A lot of significant changes have happened over the past month and I have finally found some time during this stormy period to get some of these things documented.

GL End Of Year Procedures
For those of you who have not spotted the new options in the GL you will notice that eAccounts now automates the process of .transferring closing balances from one year to the new year. You will need to ensure that you have a Appropriation account defined – this must be a balance sheet account and should sit under the Capital Accounts group. Against each GL Branch you then load that Appropriation account into the field called Appropriation. Under Transactions you will see there is a new option to generate the Opening Entries. What this process does is load into the new financial year an entry for each balance sheet GL Account and then sums all P&L accounts together and places their total into the Appropriation account.

Knowing the number of credits both in value and in dockets helps to make sales decisions when offering discounts to customers. Some customers have been surprised at the level of credits that some of their clients generate. Credits often cause a far more work for staff, than making the original sale aside from the loss of profit.

Looking Up Credits In Customer Enquiry
When in the Customer enquiry and you display the invoices the following new features have been added :
a) Against any invoice it will show up to 3 credits that have been related to the invoice. It will also show the value of the credits and the dates of them
b) Against any credit note it will show the related invoice, the value of and the date of it (if there was one specified).
c) In both cases (above) you can click on the Invoice number or the Credit number and display the full Invoice or related Credit Note this is a very powerful feature allowing you to display a Credit and with one key click display the original invoice.

Sales & Credits Analysis
Previously called the Debtor Sales report (Under Debtor Reports) has been improved to give the addition of being able to analyze credits. You can now selectively request to show the value of Credits against sales in both dollars and the numbers of invoices against Credits raised.

This report is very useful, and I remind all sales managers again that they should use this report for highlighting debtors that have stopped dealing with you (poached by the opposistion). There are report options here for instance that will highlight customers that have not purchased in the past two months but were buying from you prior to this.

More Error testing in GL Batches
When loading and posting entries in the General Ledger, the system is now much tighter in preventing errors being entered. For instance it won't let a credit entry be processed if the entry type is "Other Pmt"

Bank Reconcilliation Cross Reference
When downloading your bank transactions it is strongly advised that you have the "Bank Reconciliation Screen" opened in another window so any erroneous entries on your bank statement can be checked off against the Bank Rec. If you refresh this Bank Rec screen (use Ctrl F5) you will see that it now marks the entries that cross matches the entries that have been loaded into the GL Batch.

Contacts Database (Phone Book)
The Contacts Database (Spinning Phone popup at the top of the main menu) has had a huge amount of work done on it. It is a fantastic business reference tool. It does reply on you and your staff keeping the Creditors, Suppliers, Debtors, Sale Staff Master files up to date with the current contacts and phone and email addresses. But when you do this the advantages are :
a) There is only one central point to maintain these details across your entire organisation.
b) All staff can access this accurate information.
c) Staff that need this information away from the office (or at night at home) can access ph numbers etc
d) You can send email (and simple fax msgs) directly from this online phone book. From any computer you log into and know the email addresses are correct.
e) You can find a contact by company name, surname, first name or part thereof.
f) If there are multiple contacts (ie for a debtor there is a Manager, Accountant, and a Salesperson) when you display one of these it also allows you to hyperlink to the other related contacts.
g) If you load your staff up correctly (under Maintain Salespersons) you can load both their work email and their home email addresses. This allows you to easily send an email to a staff member after hours (Reminding them of an appointment tomorrow etc)
h) Shortly you will be able send SMS messages to you staff's cell phones.
i) Shortly you will be able to send an email to all staff in one hit (remind them all of tomorrow's staff meeting at 6am)
j) Shortly you will be able to scan thru and redisplay the sent messages (yes the system saves already the messages)

I cannot emphases how useful this tool for companies where staff work in multiple offices (branches) or work remotely from the main office (work at home).

ePOS End Of Period
For those users of our ePos Point Of Sale system, you will note there are some significant changes the end of period processes. After you roll over, there is now a separate program under the Order Processing utilities menu for updating each day since the End Of Period.

If you are running ePos you should have received in the mail a laminated End Of Period procedures card, please follow these instructions at the end of the month.

Stock Receipting
There has been lots of additions to Stock Receipting, there is now two methods of receipting stock.
a) You can elect to receive in stock "Directly" this is the way you always have had. What this means is that you are receiving in an invoice (or packing slip) with the goods and will update both the quantities and costs all at once.
b) The new option allows you to receive in a packing slip and have the stock quantities be updated. Then at a later date receive the invoice and have the ability to then confirm the pricing for each line of the packing slip originally loaded.

Several other new feature are :
a) The ability to add items onto an order being received that were not previously ordered. Examples of this is Pallets or goods that have been sent on the P/Slip in error and you have chosen to accept them instead of returning them.
b) Secondly when receiving in stock you can now enter the Suppliers part number for any item that does not already have a Supplier part number.

Importing New Stock Or Updating Your Suppliers Costs.
A new feature of eAccounts is the ability of users to import new stock directly into eAccounts from a CSV file. This feature means that you can receive from your suppliers an Excel file of their stock and with a little formatting get it into the right format and then upload it into eAccounts autonomously (without bothering us - yah !)

This feature also allows for you to receive price updates from your suppliers for products you already have on file and have the costs updated.

For further information on how to do this contact your eAccounts representative.

Stock Enquiry Shows More Detail
The Stock Enquiry screen now shows a lot more information about stock that was receipted it now shows .
a) Any stock that cancelled off orders
b) The Average before and after the receipting of stock.
c) If the Last Purchase cost was updated and/or if the Average cost was updated.
d) If yo are displaying history you can click on an order line and also see the entire order that the item clicked on came from.

Passwords
On the login screen you will see a tick box for changing passwords. eAccounts as requested by several clients who through security audits have requested the following new features :
a) The ability for users to change their own passwords.
b) The ability for a business to set a frequency at which all its users MUST change their passwords.
c) The prevention of a user from reusing a previous password once they change a password.
d) If the same Password were used for the Salesperson Raise Order program the system will automatically change that password as well.