TopForm TopGun


Congratulations Janet!


Your awards are in the mail! Send us a picture.

Here is the subject for the next TopForm TopGun Challenge.

In last month's newsletter, we announced a new feature that will allow any TopForm report or continuous style form to be printed or viewed in what format?

Send your answers to Anthony Mullins. Also remember that all correct answers are being entered into the grand prize drawing at our Spring 2003 Users Conference.

TopForm Summit in Chicago


TopForm customers from the Midwest and beyond joined Julie Pritchard, Bill Bialy and Anthony Mullins in a roundtable discussion regarding current and future software development. Julie spent the first portion of the meeting discussing the various development projects recently completed or underway. She demonstrated the new TopForm Office Products Sales Module (TOPS), the recent enhancements to the TopForm Variable Print Option, our progress toward the Graphical User Interface and our newest development project, TopForm Bar Code Warehouse Management Solution. She also discussed the work that was being done to create a new Data Replication Module and a work order to interface TopForm with a Sales Tax update service call VeraTax. Bill Bialy then discussed the newest features in Web.ec including the multiple Catalog option, credit card option, enhanced keyword search and much more. The floor was then opened up for customer discussions and ended with a tally of the level of priority they believed we should assign to each project. This survey yielded the following list of priorities.
1. Completion of Graphical User Interface
2. Continued emphasis on Web.ec enhancements
3. Data Replication module
4. Vendor interoperability with emphasis on XML
During the open discussions, the subject of a "Premium" level of support was suggested by a TopForm customer. The concept behind this would be that TopForm should employ a high level technical consultant to act as a point person to manage all of the customers who elect to subscribe, for an additional support fee, to this service. One other customer concurred that this is something we could investigate further.

Customer input is invaluable and we want to thank all those who attended and participated in this meeting. We will continue to seek your input through customer meetings, surveys, and the good old-fashioned phone call.

i2002 Conference Recap


The DMIA's i2002 conference was a smashing success with a better turnout than most expected. Over 1,400 attendees crowed the show floor to see 300 vendor booths including TopForm Software's booth located at a premier location by the main entrance doors. "The traffic this year was superior to last year's show and we scored a home run by attracting many of those walking by with a flashy "Mardi Gras" themed booth," Anthony Mullins stated. "The flash got them to stop but the demonstrations of TopForm and Web.ec was the substance that made them stay and take a hard look at our application." Many vendors voiced the same opinion that the attendees were more serious about making purchases to further their business. Mullins went on to say, "The distributor prospects were asking questions that certainly led me to believe that they were very interested in TopForm and were planning to make a change to a new software application soon."

Besides the trade show, TopForm hosted two seminars entitled, "Why Survive When You Can Thrive?" and "Technology That Counts - Bar Code Aided Inventory." Julie Pritchard conducted both sessions and the turnout was especially good for the first seminar focusing on TopForm's e-commerce capabilities. The seminar was given excellent marks by attendees through the DMIA's seminar survey form.

Win A Trip To New Orleans!



Who says software techies can't have fun! TopForm is giving away a trip for two to New Orleans! You can automatically be registered to win the trip by purchasing one or more of the following modules by December 31, 2002:
  • Web.ec
  • Shipping Management Solution
  • Variable Print Option
  • Office Product Sales module
  • Bar Code Warehouse Management Solution
Contact Anthony Mullins at 770.448.1484 to learn more about this giveaway offer or visit our website at www.topform.com.

Web.ec Training Classes


Need to brush up on your Web.ec setup skills? Want to learn about the latest additions in functionality to Web.ec? Mark your calendars for November 18-19 as the next classroom training sessions at the TopForm offices in Norcross, GA. Bill Bialy, Manager of eBusiness Development, will be conducting the training. If you would like to register, please contact Karyn Ibert at 770-448-1484.

TopForm Unveils TOPS at Inform Services


The new TopForm Office Products Sales module (TOPS) was unveiled at this year's Inform Services in Chicago. This new module facilitates the distributors ability to add office products to their product line.


View Slideshow
If you are already providing a variety of products and services to your customers, then why not provide them with their office products? Well, there used to be a pretty good reason why not. Office supplies are usually a low dollar sale and low gross profit. It may not have made economic sense to take on the additional administrative and accounting expense of processing those orders.

With TOPS, the playing field has change! Allow your customers to enter their own orders via your TopForm Web.ec. Those orders will automatically pass through to United Stationers. There is no need to reenter them into a stand alone order entry system. Next, United will send confirmation and invoice data that will be received automatically using a modified version of the Customer Invoicing Gateway Plus. The results of this interoperability will be:
1. The payable will be created in TopForm AP Invoice Entry
2. Your customer invoice will be created
3. The order and the purchase order will be closed.
It's all about incremental revenue and the efficiency to benefit from it.

TOPS provides for the importing of the complete United product catalog into a parallel database to your TopForm Inventory Control files. Drill down search features and product images are built into the system to help your customers find exactly the product they need.

TopForm Credit Card Processing Update


The development for Credit Card Processing within TopForm has been completed and is now in beta testing. There are basically three different components to credit card processing. Our development has dealt with two of these components.
  • First, you need to be able to accept the credit card information from your customer. The tags to be able to accept this data were added to TopForm Web.ec several months ago. Once the credit card information was entered into Web.ec, it was updated to a file that could be later accessed by your accounting personnel.


  • Second, many changes, some major and some minor were needed within TopForm to provide true order totals and to process a "paid" order within TopForm, as opposed to processing a receivable within TopForm. Order totals present a challenge for the following reasons:
    • Credit Card Image 1

    Credit Card Image 2
    • Lot Pricing - As you know, you can have multiple lots within TopForm and pricing can vary from lot to lot. Until the customer actually executes the purchase and the lot is selected, the final price is not known. Consider the circumstance where you have many, perhaps hundreds of buyers accessing your system. The likelihood of multiple buyers purchasing the same product at the same time is fairly high.

    • Sales Tax - Selecting the correct sales tax code is typically a function of the shipping location. Also, sales tax is calculated at the point of invoicing, not order entry.

    • Freight and handling - Obviously, you cannot know the precise freight charge at the point of order entry. Typically, for Internet type of orders, a handling charge is assessed. Also, you may charge the customer pick/ pack and other warehousing and distribution charges. These charges are defined for the customer using the Automatic Requisition Charge Program and are calculated and assigned during the billing process.

    All of these components are a part of the order total. Programming was necessary to simulate the invoicing process to order to generate an accurate order total.

  • The third component to accepting credit cards has to do with on-line credit card verification and approval. There are many different options with regard to which service you can you and the requirements for each. And, since this really involves HTML code only, we believe this is outside the area of TopForm development. We would be happy to advise or assist you with this development on a work order basis.

Following the acceptance of the order and the credit card payment, changes were needed within TopForm Accounting:
  1. A sales transaction updates with an accompanying transaction that pays the invoice with a credit card.
  2. Instead of a debit to your standard Accounts Receivable Account, a debit is created to a new merchant receivable for tracking the ultimate payment from the Credit Card Company.
  3. For those TopForm users who pay commissions based upon cash receipts, a posting of the sale and commission information needed to update immediately to the Commission Payable file. As you know this generally results from the processing of the cash receipt for the open receivable.
We want to thank those customers who assisted us in development of the functional specifications for this programming and in sharing some of the development costs. Following the beta testing, this capability will be offered as an optional module. We know that in this first release, there are likely to be issues that will need to be addressed. As always, we look forward to enhancing this as well as all TopForm applications. For more information, please contact TopForm Sales and Marketing.