making the business systematic and disciplined.
Kumar tells that with GST, it is best to record a transaction in the system and do it as recorded in the system. Under all circumstances, what is done must match with what is captured in the
system not only in my business system but also in my trade partners system. “By trade
partner, I mean my supplier or customer or service provider. Only when the transaction my
system 100% matches with the same transaction in my trade partner system, GST returns
will be accepted.”
Like banks and many organized business do, people in every business must be system
driven and disciplined in terms of recording all transactions accurately in the system and
ensuring that all work for the day is completed on the same day.
Kumar also feels that this is like changing the business culture of India upside down from a primarily relationship driven business culture to a system driven business culture. Since the businesses have less time to adopt system-driven culture, the unintended side effect of GST is that it will lead to lots of standardization in business operations among all businesses.