Friendly Systems announces that it is now authorized to sell and support Intuit’s QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions 9.0.

Get accounting and business management software delivering the power and flexibility your growing business needs with QuickBooks’ legendary ease of use. Manage your business finances, inventory, customers, vendors and employees for thousands less than other more complicated accounting software systems, backed with local support and training in the Atlanta, Georgia area from Friendly Systems, a company with over 25 years experience helping small and medium sized businesses.

QuickBooks Enterprise version 9 Offers:

• Power and Scalability for Growing Businesses – 5 to 30 users
• QuickBooks’ Legendary Ease of Use
• Advanced Functionality
• More Specialized Tools
• Low Cost of Ownership
• Customer Approved
• Multi Currency
• Multiple Location Inventory
• Service Management
• Customer Relationship Management
• Backed by Intuit

Need More Information?
Call Friendly Systems at 678-273-4010 x 1 to get answers and advice from a Quickbooks Enterprise Solutions consultant.   We can determine whether your company’s needs are met by Quickbooks Enterprise Solutions.

Report selection functions are now much easier

Selection options for reports are now on the main screen, rather than a separate tab, so all information is visible on one screen.

You can now enter value fields in report selection without having to select the operand.
Example: To select a customer for a report, enter 01-ABF as customer, the operand will automatically default to Equal-to in the operand column. This makes selection much quicker.

Also note that for AR, AP,GL & SO reports, if there are User Defined Fields setup for the primary report file, the User Define Fields appear on the report selection screen. You will have to scroll down the selection screen to see them, as they appear after the primary fields, but they can be used with the various selection options to choose records for the report. The User Defined Fields do not print on the report however, unless you add them using Crystal reports.

There’s a great new option to automatically return to the report selection screen after printing or previewing so you can change the selection options and print/preview again without having to start over. See the bottom line to the right of the printer selection where it says: Keep Window Open.

Previously announced on June 25th, 2008 the Sage Software Customer Support Knowledgebase was publicly available without requiring a user logon and password. 13 days later, on July 7th, Sage retracted this access based on feedback from their reseller community. They decided to re-evaluate this decision and continue requiring a valid user logon and password for accessing their support site. This site contains troubleshooting and support tips for many Sage products including Mas90 & Mas200, Sage Businessworks, F9 and FRx.

Do you ever have business situations that catch you by surprise (of course, we all do). If key people are out of the office, can they or anyone keep track of important developments that require immediate decisions? Business Alerts can trigger automatic e-mail alerts to one or more people based on the data in your accounting system. The actual alert triggers can be set based on the formulas that are important to your business.
Examples:
The purchasing manager can be alerted when:
An item is below its minimum stock level at a warehouse. Never run out of a best selling item.
The cost of an item received exceeds the standard cost for that item or the cost varies by a high percentage from the usual cost of that item.

Salespeople can be alerted when an inventory item’s price changes.

Account managers can be notified when one of their customers has an invoice that is past due by 30 (60,90,etc.) days or more.

Notify the sales manager when an order does not ship by the shipping date.

Contact us at Friendly Systems if you want to learn more about using Business Alerts to work for your company.

Paperless Office features example - archiving Journals and Registers

Functions: Ability to e-mail, fax and store PDF’s of forms, registers and reports with no additional software required.

Advantages: fast transmission of information to customers, employees and vendors. Archiving and easy retrieval of forms, registers and reports. Eliminate filing time and paper storage and expense.

Example - Sales Order Sales Journals: You set up your company ABC for Sales Order Sales Journals to create pdf documents and store them in your pre-designated folder for Sales Order Registers. When you select the Sales Journal, a PDF file of the report will be created with the name in the pre-designated folder in the format:
ABC_SO_DailySalesReports_SO-000010_000.PDF
where ABC is the company code and SO-000010 is the Sales Journal number.

Accessing the Journals & Registers
OK you need to see or print a certain Sales Journal from 2 weeks ago, how do you find it? Go to the Paperless Office module selector option for Journal & Register Viewer. A grid will be displayed with all the Sales Journals for your company including the journal name: (Daily Sales Reports/Updates), date-printed, User-code, and whether the journal was updated or not. There is a search feature so you can retrieve journals by journal number or user. Simply click on the report you need and it will be loaded into the viewer for you to review, print or e-mail. No more looking through files in the file cabinet. In the setup, you may specify a password for these documents so that information is kept confidential.

Paperless Office features - great for saving time and money in printing, filing, transmitting and retrieving forms, registers and reports.

Ability to fax and e-mail orders and invoices to customers and vendors

Ability to archive and easily retrieve registers, journals and reports and view, print or e-mail them.

Documents can be passworded to maintain confidentiality

New Business Insights Features

New views are included for G/L, A/P, Inventory and Purchase Orders.

Quicker drill down to information and data entry without lengthy menus.

New Chart tab allows you to view and chart data from several areas and customize the titles - then you can copy the chart into other applications such as Microsoft Word documents. Great for presentations.

Improved Business Insights Dashboard

Place detail or summary views on the main Dashboard.
Generate Dashboard pages independent of internet connectivity.
Charts are now printable.
Greater security features for setting up dashboards for different users.

Report selection functions are now much easier

Selection options for reports are now on the main screen, rather than a separate tab.

Enter value fields in report selection without having to select the operand.
Example: To select a customer for a report, enter 01-ABF as customer, the operand will automatically default to Equal-to in the operand column. Much quicker.

Great option to return to the report selection screen after printing or previewing so you can change the selection options and print/preview again without having to start over.

New E-filing options for Payroll State & Federal info, and for AP 1099 data.

Improved Financial Reporting Features

Sage Mas90/Mas200 version 4.30 CD’s have been shipped to customers who are currently on a maintenance plan. Friendly Systems recommends you contact our support line at 678-273-4010 ext 2 so we can review the requirements and effects of upgrading your system. As we noted in our June newsletter, installations with custom modifications, extended solutions or 3rd party products should not contemplate upgrading to 4.30 until each of those changes has been certified for version 4.30. In the coming weeks, we’ll be adding blog entries describing the new features in version 4.30.

Most businesses realizing that their systems and/or processes need improvement look around and total up the costs of making the changes. What will new software cost? What will it cost to train 5 new employees? What will a bigger warehouse cost me each month? It’s easy to quantify those answers, because you can get on the phone or on the Internet and get quotes that put it in green and white.

What’s harder to quantify is the cost of not changing. Just keep doing what you’ve always done is safe, right? Studebaker probably thought so…

Each of the “what does it cost to?” questions should immediately bring up an equal and opposite “what is it costing NOT to?” question. What is the old system costing in lost productivity? What is it costing in employee morale and stress-induced errors to not make sure that employees have the tools and training they need for the company to be the best at what it does?

These numbers affect the bottom line just as much as the numbers on the checks, and good decisions take into account all the facts.

Sunday at Best Buy, it took two Best Buy employees and three AT&T employees to come to the conclusion that nothing could be done to add a cell phone for my daughter to our existing Family Talk Plan, because I had Combined Billing (land and wireless lines on the same bill), and the Combined Billing department was not open on Sunday.

Alison and I arrived back at Best Buy at 3:45 pm Monday, and started over. Really started over, because neither Best Buy employee we had dealt with on Sunday was there, and the person who was didn’t seem to pay attention to anything I said and so repeated all the same issues we had Sunday, instead of starting with the Combined Billing department. It appeared that I was more familiar with the web interface to AT&T than she was. After about 20 minutes on hold, she finally got through to a person at Combined Billing. They spent the next five minutes arguing over whose system made more things impossible, until I finally mentioned the concept from the day before of “unbundling” the billing so the line could be added. In the midst of this, we once again changed Best Buy employees, this time for the better.

With the Combined Billing rep on hold, she then contacted another AT&T rep as the multitude of false starts on this seemed to have scrambled their credit approval process. We were finally thinking that my daughter might have her phone AND be on time for work, when the contract appeared on the screen. Instead of being an additional line on the existing plan for $9.99, it was a whole new plan at $39.99. At this point I took Alison to work, and when I got back to the store 30 minutes later, the Best Buy rep was just hanging up with the AT&T rep and printing out the THIRD version of the contract. She also showed me the credits that had been applied to my account to correct the mistaken charges from the first two contracts.

So, over two days, we had four Best Buy Employees, seven AT&T employees, and the two of us. Thirteen!

Oh, and I still have to call Combined Billing back tomorrow and get the billing bundled again…

If you have a customer who already purchases most of your services on a regular basis, you’d want to make it as easy as possible for them to purchase more, right? And you would want them to be quoted the same price no matter who picked up the phone, correct? You certainly wouldn’t want your internal business processes to make it impossible to place another order, would you?

Not the wireless division of the New AT&T, formerly known as Cingular.

My daughter is 15, has had a part-time job for several months, and wanted her own cell phone (that she will be paying for) added to our our Family Plan. We checked the web site and then Alison said she wanted to go to a store and actually look at the phones before deciding on a model. Prices in the store were about $50 higher than online, but the stores would waive the $26 activation fee and offred a $20 rebate if you added a text message package, which Alison wanted. She was about ready to order a RAZR, when she found that the store only stocked them in black. So we decided we would order online from home.

First we made a stop at Best Buy to pick up a gift card for a family birthday party that evening. Best Buy was offering the RAZR FREE with 2 year contract, plus a $50 gift card by mail. The salesperson pointed Alison at the most recent RAZR model which had several additional features and was the color she wanted. Alas, they did not actually have any in stock.

The salesperson returned from the stock cabinet with a Samsung Sync phone with the same colors and features as the RAZR, with the added advantage of being of sturdier construction. I’ve had a Samsung phone for about a year and it has survived many drops with no adverse effects, while Alison has several friends who are on their second and even third RAZRs in that time.

I gave my phone account info to the salesperson, who started the “add a line” procedure on the AT&T web site. The procedure got stuck at step 3 of 6. After several phone calls to AT&T, the problem was determined to be that I had “combined billing”. My landlines, cell phones and DSL service are all on one bill. According to AT&T, I could not add a cell phone line without calling Combined Billing, having them “unbundle” the billing, add the line, and then redo the bundling. After calling that number and winding through a number of menus, the Best Buy salesperson was informed that the Combined Billing office was CLOSED on Sundays.

So we will have to go back to Best Buy on Monday or pay $50 more for the same phone online from AT&T. Or maybe take all 3 cell phones to Sprint and the land lines and internet sevice to Comcast.

Stay tuned…