New Features in ManageMore
Version 4.0 (revision F)

Been a while since you last upgraded your ManageMore business software?
Don't worry, the following features from prior revisions have been documented below so that you can catch up on the improvements and fixes made to ManageMore. 

Version 4.0 (revision F)

Known Regression
As of this revision, the billing statement form type 7 and invoice print form type 20 no longer work under Windows 95/98 stations.  These fairly uncommon dot matrix designed form types were developed back when Windows 95/98 were quite popular operating systems and allowed a way to circumvent the operating system in order to improve print speed on dot matrix printing.   Inevitably, with the lack of support for draft mode printing under later Windows operating systems, and the difficulty of maintaining backward compatibility on 6+ year older operating systems, we no longer will be able to support this feature.  ManageMore does offer alternate form styles that will print on dot matrix printers, but will be considerably slower than draft print modes. 

Improved Screen Layouts
Yes... we did it again.  We changed the look of the program.  Well, sort of.
We completed the final overhaul of making ManageMore 100% cosmetically consistent throughout the application.  When version 4.0 was released, we had changed approximately 85% of the screens to use a toolbar section across the top of each window (a common look for most Windows applications of today).  We simply completed what we had not finished by making the rest of the windows also use a toolbar section for buttons like Save, Print, Help, Close, etc.   This primarily affected the main transactional forms like Sales Orders, Sales Invoices, Purchase Orders, Purchase Receipts, Disbursements, etc.  It may take a little getting used to at first, but it is actually more consistent to all the other forms throughout the program and will make it easier to train new employees.

Another added benefit is the extra room it provides for added features.  Some of ManageMore's most critical windows (i.e. Sales Invoices, Sales Orders, Disbursements, etc.) had run out of room for adding new functionality.  With the advent of the new toolbar layout, we are now able to accommodate more options without cluttering up the screens.  Some of these new features will be discussed further below.

The new screen layout also introduces a Help button on nearly every window in ManageMore.  Although the F1 key still works for invoking the online help, we added the help button  to make it easier on individuals who are not as familiar with the older Microsoft standards for invoking online help.

Lastly, a few of the graphic icons throughout the program were replaced by more professional looking images that better depict the action requested (e.g. Auto-Fill, Shipper Notes, Open/Close Order, Memorize/Recall Transaction, etc.).

New Item Profile Feature
Due to the new screen layouts, we are now able to provide some new functionality on many of the transactional forms.  Please find a new toolbar button labeled "Item Profile" on transactions like Sales Orders, Sales Invoices, Inventory Adjustments, Inventory Transfers, Purchase Receipts, etc.  The new item profile button allows you to drill-down on any highlighted item in a transaction and pull up the actual Supertrack Inventory record.  You can even make on-the-fly changes to an item in inventory if desired.

WARNING: This feature could be a security issue because employees would have access to item costs and pricing changes.  Your security settings should already have the UPDATESUPERTRACKINV resource locked from access.  Please double-check this to be the case before allowing employees to login to ManageMore.

New Transaction Notes Feature
Again, due to the new screen layouts, we are now able to add a printable notes feature on many  transaction screens like Purchase Orders, Purchase Receipts, Inventory Adjustments, Inventory Transfers, etc.  We also changed the "Shipper Notes" feature on Sales Invoices to represent this same new transaction notes feature as well.  This makes it more consistent throughout the program and allows the feature to be used for much more than shipping instructions on orders and invoices.  In fact, you can now provide a default text message for the transaction notes on sales invoices and orders, if desired.  See Setup... Forms... Sales Invoice or Sales Order... Transaction Notes Tab.

Improved Customer Incidents
Customer Incidents can now have up to 10 user-defined fields added to each incident record.  This is extremely useful for storing some additional data about an incident (e.g. Phone Number, Product Code, Serial Number, Date when Problem occurred, etc.). 
Customer Incidents can also be imported from other third party contact manager software applications, if needed.  See Setup... Options... Customer Incidents...

Since the topic of document management is quite lengthy, we will be providing a variety of web pages that discusses the many facets of document imaging and how it correlates to ManageMore.  Please refer to the Document Management FAQ's we have setup to answer some of the common questions we have already received regarding Intellifile.  Also, more information can be obtained at http://www.managemore.com/document-management

New Transaction Importing
ManageMore now offers a method for importing past sales invoices directly into ManageMore.  This feature makes it simple for a customer to transfer past sales data from another financial software directly into ManageMore. 

This new transaction import process can also import open A/R invoices as well.  This means that you can use other financial programs to generate invoices, import the outstanding invoice amounts, and handle all other A/R processes through ManageMore directly. 

For a detailed look at how the new import process works, please click here.

Miscellaneous Improvements and Fixes
1. New Location Locking feature.  It is now possible to minimize employee error when logging into ManageMore by forcing a specific location value each time anyone runs the program.  Location locking forces a workstation to always assume that it belongs to a certain location only, thereby minimizing the chances of a wrong location login.  Simply modify the shortcut icon properties or your login script to call the ManageMore program with a special command line parameter (L=xxxxx) that identifies the desired locked location. 
For example, "mm.exe L=101" would run ManageMore and always login as location 101. 
2. New AutoChange Billing Status feature.  This AutoChange feature simplifies the steps required to suspend or inactivate many customer service records based on criteria (e.g. Aged Balance, Billing Group, Class Code, etc.).  This process is most useful for terminating billing on hundreds of customers without having to go to each service record manually.  It also allows for an automatic invoice to be generate when the billing status is changed (e.g. for charging an early cancellation fee or penalty fee).
3. New "Save Confirmation" feature for Purchasing Transactions.  A new setting was added that forces confirmation before saving purchase quotes, purchase orders, purchase receipts and disbursements.  This eliminates accidental saving of records when the Enter Key is pressed prematurely.  See Setup... Accounting... Purchasing.
4. New "Item Profile" Button on Purchasing Transactions.  A new button was added that allows you to instantly view or modify an item's inventory detail on-the-fly while creating purchase orders, purchase receipts, and even disbursements. 
5. New support for signature capture device.  Support for the HHP-T3100/T3101 Signature Pad allows the point-of-sale to now electronically store signatures directly to the invoice generated.  This device also acts as a credit card reader which allows the user to swipe their own credit card onto the device and confirm the purchase themselves.  See Setup... POS... Signature Capture...
6. New Email feature within Customer Care allows a single statement to be sent to a customer as an Adobe PDF document.  Simply press the statement history button inside customer care, highlight the billing period you want to email to the customer, and press the email button at the top of the toolbar for that window.
7. Improvement to Average Costing in Inventory Transfers and Inventory Adjustments.  Prior versions could intermittently re-average the cost of an item to 2 decimal place accuracy only.  Also, a safety check was added to prohibit certain transactional changes to the unit cost or extended cost that would cause accounting problems.
8.  Better Support for International Addresses.  A new "International" setting is now available for prospect, customer, service, and vendor records.  When activated, the U.S. City/State/Zip code will be replaced with a 3rd Address Line to allow space for a country.  Phone number field formats will also be adjusted for international use as well.
9. Improved Reminder Feature.  You can now specify a single employee for receiving all reminder messages when logging into ManageMore.  See Setup... Options... Reminders.
10. Improved Sales Order Deposit Feature.  You can now specify an initial deposit percentage  that should be collected at the time of creating a sales order.  See Setup... Accounting... Order Entry... Sales Order.
11. Sales Invoice and Sales Order Transactions now print the time in the lower right hand part of the document.  The time printed will always display the time that the document was created, and not the time of printing.
12. Improvement made to the data entry of a customer record when additional contacts are added to the record.  It is no longer required to fill-in  the contact method while adding new contact numbers to a customer account.

Version 4.0 (revision D)

Our revision D release brings a whole new meaning to the word "Deposit" and "Billing."  We have also slightly moved things around in our menu system and have created a new Banking menu for processes that are neither A/R or A/P related exclusively. 

WARNING:  PLEASE review your security settings after upgrading to this revision.  A new Banking menu option was created that most likely will require new employee restrictions via security administrator.  It might even be advisable to talk to our technical support regarding the steps for re-assigning all employees to the default security groups that ship with ManageMore.  Our default security groups are already logically constructed based on common divisions of accounting responsibility within most organizations and may be a quicker way to lock down ManageMore capabilities.
Also, a new billing engine was developed that supercedes the need for using the Cellular Manager for billing purposes.  If you are using the Cellular Manager Module to do any type of billing, please read the notes below on the new recurring billing capabilities and how it may affect you.

New Banking Functionality
Within the Lists menu and Activities menu of ManageMore, you will notice a new menu section titled "Banking."  Actually, the banking menu section added to ManageMore is not entirely new.  Some of the processes contained within the newly added Banking menu items were in other areas of the menu and/or are now more specific to bank account related activities.
For example, under Activities... Banking... we can now directly choose to do a Bank Reconciliation process.  Although this function was possible before under the General Ledger Menu (See Activities... General Ledger... New  Reconciliation), it was not as obvious to those who are "accounting challenged."  Our account reconciliation could reconcile bank GL accounts as well as any other GL account in ManageMore.  Unfortunately, many users didn't correlate their bank account with a GL account number.  Hence, there was some confusion with how to do bank reconciliation in ManageMore.

Now, under the Banking Menu option, there is a specific option for Bank reconciliation which only allows you to choose from a list of bank accounts you have setup.  This same concept goes for viewing a bank register as well.  Within the General Ledger Menu, you have the option to view registers for any GL Account.  But now, within the Banking Menu, a "View Bank Register" item will only let you select from defined bank accounts.  This menu design improvement should be a bit more user-friendly for those coming from "QuickBooks" or other products that refer to registers and reconciliations as "Banking" functions.

Other notable features added to the Banking Menu option include an easier way to handle bank transferring of funds.  Although it could be handled already with a straightforward journal entry, our new bank transfer feature makes it quicker and simpler to understand for the 99% of us who are not accountants or bookkeepers.

A few misplaced menu items have also been reshuffled into the Banking Menu (where they make better sense under Banking versus A/R or A/P related processes).  For example, printing checks, creating/editing payment methods, and cash drawer management items are now all found under the Banking Menu.

It is for this reason, we ask all of our customers to thoroughly re-evaluate your Security profiles to ensure that certain user groups have restricted access to the Banking Menu item.

Improved Deposit Capabilities
When ManageMore was initially developed, our focus was around accounting with integrated point-of-sale.  This concept was unheard of several years ago and is still quite uncommon today.  In fact,  Intuit Corp. recently announced its hyped Quickbooks POS about 6 months ago and it is only a standalone POS solution that requires exporting to QuickBooks PRO.  Not much integration in that!

ManageMore's handling of bank deposits was initially conceived around the notion of cash drawers versus traditional manual selection of payments for deposit.  Our cash drawer concept of automatically grouping payments for bank deposit based on individual employee or location made sense for most retail business scenarios.  However, cash drawer based deposits do nothing for managing delayed payments (i.e. credit card transactions).  Prior to this revision, the handling of credit card deposits to your bank account required setting up special GL accounts (e.g. creating a form of GL clearing account) and using account reconciliation in order to reconcile the depositing of credit card payments.  For most, this reconciliation process was considered a bit tedious and awkward to perform.

Therefore, ManageMore has now created a new deposit method referred to as "Delayed Group."  This new deposit scheme works in a similar manner to most other accounting systems.  Undeposited payments are shown on a single screen so that you can tag/untag the payments that will be deposited to your bank account.  This deposit method can be used for all payment tenders (i.e. Cash, Check, Credit Card, etc.), but has its greatest advantage when dealing with credit card payments or other forms of "delayed" deposit.  The simple tagging of selected credit card payments for deposit as they are confirmed deposited by your credit card merchant processor acts as a confirmation of deposit and reconciliation in a single step.  Credit card payments not deposited will continue re-displaying each time you select a new "Delayed Group" deposit.  Filters by location, tender, date and more allow you to easily tag/untag items for quicker selection when posting deposits as well.

The main changes affected by this new deposit scheme are located within the deposit record itself.  The next time you go to create a deposit record, you will notice a design change to accommodate the multiple deposit methods that are now supported by ManageMore.  A deposit method drop list will appear to let you choose which deposit technique you wish to create.  The window layout will change according to the deposit method chosen.  Those of you who are currently using the cash drawer deposit scheme will not need to make any changes to ManageMore unless you want to start depositing credit cards using the new deposit method mentioned.

The key to utilizing one or more deposit methods relies solely on how you define your payment methods (i.e. Cash, Check, Credit Card, etc.).  In the payment method form (See Lists... Banking... Payment Methods), you must identify each payment method with a deposit method to use.  Assuming you want the majority of your deposits to be handled in a cash drawer deposit method, you will only need to set cash and check payment methods to "Cash Drawer" depositing and credit cards to "Delayed Group" depositing.  ManageMore will handle all of the rest so that your end of day deposit knows how to group your payments accordingly.

For a more detailed discussion on deposits and the various implementations you can choose from, please review the updated online help on this subject.

New Deposit Slips Form
Along with the redesigned deposit form and newly added deposit methods, we have implemented support for Deposit Slip Report.  A deposit slip (a.k.a. deposit ticket) report is a standard pre-printed bank form which is used in conjunction with accounting software to fill out a deposit slip automatically.  Instead of hand-filling out a deposit slip each time you make bank deposits, ManageMore can fill-in a bank-ready deposit slip form for depositing directly to your bank account.  Simply click on the printer icon within your deposit record and choose "Deposit Slip with Deposit Detail."  The deposit slip format currently supported is identical to the "Quickbooks Pro 99 or higher" deposit slip form.  There are literally dozens of suppliers that carry this deposit ticket form (try http://www.checksforless.com for starters-- no affiliation to Intellisoft).

New Tax Payment Feature
Say goodbye to the old way of paying taxes and say hello to convenience, ease-of-use, and reduced errors in paying taxes.  That's because you no longer need to rely on a report to get your tax figures and then manually use ManageMore's A/P to print the check.  A new tax payment process exists that guides you through a series of questions and then ultimately creates the check to send to your taxing authority or creates an outstanding bill for you to along with the rest of your vendor invoices.
The new tax payment system also protects you from accidentally paying taxes twice on the same invoice.  It does this by way of a posting process that knows which invoices have outstanding tax liabilities only.  Another nice benefit of this tax payment process is that each time you use it, you build a tax payment history log that shows all prior taxes paid to the taxing authority in one easy to read window.  You can even easily reverse the process (i.e. create a disbursement credit) in case an error was detected later on an invoice that was taxed incorrectly.  See Activities... Banking... Pay Taxes to see the tax payment wizard in action.  Once a tax payment has been made, you can go to Lists... Banking... Tax Payments and see the entries that are generated by paying taxes.

 New Recurring Billing Engine
Well after years of planning, designing, and planning again, we are proud to introduce the first phase of a new recurring billing system within ManageMore.  We have been promising many business models that a new design was coming that would facilitate a more flexible billing engine for a variety of service related activities (e.g. communication services, subscription services, maintenance related services, utility services, etc.).  Basically, this new recurring billing allows a business to bill any customer for anything, for as long as needed, for any billing frequency and range needed. 

A new recurring charge item concept was developed that allows you to easily create  item code(s) which can be billed to customers on a continuous basis using a distinct billing pattern and criteria specified by you.  The billing criteria will allow you to determine what billing frequency (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly) to use and how long each billing period will be.  You can easily create dozens of billing cycles as well (Note: A billing cycle is a denomination of the billing range you will bill for.  So, if a billing range is one month, you can create billing cycles that are any combination of months like bi-monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, etc.). You will also be able to instruct ManageMore on what billing period a recurring charge item should commence and even when it should terminate (if your goal is to bill for short-term services).

The key to the new recurring charge design is in the re-vamped design of the billing code.  ManageMore now refers to billing codes as "billing groups."  The billing group setup can now be located under Lists... Billing... Billing Groups.  You will find that a billing group now consists of a billing frequency, billing range, and a set of valid billing cycles.  We no longer thinking of billing as defined by the next post date, but rather the next billing period (starting and ending date range).  A billing period can start on any day of the month and last for any range of time defined by your billing frequency and billing range. 

Thus, you can have a billing period that is a weekly frequency and consists of a 2-week billing range (e.g. first billing period is 02/01/04 to 01/14/04, next billing period is 02/15/04 to 02/28/04, etc. for 2-week billings).  The billing cycle can be defined to be any combination of this 2-week range (e.g. every 4 weeks, every 8 weeks, etc.).  One popular concept that is often asked by us is "Can you bill every 28 days?"  The answer is YES.  This is a billing period that is daily with a 28 day billing range (also equivalent to saying weekly with a 4-week billing range).  A 28-day billing cycle is actually a fantastic way of boosting revenue because it squeezes one extra billing cycle within a one year period.

Once you understand how the billing group works, the rest is fairly straightforward.  Simply assign a customer to a billing group and then create recurring charge items associated to the customer.  See Activities... Billing... New Recurring Charge Item... for adding a new recurring item to a customer account.  You can also accomplish this right from within the Customer Care window where a new "Recurrence" tab was added to display all associated recurring items on an account.  The fields on the recurring charge item are fairly self-explanatory.  Here are just a few things to keep in mind:
1. It is not necessary to place a date in either the commencement date or termination date fields.  Doing so, will either delay billing from occurring or stop billing after a certain date.
2. The commencement date and termination date allow for you to manually type a date or select from a list of calculated commencement/termination dates that coincide with future billing periods.  Since this release does not prorate billing, it is probably best selecting the dates shown on the drop list.
3. The extended description field acts as a sorting field on the customer statement.  This can be helpful if a customer has many recurring items on their account, and wants the statement to reflect a sorted order based on some unique value about the services being billed (i.e. telephone number, serial number, address, etc.). 
4. Each time you bill (i.e. Generate Statements), the billing engine will evaluate the already billed date range of each active recurring charge item on a customer account.  If the billing group's new billing period exceeds the billed date range of a recurring item, then the recurring item will generate a new invoice charge.  Of course, commencement dates and termination dates are also considered to ensure that it is alright to create new charges.

 How does the new recurring charge design affect the old billing engine used exclusively in the Paging Manager Module and Cellular Manager Module?  
The billing design of the paging manager (dating back to 1992) has always revolved around an assumed monthly billing period.  Since the design was monthly-driven, our engineers had developed a unique prepaid month count-down strategy to determine when to bill next.  This design worked well for billing pager units, but was invariably inflexible for other uses.  Unfortunately, there is no easy way to modify the paging manager module to behave like the new recurring charge billing design without causing grief to some of our long-time clients who want things to stay the same.
The Cellular Manager also has abilities to do recurring charges, but its design is much simpler in nature compared to the Paging Manager. 

NOTE: DO NOT attempt to modify existing billing groups (a.k.a. billing codes) with non-monthly billing characteristics, in hope of billing pager records or cellular records in a different manner.  It won't work!

We have been using the Paging Manager/Cellular Manager module to bill for non-pager related activities.  How can I switch everything over to the more flexible billing engine design? 
We understand that many customers are currently using the Paging Manager or Cellular Manager  to bill for auxiliary services.  A special set of conversion tools were developed to easily convert your existing billing records to the more flexible service records.  Please contact technical support for information on how to download these special conversion utilities.

WARNING:  As of this release, the recurring billing capabilities of the Cellular Manager has been suspended indefinitely.  For the small percentage of customers who were using this billing engine, we recommend you contact our technical support for instruction on converting to the new billing paradigm. 

What about an easier way to add a group of recurring items to a customer account? Or storing special fields  that relate to those recurring charges?
In the next section, we will discuss ManageMore's newest module called the "Service Manager." 

See Lists... Billing... Recurring Charge Items
See Activities... Billing... New Recurring Charge Items
See Customer Care Window... Recurrence Tab

New Service Manager Module (Optional Module)
 As discussed above, many businesses who do a light amount of billing will be able to take advantage of the new recurring billing engine in ManageMore.  However, for those business who rely heavily on billing and need to store additional database information that relates with the recurring billing, you need something a bit more powerful.  In comes our new Service Manager Module.  A heavy-duty service billing system that relies on the same recurring billing engine design discussed above, but adds another layer of sophistication, convenience, and control to the billing process.  The premise of the Service Manager is quite simple. It revolves around four basic concepts; Service Templates, Service Plans, Service Promotions and Service Records. 

At the lowest level,  a single service plan can be used to create a group of recurring charge items that belong together (e.g. Phone service might include multiple recurring charge items like basic telephone service, voice mail, call waiting, caller ID, etc. that can be grouped together as a package plan or billed separately).  Service plans make it easier to manage many different charges that require continuous billing.  A Service plan also eliminates data entry errors and ensures that the right prices are associated to each recurring charge.  Service plans can be made up of an unlimited number of recurring items, and can even be associated to a specific customer or group of customers only (i.e. for special pricing considerations).

At the next level, the Service Manager wraps the service plan concept around what is called a "service record."  A service record helps to determine if billing is active/inactive, how often billing will occur for a selected service plan, and  when it commences or ends.  The service record also acts as a database system for retrieving pertinent information about the service being offered.  For example, a telephone company might want to bill for Service Plan "A", but also want to record critical information regarding the installation of the service (like contract number, residential or commercial Installation, Inside wiring request, etc.).  The service record currently offers up to 10 user-defined fields that can be stored along with the billing particulars.

With service records, data entry is reduced to a minimum.  One can quickly make changes to one or multiple recurring items by simply changing attributes found directly on the service record. For example, a customer who is being billed for several telephone lines may have over 30 distinct recurring items being broken down in detail on their bill.  If the customer were to cancel service on one or more telephone lines, the Service Manager would allow you to easily find the specific service record(s) associated to those recurring charges and only have to inactivate the service record itself.

A service record also has the benefit of tagging recurring charges to a specific description that can be searched from within Customer Care.  This makes it easy to retrieve customer information based on the specific service being offered to the customer.   For example, a local telephone company could store the end-user's telephone number on the service record for quick lookup purposes.  An internet company could store an email address or web site domain for similar lookup reasons.

Service records also help in determining how a statement will be printed.   Departmentalized billing, sorted details, and billing reference fields can be easily accomplished with the Service Manager.

Yet another concept of the service manager  is its ability to assist you in automated marketing techniques.  With the help of a service promotion record, one can optionally market your services better by making it easier to provide special offers that reduce service fees for a specific number of billing periods only (i.e. First 3 months of xyz service at 50% off).  This marketing technique can bring more customers to your services by providing attractive pricing for limited periods of time.  The service promotion record can be associated to any number of recurring charges and can be for any amount and for any given number of billing periods.  Service promotion records usually work in tandem with service plans, but is not mandatory.

The last and highest layer to the Service Manager includes the ability to create Service Templates.  A service template becomes extremely useful to those businesses that  mingle in different business models and require a billing engine that can support combinations of services.  For example, a business might want to bill for local telephone service, while at the same time billing for live answering service.

Overall, the Service Manager adds a new dimension to the billing process that simplifies the way you deal with recurring charge items and helps maintain a database for archival purposes.  See Lists... Billing... Service Templates or Service Plans or Services List.  See also Activities... Billing... New Service.

Improved Cellular Manager Module (Optional Industry Module)
Well, we've done it again.  Major design changes were done to the cellular activation form to improve several long standing requests.  In order to accomplish some of the new functionality, much re-design consideration had to be made on the layout of the cellular activation form.  We certainly hope that all cellular dealers who have used ManageMore for years, will understand why we had to juggle many fields around to accommodate the new features we implemented.  The new changes benefit several key areas including: Better point-of-sale integration for phone upgrade sales;  Increase in the number of optional features that can be selected on a contract; flexible contract type creation per provider; and the ability to create your own user-defined fields for storing auxiliary values.

Note: With the new cellular activation design, all fields were re-evaluated to determine if they still had a purpose for being recorded on the cellular activation form.  Since the cellular module was created many years ago, some fields no longer serve a real purpose with today's standards.  Five seldom used fields (Additional Reference, PIN Code, Lockout Code, Prepaid Card SN, Prepaid Card PIN) were ultimately moved over to the new user-defined fields tab within the activation form.  Two other fields (Unit Price and Prorate Amount)  were removed completely because they served no real purpose and caused more confusion than was necessary.

New User-defined Cellular Contract Types
The contract type field that previously existed on the activation form used to display four options (Standard, Prepaid, Upgrade, and Pending).  These values were not changeable and only served as a reference value for reporting.  Now, you will be able to create an unlimited number of contract types per service provider.   See Lists... Industry... Cellular... Service Providers... Contract Type Tab.

The biggest advantage with this new customizable field is that you can associate a contract type with an inventory price level.  This allows you to control the pricing that displays when you auto-create an invoice from the activation record.  For example, it is quite common by most service providers (i.e. AT&T, Cingular, Verizon, etc.) to offer existing customers the option to upgrade their phone for a nominal fee if they resign a contract.  Unfortunately, prior releases of ManageMore could not distinguish the difference in contract types and would always pre-fill invoices with the base price level defined.  With this new improvement, you can now create a special contract type for service provider XYZ that is associated to a different inventory price level whereby the cellular phone item will now display with the correct "upgrade" price at the point-of-sale.

Basically, the new contract type design allows you to better control the inventory price levels than before.  Instead of price levels being associated by the type of customer that is activating service, the price level is now associated to the type of contract being added to the program.  You can now avoid the need for employees having to override the phone price at the point-of-sale.

Another advantage to the new contract types is that you can define which contract types should be considered when calculating volume incentive tiered commissions.  With most carriers, cellular phone upgrades are not calculated in the total activations for a given date period.  The contract type now plays a key role in determining which activations should or should not be considered when computing the volume commissions.

New User-defined Cellular Fields
It is now possible to create up to ten user-definable fields that can be stored along with the rest of the information on your cellular activation form.  This gives your company the flexibility to save any extra important fields that directly relate to the phone service being offered to the customer.  The user-defined fields will appear on a separate tab labeled "Detail."  See Setup... Industry... Cellular... General... Screen Prompts Tab for creating your own fields.

Note:  Upon upgrading to this revision, four prior fields from the activation record were moved over to becoming user-defined fields.  You have the option to remove these fields and/or replace them with your own fields if you never used them in the past.

More Optional Features Added to Cellular Activation Form
Per the request of many AT&T dealers, we have added two more optional feature plans that can be added to the activation form. 

Unwanted Cellular Fields can now be removed
Since ManageMore was designed to work with most cellular providers, often there are some fields on the activation record that pertain to one dealer, but not another.  In order to simplify the filling-in of an activation record, we have added the ability to remove over a half dozen additional fields that may not be needed by your organization.  See Setup... Industry... Cellular... General... Preferences.

New Activity Logging Capabilities
As of this revision, ManageMore has now added a very powerful activity logging feature in several key areas of the program.  The concept of Activity logging is simple... each time a user makes any changes to fields on a record, ManageMore records the old value and new value to a special activity log.  This activity log will show a historical picture of who did what changes and when those changes were made.  Activity logging provides an instant audit trail of activity that reassures you users by providing peace-of-mind as well as settling any disputes over "who did what".  You will easily be able to refer back to your activity log whenever needed and recover prior information that was accidentally lost.  With an audit trail, you can now do things like: Look at all prior customer addresses on file, confirm a customer's prior credit terms, sales person, email address, etc.;   View employee records and see when changes were made to pay rates, marital status, commission rates, etc.;  View inventory records and see who made what changes to inventory prices, costs, descriptions, etc.  

Currently, activity logging has been added to the following files:  Customers, Vendors, Employees, Prospects, and Supertrack Inventory.  The cellular industry module and paging industry module also has this new logging feature added to the activation form only.  To access this history log, simply go to the Lists menu and select the appropriate database table.  A new toolbar item will appear at the top of each table (icon looks like a clock with a document behind it).  Also, within the actual record itself, you can access the activity log and only view changes particular to that record only.  An option does exist to turn activity logging off at Setup... Options... General.

We certainly think this feature alone is definitely worth the cost of upgrading to rev. 4.0D.

New Bad Check / Credit Card Chargeback Marking Feature
It is now possible to mark specific customer payments as bad (e.g. bounced checks, card chargeback dispute, etc.).  Marking a bad payment doesn't affect your accounting or deposits in any way.  Its main purpose is to clearly identify problem payments by displaying the payment record in red on the payment list.  It also automatically records the date that you marked the payment as bad for reference purposes.  To access this new checkbox setting, simply edit an existing check or credit card payment and you will see the setting on the left side of the window.  Once you save the marked bad payment, you will immediately see the record in red on the payment list.  You can optionally edit the payment memo field and place any additional info you want stored on the problem customer payment.

Miscellaneous Improvements and Fixes
1. You can now assign default inventory GL accounts in the setup of ManageMore.  This eliminates the need to assign GL accounts to each inventory item you add to the program.  Simply place the more common GL accounts for sales, cost of goods, inventory and expense account in the setup area, and then leave the GL accounts blank on the supertrack inventory form if the item falls within those default standards.  See Setup... Accounting... Inventory... GL Accounts.
2. New Trial Balance Report Added to General Ledger Reports.
3. New Deposit Detail Report Added to Banking Reports.
4. Taxing Authority Names within the Tax Code Table now require a valid Vendor Id for the Tax Authority.  This change is to make way for the upcoming "Pay Tax" feature.
5. The Deposit Category under Setup... Accounting... is now referred to as Banking.
6. Rate Plan lookup in the Cellular Manager Module now only show rate plans associated to the service provider selected.
7. Payment memo's can now be edited even after creating the customer payment.
8. Some cosmetic improvements were done to the Customer Care screen to create a more consistent look on all Customer History tabs.  The same information that used to be found in isolated boxes to the left of the transaction history table and payment history table are now all contained within the tables respectively.
9. Under the Activities Menu, the sub-menu item titled "Statements" was renamed to be "Billing." 
10. Under the Activities Menu, the sub-menu item titled "Past Due Notices" was renamed to be "Collections."
11. Under the Activities Menu, the sub-menu item titled "Bulk Email" was renamed to "Marketing."
12. Under the Lists Menu, the sub-menu item titled "Email" was renamed to "Marketing."
13. The term "billing code" was changed throughout the program to "billing group."  This includes the Billing Codes menu item that is now titled Billing Groups.
14. Reverted back to the original default way that purchase credits were applied to a vendor account.  This basically created an open credit that could be applied against any bill for that vendor.  If you prefer the automatic posting of purchase credits, a new setting was added in Setup... Accounting... Accounts Payable... for allowing  automatic application of purchase credits to other outstanding bills.
15. Improvement made on Email Pro module to support real-time virus scanning utilities.  It is no longer necessary to individually check each file attachment against an anti-virus software tool.  If the anti-virus software supports real-time scanning, then no extra steps are needed during the receiving of email inside ManageMore.  The anti-virus software should be able to quarantine viruses the moment ManageMore downloads the infected email from your mail server.
16. New misapplied customer payment feature added.  You can now easily correct any misapplied customer payments done at any time.  ManageMore will reverse all credits and properly re-apply the payment to the new customer account.  This method is much cleaner and easier to do than the previous method of voiding and re-entering the payment transaction.  It also keeps your bank deposits in proper order as well.  See Lists... Accounts Receivable... Payments... Correct Payment Icon on toolbar window.
17. Improved Company Payee Name feature.  You can now choose a different company name to appear on statements when requesting payment under a different business name.  This also allows for a much larger company name to appear on the statements as well.  See File... Company Info... General Tab.
18. Improvements were made to the information that prints on a customer statement.  A customer can now see his/her payment history detail since the last billing period.  This makes it easier to determine where the credits applied came from since the last statement.
19. Cellular Dealer Commission Reports now have an option for printing the customer name on the report.
20. SKU Notes are now accessible during a refund transaction.
21. Correction made on "Make Invoice" button option of sales order transaction that addresses the issue where more than one user could simultaneously create an invoice on the same open sales order.
22. EFT module now supports an optional credit card AVS switch which determines whether or not AVS information will be sent during the EFT process.
23. Improvement to Return Processing now allows a held item to be transferred directly to another store location.  This is useful if you have a main location that deals with all the returns.

Do you still need to know about software revisions prior to the ones mentioned above?  If so, please click here for older revision archives.