(1) FLEXIBILITY AND OPTIONS;.

As stated in the section on Installation and Training, a full accounting system needs a lot of power and flexibility built in, to accommodate the diversity of business types, accounting procedures and user wishes.

Fortunately, we have been able to draw on the last twelve years experience of writing and modifying programs for New Zealand conditions and users needs.

Thus SmartBiz has the level of sophistication and flexibility built in that can only be found in a suite of programs after some years of use in the field and feedback from users.

Some of this flexibility which can be configured for the individual user by one of our trained installers is as follows:

(2) INFORMATION HELD;:

There is an Account definition file which tells SmartBiz what fields are to be held in the Account file for each type of ledger, their type (e.g. Date, Whole Number, Integer Number, Alphanumeric field, etc), and where the information starts and finishes in the file.

This file is used by the Open/ Edit account windows and the User Defined Reports programs.

Thus it is a relatively simple job to modify this file with a word processor to hold additional, non-accounting type information.

For instance, in our own environment, we are using SmartBiz for our own accounts, and are holding for all our SmartBiz users such information as the Type of Computer, who it was purchased from, who the users current support person is, the version the user has, the date it was purchased, what their update status is, etc, etc.

It will be appreciated that all this extra is not accounting information as such and so would in normal circumstances (with all other Accounting packages that we are aware of) require running some other program to track this sort of information.

Were this to be done, it means keying a lot of the information twice, but more importantly it means running two databases, one for accounting and one for customer information. Believe us, whenever this is done the different databases never have exactly the same information, addresses, contact names, etc, no matter how disciplined and systematic the office systems are.

With SmartBiz all this extra information is held against each client, able to be changed in the Edit window and accessed in "User Defined Reports", with no modifications to the programmes whatsoever.

(3) DEFAULTS ON OPENING ACCOUNTS;:

Similarly, by changing the File definition file, it is possible to change the default that is used whenever a new account is opened, or skip a field totally if the user does not wish to use it.

For instance, if a user is to have only Open Item debtors, then either the default can be changed to have Open Item as the default, allowing the user to override it if necessary, or the system could be set so that the question is skipped entirely and all Debtors are automatically Open Item.

This flexibility is available for every single field available across all types of account.

(4) OTHER BUILT-IN FLEXIBILITY;:

There are many other flexible options in the full version such as numbering and sorting methods when opening ledgers, options as far as whether discounts apply, whether Salesmen codes should be asked for, whether individual trading terms are to be used or global trading terms to override the individual ones, etc, etc.

Unfortunately, there are far too many of them to list here without this overview ending up hundreds of pages long. For further detailed information of this nature, you need to ask your installer, or preferably order a demonstration disk and manual.