NumberCruncher News: Issue 8-2012

At Numbercruncher, one of our goals is to give our customers new and easy ways to increase efficiency. This summer we have been busy working on numerous new features for All Orders including the addition of contact management, one click access to linked transactions on sales orders, and internal notes on the sales order and ship doc screens. One of the new enhancements, which was commissioned by AIM Wholesale, are the powerful new price levels that give your business better pricing control than ever before.

All Orders already significantly expanded on the price levels in QuickBooks. While QuickBooks offers 2 types of customer price levels (and in certain versions limits the number of price levels that can be setup), All Orders has been offering an additional 7 types of price levels for many years. All Orders now offers even more advanced types such as margin pricing, volume discounts and percentage discounts either by item group or by item. In addition, we have added the ability to give price levels a starting and ending date, which means you can setup your price levels in advance without them taking affect and not have to worry about removing them once that pricing is out of season.

My favorite new price level, though, is the new Customer Pricing Group price level. This feature allows you to stack price levels so that they can be evaluated in order and All Orders will find the lowest, highest or last found price. Here is an example of how the Customer Pricing Group can be useful. Say Customer A gets a 20% discount across the board except for certain items where they get a specific price. Previously a 'Customer Item Price' would have to be created for ALL the items to specify the unique pricing that was being offered. Now, by creating a 'Customer Discount' of 30% and a ‘Customer Item Price’ for only those specific items the same results can be achieved. Simply create a ‘Customer Pricing Group’ and add the above 2 price levels and specify the final price will be based on 'Last Found'. Not only does this make unique pricing easier to maintain, it also saves hours of data entry and prevents possible data entry issues where incorrect pricing may be entered. Happy pricing!

After almost 30 years in the industry you can say Joe DeSantino knows his car parts. Starting as a software specialist he moved into sales and eventually became the VP of Sales-South American of a major automotive parts distributor. After 20 years working for the same company, it was time for a change so in 2004 Joe founded JDS Worldwide Corp as a specialty aftermarket parts dealer.

He used QuickBooks exclusively for a while but as his business grew he realized that he needed more advanced inventory software including bin management, FIFO picking and kitting/assembly processing but he did not want to stop using QuickBooks for accounting. In October 2010 Joe found All Orders by NumberCruncher through the QuickBooks Solutions Marketplace.

"We developed a binning system that maximizes the use of shelving space yet minimizes the picking process". said Joe "And more than one bin can be on the same self so we needed software that can accurately track the movement of inventory in and out of bins and give us quantity status by bin as well". It is important to JDS's business for product that arrives first to get shipped out first. "All Orders is able to pick bins on the FIFO basis even if the stock was moved from its original receiving bin" said Joe DeSantino.

What struck Joe about NumberCruncher is the personal touch he received from our team. "I was surprised and delighted that the owner of NumberCruncher gave the initial demo and that the rest of the team was so responsive to my questions" said Joe. "I am happy to say that they continue to be responsive to us to this day".

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Like most software only a fraction of its functionality is used. In this section we want to highlight some of the lesser known areas of All Orders that you make have not know about.

In this issue we are going to review a new feature recently added namely calculated fields on reports and forms. Until we added this feature the biggest issue was that there was no way to summarize or filter on a calculated field. The new calculated field feature not only solved this issue but opened up a realm of possibilities including applying logic and advanced concatenation (putting words together). For more of the advanced stuff you will need to know some SQL statements but mostly you do some basic math for example CostPer/PricePer. Here is where a little SQL knowledge may help. In the previous example an error would be generated if PricePer where 0. To prevent this issue you use a case statement like case when PricePer = 0 then 0 else CostPer/PricePer end.

Calculated fields can also be used for dates. Say you want to see the difference between the order date and shipped date (i.e. your own lead time) you would create a calculated field call 'SOLeadTimeDays' with the SQL statement datediff(d, ItemShipDate, LastShipDocDate). This customized field take the difference in days between the ItemShipDate (due date) and the date of the last ship doc created for this order. Not only can you create the field but you can also use it as a filter. There are many more date functions that you can use.

My final example is a concatenation. As you know that by default if say the suite # is blank it will show as a white space. This can be resolved with a calculated field like this billaddr1 + char(13) + char(10) + billaddr2 + char(13) + char(10) + case when billaddr3 is null then '' else billaddr3 + char(13) + char(10) end + BillCity + ', ' + BillState + ' ' + BillZip. Feel free to cut and paste this directly into your sales order template.

If you are more of a visual learner, no problem! We have created a video tutorial on this topic. watch now

Summers in South Florida are hot but just before the sun goes down I like to sit outside and reflect. Like always, there are a few spiders busily working on their webs creating perfectly symmetrical formations that catch any flying creature unfortunate enough to get caught. I watch like a child fascinated by these small creatures so much so that I have given a few of the names like Charlie and Sam. One day I decided to conduct an experiment. So I detached one of the anchors which attached the web to a tree which as a result the web starting to blow around in the wind. Instantaneously the spider jumped into action gathering up the dangling silk and set out to fix the damage. Within moments the web became stable and the spider resumed his space in the middle of the web.

Life is full stimuli. We get clues as to health of our business or our bodies for that matter. How often have we ignored clues that had we acted sooner, what would otherwise have been a small issue becomes a huge problem. So when you get such a clue in your business or in life don't wait for it blow you away, take action right away even if the action is unpleasant; be like Charlie the spider.

NumberCruncher News: Issue 8-2012

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