Recently, BusinessWare Technologies has completed a major upgrade to its field-ready service, AvailSuite, with full tax reports, an improved user interface and QuickBooks synchronization. The company also divided the standard version of AvailSuite, now its lineup consists of Standard and Personal. The standard version is suitable for companies with 5-50 employees due to its networking capabilities. It organizes customer information, manages products and / or services, schedules and employee mailings, helps control expenses, handles billing, synchronizes data with QuickBooks, and more. The personal version is available for micro enterprises or single-person companies. It has most of the features of the standard version, but with a limited number of employees. The price for Standard is $ 299 for a single-user license (with an unlimited number of technicians); The price for Personal is $ 69.99.
Standard and personal versions are built on the same code base, which allows you to instantly update or quickly move between them. This supports business growth and allows you to stay with the same program and avoid retraining staff.
Help and support options
It takes some time for a new software product to learn how to start working with it. The QuickSuite Quick Start Wizard provides excellent assistance in the process of creating company information, adding employees and customers, creating orders and invoices, entering payments and maintaining reports. You can choose Show Me an educational film or Do it for me. The Quick Start Wizard was available at any time by clicking the “Quick Start” button in the main menu. This built-in help function and traditional help (press the F1 button to access) are very useful. Free unlimited email support is provided for both personal and standard versions.
Ease of use Functionality
The main menu provides seven general areas of work: sales, manufacturing, receivables, payables, inventory, reports and a calendar.
AvailSuite offers several customization features that allow users to customize the navigation bar and page layouts. You can hide the main menu groups or replace them with a small icon and view only those that are used frequently. All pages can be configured in the same way - you can add or hide columns, change their places, sort them, group data, etc. For example, a customer view can contain 1 or 21 columns.
Sales This is a customer management module, in which you can click on a customer and immediately view or add new orders, tasks, invoices, payments, service history and the next task date, default discount, billing address, notes, etc. D. one window. The system provides excellent workflow support, for example, if you add an order, you will be asked to create a task for this order, and then you can schedule your meetings. The repetitive tasks wizard will assist you in scheduling recurring meetings. You can set a very flexible repetition pattern, for example, “every third Friday every month” or “on Monday and Thursday every second week”.
If you want to work with your customer base, you can view your recurring meetings that will run for the next 7 or 10 days and send reminders to serve your customers by email. View one-time tasks completed during the last month to make a list of clients you want to call and schedule the next meeting.
All orders have status, so they can be viewed as draft orders, complete orders, agreed orders, canceled orders, and retention orders. In addition, you can quickly get statistics on orders, sorted by customers or by month.
Here you can also create invoices. Because the system stores information about all your customers, so when creating a new invoice, their billing information is automatically included, and you can specify the tasks that they need to pay for the drop-down list. Invoices can be customized. To enable your company logo and customize text for printing on invoices, you must fill out the company settings form, and then all this information will be automatically displayed in your documents. All documents can be printed or emailed to clients as PDF files directly from the system.
Production. This is a module for managing employees and all expenses that you spent on providing your services. You can enter / view all employee information, such as name, address, photo, working days and time, hourly rate and / or monthly salary; Add a new task or time map - all in one window.
Employees can submit time reports using the Time Cards functionality. This is a very useful feature for tracking work time, so you can always be sure that each employee’s requirement was accurate.
Employees may have different levels of access. If you want your technician to view the tasks and submit your time cards, you must enter your login name and password on the System Access tab on the employee card.
Receivables and payables. The accounting functions of the AvailSuite are very simple, so for more complex accounting you need to have additional software, such as QuickBooks. In the receivables module, you can analyze the debts of your customers, as well as all invoices and payments, sorted by the customer and by month. On the invoice payments screen, you will see payments to your suppliers and employees and invoices from your suppliers, grouped by status as drafts, agreed, completed, canceled, and retained.
Inventory. AvailSuite Standard now offers support for multiple warehouses, with the ability to track suppliers, purchase orders and all the products you have, their location, warranty information, quantity in hand, price, etc. Using the Vendors module, you can quickly view your purchase history, credit limit and the proposed discount, as well as the sellers - their contact information, grace period, conditions and price list.
This feature is more than tracking your inventory. AvailSuite notifies you of a shortage of items in stock when saving an order. You can also view a list of products whose number is less than the specified threshold value. You can create and print purchase orders, track their status and payments, view PO groups grouped by supplier or by month.
Reports. This is one of the things for which you need business management software. AvailSuite provides about 40 reports on all aspects of the business, allowing owners to have key information at hand. Users have access to profit and loss reports with one click, matching P & L, aging payables, purchase orders or any other items. The menu groups all available reports into various categories, such as sales reports, accounts receivable reports, payment reports, and inventory reports. All reports can be exported to PDF, XML, XTML, Word and Excel for further modification.
The calendar. This is one of the distinctive features of AvailSuite, very flexible and easy to use. It allows you to schedule appointments directly on the Calendar screen and coordinate the workload of the technicians so that you can view all the tasks of all your technicians on one screen or view only your personal sessions. Once you have an appointment on your calendar, you can set up an alert to remind you when a meeting is coming.
The AvailSuite calendar has all the “point-and-click” and “drag and drop” capabilities to simplify planning. You can move tasks from one day to another with one mouse movement or rewrite them from one person to another. Resizing the taskbar will change the duration of the task. Double-click on the taskbar to open a screen with task details. On the same screen you can view all unselected tasks.
Once the planning is complete, you can print out the daily task lists for employees and start their work.
Extensibility
A tiny business should strive to become large, so a simple upgrade path is needed. You did it. Starting with a single license, if AvailSuite Standard is available, you can buy some additional ones, and AvailSute will work in multiplayer mode. Adding new users is a matter of purchasing the appropriate number of user licenses.
If you outgrow your Popular Personal, switching to another product requires little effort. So if you stay small, it’s best to start using BeneSuite Personal. No other business management software is suitable for micro enterprises and start-up companies.
Data transfer
New users can import existing data (customers, suppliers, services, and resources) from their old software using Microsoft Excel files. The wizard makes the tedious configuration process acceptable. If your software cannot save data in Excel files, try sending a request for the migration process to BusinessWare Tech support. They are currently conducting an advertising campaign and offering free data migration.
Customization Requests
One of the most common mistakes is that setting up the software and adding new features will be very expensive, so it’s useless to ask about it. Have you ever thought that on the other hand there is a software product manager who is thinking about the same new features, because “No one asked about them”? So please ask whatever you want. This manager is waiting for your feedback, and he / she will appreciate it.
