[Wally]

Sorry, a few more questions:

1) How much data conversion is available from our system to yours? Is it
mainly a manual entry job?

2) Where on the system do you enter information relating to stock
shipping such as the duty on a product? Is this a field that is set up
specially where required in the stock control information section.

3) Where in the system do you enter on the Shipping costs invoice (eg
for GST, Duty, Freight)?

4) Does your system allow for barscanning of products. For example if we
were packing orders could we scan each product into the invoice/packslip
rather than manually find each code?

[COBS Tech Support]

1. It depends on what your capabilities are, the capabilities of the software you use, and your budget. If you can move your customers, supplier and stock records from your old system into, say, Microsoft Excel, then it's relatively easy to import that data into CAPITAL. Importing transaction data is more complex and is not always possible, and takes more time so extra costs are involved in doing that when it is possible. Usually it takes 1-2 hours to import your customers, suppliers and stock records, so you should budget a few hundred dollars to do that. (If you don't have any interest in doing that yourself.) If you want to move things across like product history, then that has to be looked at on a case by case basis. For some companies product history is very important, but with most companies they keep running their old system to refer back to for around 6 months to a year, before retiring it completely, so don't need to re-enter the same information into their new system.

2. It's set-up specially if you need this functionality. You use the Screen Builder to add the fields COSTCAT1... and others if required. The topic "Import & Shipment Stock Cost Categories" explains this a bit further. Some companies do not bother with cost categories for individual stock items, as they tend to apportion costs by price over all products or groups of products during the import costing process. This may not be workable for everyone. Anyway you can specify cost categories against product items if you wish.

3. This doesn't happen when you raise a purchase order, because at this point you don't know what the duty and freight will be. It's done during the process of performing a import costing job. This involves selecting which purchase orders to cost (or which items within particular purchase orders). You then enter your total costs and additional charges, apportion these to your stock items to calculate your new unit costs. Finally the system asks you for the supplier invoice details. Here you enter the invoices for your freight forwarder, product supplier, and others (such as the ATO, local cartage, etc.) when necessary. Then the system does all the other tasks automatically, such as print shipment reports, and/or stock labels, mark your purchase orders as delivered, update your stock levels, and so on.

4. There are a number of different ways you might go about this. If you are going to be entering sales orders and then converting these into invoices, the normal way to do this is to add our Warehouse Manager component to your software, which would permit you to scan and pack goods using barcodes. If you were just going to scan items directly onto an invoice, this could be done also by using a basic $100-$200 scanner. This approach is not unlike what is done in a supermarket, where the goods are scanned and the invoice (or cash sale docket in the case of a supermarket) is produced. Usually, for most distribution based businesses the approach is more structured:

a. Enter sales orders (manually, via web site, etc.)
b. Print pick lists
c. scan goods with scanner
d. Release goods (either in bulk or immediately after scanning an order)

CAPITAL supports all kinds of different scanning devices. Normally warehouse management with barcode scanning is something that is done after the core system has been installed and is working successfully. By "core system" I mean your debtors, creditors, stock control, billing, quoting, and so on, is up and running. A wireless mobile scanner with an LCD display telling operators which items to pick next (paperless picking and scanning) can cost upward of $3000 each. CAPITAL supports basic/simple scanning right up to very complex barcoding and scanning requirements.