TopForm 2004 Client Conference

Due to popular demand, TopForm will be returning to the Evergreen Conference Center!

Mark your Calendars so that you don’t miss the next TopForm 2004 Client Conference. Our next Annual conference will be March 17th through the 20th and will be expanded to include sessions specifically for Principals.

Please review the following tentative outline of meetings and activities.

Wednesday March 17, 2004

6:00 pm – 10:00 pm Reception and Dinner, Principals only

Thursday March 18, 2004

8:00 am - 11:30 am Principals only meeting
8:00 – 5:00 pm TopForm Training Classes, Topics – To Be Announced
Noon TopForm Annual Golf Challenge – open to all.
6:30 pm Reception and Dinner, all conference attendees

Friday, March 19, 2004

8:30 am – 10:30 am General Session, all conference attendees
11:00 am – 5:00 pm Breakout sessions

Saturday, March 20, 2004

8:30 am – Noon Breakouts
Noon – 2:00 pm Luncheon General Session
2:30 – 4:30 pm Breakouts

Principals may wish to attend through the Friday morning General Session to participate in high level discussions and to get an overview of the conference content. Or they may wish to sign up for the entire conference.

Also a day of classroom training has been added to the schedule for System Administrators and other Operations personnel who wish to take advantage of their time in Atlanta. Look for your pot of gold and more details on the next Annual TopForm User Conference later this year.

Inventory Transaction Entries And Their Effect On Your General Ledger
By Lori Cave

I thought it might be helpful to provide some general information on how TopForm handles the various types of Inventory Transactions with regard to your General Ledger. 

There are several different types of Inventory Control Transaction Entries. 

Receipts 

General Ledger entries are not made for Receipt types of transactions. Normally receipts of inventory are accomplished through Purchase Order Receiving, however there are times when you may need to record inventory for which you did not create a purchase order within TopForm. For instance, if you just landed a large account and are transferring inventory that your customer already owns, you would need to record this inventory without generating any billings to your customer at the time of receipt. You could use a Receipt (“R”) type of transaction entry and TopForm will not make a General Ledger entry. 

Transfers 

General Ledger entries may result from Transfer (“T”) types of entries. This is dependent upon the ownership of the inventory and your Inventory Parameters. If you have separate inventory accounts by warehouse location, you probably have set your parameters to post your General Ledger by warehouse location. In this case a General Ledger posting would result from a Transfer. Otherwise it would not. Also, keep in mind, if you are making any type of transaction entry to customer owned inventory, no general ledger posting will result. 

Adjustments 

General Ledger may result from Adjustment (“A) types of entries. This is dependent upon the ownership of the inventory. If you are making an Adjustment type of entry to customer owned inventory, no posting will result. When you enter an “Adjustment” type of entry to distributor owned inventory, TopForm will make a General ledger entry to your Inventory account and an offsetting entry to the account that has been specified in your General Ledger interfaces as the Inventory Adjustment account. 

For normal processing, you would want the system to post to the general ledger, but there are situations that are out of the ordinary when you may prefer to defer or eliminate the automatic general ledger posting. Below is a discussion regarding when and how to do this.

When you are positioned at the Reference code in IC-T1, the following message will appear at the bottom of the screen to prompt you that the '*' will eliminate the posting to your General Ledger.

To eliminate G/L posting for adjustments, enter * as 1st character

Here are some examples where this would be appropriate.

• Inventory was received into the system more than once, but hit the general ledger only once.
  
  
• You need to remove inventory out of one customer with an 'A' type transaction and receive it back into the system under another item code and/or customer using an 'R' type transaction. Since, as we already discussed, ‘R’ types never post to the general ledger, you would not want the ‘A’ type to do so either.
  
  
• You may have a situation where you have many items that need to have a correction made to the value, if you do not want to have this many entries to affect your general ledger at the time of the adjustment, you would use the '*' at time of entry and then when all items have been corrected, one entry would be made to the general ledger to bring it into balance with the valued inventory report.

You may have come across other circumstances where this procedure may be appropriate and should be added to your operations manual.

As is the case with any source journal that impacts your general ledger, you must run and update the appropriate journals before the postings are final.

If you have any questions about this or any other TopForm feature, please call TopForm Support.

Credit Checks, Warnings and Warning Overrides in TopForm
By Anita Long

Basically there are three different checks and warnings that are provided based upon your customers’ settings and their transaction detail.

• Credit Hold or Monitor – Credit Panel of Customer Masterfile
• Over Credit Limit – Limit set in Credit Panel of Customer Masterfile
• Open Invoice Past Due – Parameter Determines Days Old Before Warning

To set the Credit Hold or Monitor Flag for a customer, choose the credit analysis option from your customer file. The first tab shows you the options to place a customer on Hold, or on Credit Monitor. It also allows you to set the customer’s credit limit.

If you look at the Receivables Tab under the Credit Analysis Option, you will see a summary aging of the customers invoices and their open credit (Below). Open credit is determined by adding together the total open invoices and the customers open orders.

To receive warnings during order entry for past due invoices, you must first set the flag in your Order Processing Parameters, Screen II. Look for the following question and enter a “P” for Past Due.

(OPS-S1 Screen II: )

Credit check warnings to be given during Order Entry: P

But what will TopForm consider Past Due? You have control over this on screen two of your Accounts Receivable Parameters:

In the illustration above, you can see that the ageing category to consider past due is “3”. If you look just above this question, you will see that Ageing Category 3 represents the “over 60” invoices. Therefore, in order entry, after the check is performed, if the customer has an invoice that is over 60 days old, the operator will receive a credit warning.

Credit Warning Overrides

What controls whether there is just a warning or whether order entry is halted? Actually that depends upon the particular operator’s security settings. In order to accommodate the various needs our of very diverse customer group, the following Application Security by Operator parameters control whether or not an operator can override the specific credit warning.

Application Security by Operator (ZZX, A6). 

Screen I Eliminate continue option after credit check message in O/E? Y/N

The first parameter (above) applies to ALL warnings (past due, over credit limit, credit hold or monitor). If set to “Y,” and any of the credit checks fail, the operator will not be able to continue entering the order. If it is set to “N,” they will receive a warning and being given direct access to the customer’s credit history and open invoice screen so that they can analyze the situation. Then, they will be given discretion as to whether to continue with order entry or not.

If you wish to allow the operator to continue with order entry under certain circumstances but not under other, you have two additional options. To exercise these additional options, make certain that the first parameter is set to 'N', then set one or both of the following two parameters to “Y.” 

Application Security by Operator (ZZX, A6). 

Screen III     Eliminate continue option if over credit limit only? Y/N
                      Eliminate continue option if on credit hold only? Y/N

We hope this helps you understand the current options available for credit checks. If you have any questions or have any needs that are not satisfied with these options, please contact TopForm Support.

TopForm Announces the new version of TopForm Variable Print Option
By Ned Mesihovic

The TopForm Variable Print Option (VPO) is probably the single most important solution for the TopForm Distributor since the initial release of Web.ec. With VPO your clients can order customized items like business cards, stationery, imprinted brochures, company store items and more over the Internet and those orders are created on-line, real-time in your TopForm Accounting System.

For the last three months we have been listening very carefully to your suggestions, comments, concerns and ideas of how to improve and make VPO more powerful, and thanks to you, we are so excited and proud to say that our team has made some terrific enhancements.

In response to customer feedback, the new version of TopForm Variable Print Option (VPO) includes a number of new features developed and designed for you to be able to offer more choices to your clients as well as to make managing and administering the application easier.

New Features

• Providing for the selection and on-line proofing of multiple customer logos’ or other images.
  If you have clients that have multiple logos or other images that can be a part of their variable text products, they will have ability to select these images from a drop down box. 
  
  
• “Smart Fields” - This feature gives you the ability to use “Lead and Follow Text” to customize (format) how each and every field will display on the final proof. Having this feature in place eliminates the need for most custom formatting. For example if your client has an option to specify a toll free number on his or her business card you can use this feature to have the label “Toll Free:” attach to the front of the number. In addition you can format the number to display in accordance with the preferred conventions (i.e., (xxx) xxx-xxxx or xxx.xxx.xxxx). In the event the client does not supply the number, the “Toll Free:” label together with every formatting element will be eliminated.
  
  
• “Single or Multiple Profiles” – With this feature you can choose for a particular client to have a single profile across all products offered, and at the same specify multiple profiles for other clients.
  The advantage of having a single profile is that the buyer keys in all of their personal information once and that information is saved for future ordering. For instance a client with a single profile orders business cards. The next time when he or she creates an order for a Rolodex card, the information previously submitted for the business card is displayed and he or she needs only to enter the additional information. Imagine a client with a many different products where the phone number is a component of the variable data and their phone number changes. Use the Single Profile option, he or she has only one change to make to update all of the products. However another client may prefer to multiple profiles, that is, the information required for one product may not have any bearing on another.
  
  
• Ability to print apostrophe (‘) - This is a common problem when dealing with ASP technology and databases. Databases reserve the apostrophe (‘) sign to start and end strings. So by typing an apostrophe (‘) in the text (e.g., ‘Bruce O’Neal’) you actually enter a third apostrophe in the middle of the string and "confuse" the database. Having this issue solved has made a number of our customers and their clients very happy.
  
  
• With the new version of VPO you have full control over the all fields that you can offer for user input.
  For example for client #1 you will be able to display “sal” (salutation field) and “ext” (extension field for the phone), and at the same time for client #2 you can decide to hide those fields.
  
  
• much more is coming …

As always, we continue to listen to your suggestions and ideas of how to improve the product and reflect them in our development. We need your continued participation in making VPO product one of the best of its kind. Your input is very important to us, so please send your suggestions or comments to support@topform.com.

To get a new version of VPO, please contact Ned at 770-239-5445 or by e-mail ned.mesihovic@topform.com.