17th October 2005 - Newsletter 137

Please read and pass on to your staff to read.

 

Lower Case

We note an awful lot of our customers enter all their customers' names, addresses and stock descriptions in capital (uppercase) letters.

We have, to the delight of a few customers, converted their databases to lower case or more accurately - title case with the first character being capitalised.

There are a number of good reasons to do this;

  1. Text in a mixture of upper and lower case is much easier to read.
  2. Looks far more professional on your documentation.
  3. Takes less space in the allocated area on the screen and on your paper work. Therefore on some reports where we are constrained for space you can see more of your data. This is because lower case character takes approximately 60% of the space of uppercase characters.
  4. It is considered "HTML SHOUTING" to use too many capital letters when sent as email and some spam filters will reject emails if they consider a document to contain too many words in capitals.

We have some utilities for converting your customers' names, addresses as well as your stock systems to "Sentence casing" if you are interested in doing this please call Mark Hilditch in our office and he will discuss doing this on your databases.

Please note there will be a small charge for this service.

 

Unblocking eAccounts (Pop-up Blocker)

A number of features in eAccounts now require the ability to open new windows automatically. Some places where you need pop-up blocking turned off in eAccounts are;

Help topics

Creating new creditors on the fly (see next topic)

Accessing the built in Phone book or calculator.

Should you have trouble with any of these features ( i.e they don't show for you) please follow these instructions. Please note the reason for this is that default security settings within your browser are set too tight.

Using Internet Explorer 6 or above:

  1. Goto Tools menu at the top of your browser window
  2. Choose Pop-up Blocker > Pop-up Blocker Settings
  3. In the 'Address of web site to allow' box, type '*.eaccounts.co.nz' and click 'Add'
  4. Click the Close button

Using Firefox:

For other browsers or 3rd party pop-up blockers please consult the help files that come with the product to allow pop-ups from '*.eaccounts.co.nz'.

 

Creating Creditors On The Fly

Often when entering Creditors invoices you come across a new Creditor. To make the process of creating a new Creditor easy click on the button called "Create Creditor" when loading your invoices received. This will take you to a screen to define the new creditor. When filled in it will automatically take you back to the "Load Transactions" screen for you to continue loading the invoices.

Please note:

For this function to work correctly you MUST have the 'Pop-Up Blocker' disabled for eAccounts (see previous topic)

Handling Customer Refunds & Bounced Cheques

We have created a new help topic for you on dealing with a variety of tricky situations that occur when receipting customers (Debtors). The new help topic is titled " Receipting Debtor Issues" ( Keyword : Receipting)

Issues covered are :

Handling Bounced Cheques

 

Handling Customer Refunds

Dealing with underpayments (customer pays you slightly less than they owe)

Dealing with overpayments (customer pays you slightly more than they owe)

Reversing Interest (if you charged a customer interest previously)

Writing off Bad Debts

 

Min & Max Margins And Increasing Your Profitability

If you are running a stock system eAccounts has a very powerful tool for monitoring you Invoice Margins.

Against each Stock Group you can set the Minimum and Maximum margins you expect to make for this group. Clearly this will vary to cope with Retail & Trade sales.

On a daily basis if you scan your daily sales (through Debtor Batches or the Invoice History report) the system shows you the overall margin you are making on each invoice. If you have the Min & Max margins filled in against each Stock group the system will highlight the Margin in Red if there are product lines within the invoice that need checking.

This feature stops invoices which may appear to be OK being updated with products with low margins. Incidentally when you display the invoice it highlights the actual line where the product margin is wrong.

For more information look at the help topic "Increasing and Monitoring Profitability In Stock" (search keyword: margin)

There is also some useful information on how to quickly load the Min & Max margins against all your groups.

 

Price List excluding Those without a page code

The price list program has a new feature. You can now specify to only include products that have an " iPage " code loaded against them (bottom of Stock Maintenance screen). iPages are what are used to specify on which Internet pages within your "Shopping Basket" products will appear.

With the ability to exclude on your price list products that have been excluded on your Internet shopping basket this means customers whom you send price lists to either electronically (email) or in paper form will now find they don't get confused looking for a product on the Internet that's not there despite being in the price list.

Even if you don't use a shopping basket on the internet, this feature is also a good method for excluding certain products showing on your pricelists.

 

Statement Message – Deduct from Credit Card

Some businesses have arrangements with their customers that allow them to credit their Debtor Account at the end of the month (or on some date each month) by using their Credit Card.

  1. Under Maintain Debtors set the "Auto Charge" field to one of the Direct Debit options.
  2. If you print statements for these customers the Statement says
    "This account will be paid directly with your Credit Card"
  3. You can also run a Trial Balance at the end of the month with the "Include" option "Only Those That We Direct Debit". This will give you a list (with amounts) to process manually through an EFTPOS/Credit Card machine.

 

CSV Statement

Up until now the options for producing Customer statements were:

  1. Printed Statement
  2. Emailed - HTML with attached PDF Statement
  3. Faxed Statement

For your really large customers we now offer emailed HTML with attached CSV Statement

This option allows your big customers to directly load your Statement into their accounting system for reconciliation.

 

Creditor Invoice Search

Under Creditor Enquiry we have a new feature. On a "Clear Screen" (No Creditor displayed) you will see there is a Box to enter an Invoice number. Here you can specify an invoice number and the Creditor Enquiry will show all Creditors that have used the specified Invoice Number and all Payments associated with it.

This is a very powerful tool especially with your larger creditors and for those where you make multiple part payments for the same invoice and want to reconcile an invoice you believe is paid.

 

Need Help?

Almost daily we add new help topics to our system. As we take on more customers the need to manage our Help Desk resources and to provide documentation increases. We believe our help system is now very detailed. The information in our help topics can be printed for future use or easily referred to on-screen.

Please try searching words in our help system on your relevant subject prior to calling our help desk. We now have 3 almost full time Help Desk Support staff available 8:30 am , to 5pm business days. Outside these hours you can generally get help until 11pm NZST from Neil on his mobile.

Please do not get offended if we redirect you to a specific help topic in our system when you call.

 

Using Stock Franchises

Although most of our clients use the Franchise report feature to its maximum, it has come to our attention that a few businesses are not taking advantage of this powerful reporting tool.

  1. Franchises are defined as a higher level of reporting for Stock Groups. Consider them groups of groups or categories of groups.
  2. Where most businesses may have anything from 50 to 400 stock Groups, if you have these all being summarised into say 10 Franchise codes it makes for a much easier report to look at when reporting on Sales trends over say the last 12 months or even Stock on hand by Franchise.
  3. If you are sitting down with an accountant, Bank Manager or business advisor displaying your sales or stock on hand in say 10 categories, it is much more user-friendly than a report of groups that runs to 50 – 400 groups which becomes unreadable.

Naturally there is a help topic "Understanding Franchises" (Keyword: Franchise) that not only explains them but gives useful information on how to easily set up your system if you are not already using this powerful feature in the stock system.

 

 

After hours (emergencies only) Ph Neil on 021 921188 or email neil@eaccounts.co.nz

The Team - Neil, Stuart, Mark, Darron and Conscience
(and our consultants Peter, Lee and Mark2)

 

Copyright © eAccountsGlobal 2005