The Business Master (3rd Edition)

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SOAR USERS GUIDE SECTION 5 BUILDING A CUSTOMER FILE Now that you have setup your system file, SOAR knows where to store and fetch the data for the other required files. At this point it is best to add five or ten customers so you can get on with exploring the capabilities of SOAR. From the Main Menu select 4, Customer Maintenance. SOAR will load the customer maintenance program and display the Customer Maintenance Menu. You can see that you have five choices (not counting the EXIT choice) and these are fully described in the manual. At this time we want to add customers so select option number 1. A screen will be seen similar to the one below. ADD NEW CUSTOMER XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX X 1. Customer ID: X X 2. Name: X X 3. Address: X X 4. Address: X X 5. City: X X 6. State: 7. ZIP: X X 8. Telephone: X X 9. Tax Exempt: X X 10. Current Charges: X X 11. Current Balance: X X 12. Past Due Balance: X X 13. Year to Date: X X 14. Last Payment Date: X X 15. Last Check Number: X X 16. Last Check Amount: X X 17. Monthly Finance Charge: X XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX ESC to EXIT Start entering your customers and filling in the data described in the following sections. You will be prompted for every entry and given an opportunity of making changes before the data is saved. 5.1 Customer ID: The highlighted area is the prompt SOAR is giving you to indicate how many characters can be entered as the customer identifier. You may use any combination of up to 12 letters or numbers as the ID. If you already have a system that uses numbers to identify customers, then continue to use these numbers. If you are starting fresh, you might want to use the customer name as the ID. For example, SMITH, JONES, AJAX, are all valid identifiers. If you have more than one customer with the same name then you can add a suffix to further identify them; e.g., SMITH1, SMITH2, and so on. Complete your entry by Page 20 SOAR USERS GUIDE depressing the ENTER key and SOAR will advance to the next field to be entered. Note: you may exit this program at any time by depressing the ESC key. This is true for all programs in SOAR. Since SOAR is hierarchical, the ESC key can be used to climb up from any level to the Main Menu and to the operating system. 5.2 Customer Address: Enter the customer address as you want bills mailed. If you do not need two lines for the address then just depress the ENTER key when the second address prompt appears. Enter the customer city, state and 5-digit ZIP code when prompted. The state need only be entered as the two letter abbreviation approved by the U.S. Postal Service. You may enter the customer's telephone number for reference purposes; it will be printed as part of your customer master list. 5.3 Customer Tax Status: Line 9 requires you to enter whether or not the customer will have sales tax applied to taxable purchases. Enter a "Y" if the customer is to be exempt from taxes (doesn't pay any) and a "N" if the customer is to pay sales tax. If you happen to live in a state that does not have sales tax then enter a "N" since you have already entered a 0.00 as the sales tax rate in the system file. 5.4 Customer Current Financial Status: Lines 10 through 13 allow you to enter the present status of the customer for billing purposes. You may change this data at a later time if it is not available now. If you do not wish to enter values now, simply depress ENTER at each prompt. There may be some confusion concerning Current Charges, Current Balance and Past Due Balance. Current Charges are those charges incurred since the current billing period began; i.e., since the last End of Billing Period program was run. Every time a charge transaction is entered and posted, this field is updated. Thus, you have instant access to the current charges for any customer. Current Balance is the balance remaining from the previous billing period that is not yet past due. For instance, if customer SMITH had $100 in charges last billing period for which he was billed, then after End of Billing Period pro- cessing his Current Balance would be $100 and his Current Charges would be zero. When End of Billing Period processing Page 21 SOAR USERS GUIDE is run the "old" Present Balance is added to the Past Due Balance, the Current Balance is replaced by the Current Charges and the Current Charges are set to zero. SOAR uses the principal that anything billed today is due before the next billing period. If you bill on a monthly basis then you expect payment before you bill again. Therefore, Past Due Balance is that which has not been paid since the last billing period. Using SMITH for an example again, assume that SMITH had $100 in charges in January and that you billed him on February 1st. When the End of Billing Period processing was run after your billing, his Current Charges were set to zero and his Present Balance was set to $100. SMITH did not make any payments in February. Now, after billing on March 1st and running End of Billing Period processing the $100 was trans- ferred to Past Due Balance. Now is as good a time as any to discuss how payments are handled. Whenever a payment transaction is entered and posted, the amount of the payment is first applied against the Past Due Balance. Any remainder is applied against the Present Balance. Should a customer make a payment greater than their balance, then their Present Balance would be a negative number to in- dicate that they have a credit. 5.5 Customer Last Payment Data: Lines 14-16 provide data to show the last payment data for a customer. These fields are updated whenever a payment trans- action is posted. If you do not have this data availabe now, just depress ENTER when prompted. 5.6 Customer Monthly Finance Charge: SOAR allows each customer to have an individual late charge percentage. Thus, your very good customers that you wish to give special treatment can have a monthly finance charge of zero. This value must be entered as a percentage. For example, a finance charge of 1.5% per month on the past due balance would be entered as .015. Also note that the finance or late charge is applied ONLY against the Past Due Balance. 5.7 Saving Your Customer Data: After completing the entry for line 17 you will see a prompt on the screen "S to SAVE, C to CHANGE, A to ABORT:". If the data is correct, enter S <E> and SOAR will save the data to the disk and prompt you for the next customer. If you wish to make changes the enter C <E> and you will be prompted for the line number you wish to change. After making all your changes, you would save the data by entering S <E>. You may abort the program by entering ESC or A <E>. All data previously saved is intact; you simply aborted from the current screen. Page 22 SOAR USERS GUIDE After entering 5 or 10 customers you might like to leave the data entry mode and try the View or Change options on the Customer Maintenance Menu. To exit, depress the ESC key. You will then see a message flashed to the screen: SORTING CUSTOMER.MAS SOAR keeps all customer records in ascending order by the customer id. This is done to speed up accessing any customer in the file. Once the sort is complete you will be returned to the Customer Maintenance Menu. Return to the Main Menu by either accepting the default option or depressing the ESC key. Page 23 SOAR USERS GUIDE SECTION 6 ENTERING SUMMARY CATAGORIES Now that you have the system file setup and your customers entered, it is time to enter your Summary Catagories. (1) At the Main Menu select 6, Utility Menu. (2) At the Utility Menu, select 2, Charge Code Maintenance. (3) At the Charge Maintenance Menu select 1, Summary Catagory Maintenance. The screen will now display all the empty summary catagories and their associated totals. Since this is a new file the only catagories labeled are those created by SOAR; i.e., PAYMENTS, TAXABLE SALES, etc. Using the data you prepared after Sections 2 and 3, select the catagory you want to enter. Enter the title and, if you have it, the year to date totals for this catagory. Once you have entered all your summary catagories, exit the program by accepting the default when prompted for a line to change. The exit path from Summary Catagory Maintenance is to the Charge Maintenance Menu. You will probably want to make some changes to your summary catagories after you have run SOAR for a while. To do so, just follow the path from the Main Menu as described above. Page 24 SOAR USERS GUIDE SECTION 7 BUILDING A TRANSACTION CATAGORY FILE The final step in installing SOAR is creating the transaction catagories you will use for entering payments and charges. If you skipped over Sections 2 and 3, please go back and read them so you have a good feel for the relationship between transactions and transaction catagories. There are two ways in which a transaction catagory file can be created. These are (1) creating a "block" of dummy catagories and then changing them as needed, or, (2) creating (adding) catagories one at a time. Both methods will be described. 7.1 Adding A Block of Catagories: A suggestion was made in Section 3 for you to partition your transaction catagories such that your most commonly used catagories were at the start of the list, your automatic billing catagories next, and your "inventory" or fixed price items last. Using this strategy, you can create an initial block of catagories with sufficient space to hold all your items. However, make sure you have allowed enough room for growth in the lower numbered catagories. As an example, suppose you think that you will need no more than 30 catagories for commonly used charges; i.e., hours consulting, fixed price jobs, payments, etc. To allow room for growth, reserve at least 50 or 60 catagories for this purpose. If you have, for instance, 50 customers for which you perform a service and bill them automatically each month, then you should reserve at least 100 catagories to allow for growth. Remember, each customer to be billed automatically requires a transaction catagory. The final partition will encompass the "things" that you sell such as supplies, plants, or whatever. These are the retail or inventory items that are sold on a regular basis and for which you wish some historical data as well as simplifying a transaction entry. Suppose you have 100 items that fall into this classification, then allow at least 200 catagories in building the initial file. Note that new blocks can be added at any time as you add new items. Based on the example above, you would need: Commonly used catagories ....... 60 Automatic billing catagories ... 100 Inventory type catagories ...... 200 ---- Total required ......... 360 Page 25 SOAR USERS GUIDE Since this is an estimate, you would probable establish an initial block of 400-500 transaction catagories. This is done as follows: (1) At the Main Menu select 4, Utility Menu (2) At the Utility Menu select 2, Charge Code Maintenance (3) At the Charge Maintenance Menu select 2, Transaction Catagory Maintenance (4) At the Transaction Catagory Maintenance Menu select 4, Add/Create TC Block SOAR will display the following message: This program allows you to create a transaction catagory file if one does not exist or to add to an existing file. Do you want to continue (Y or N): The default response is "N", so enter Y <E>, and you will be asked how many catagories you wish to create. The default is 100. Either accept the default (depress ENTER) or enter the number you require. SOAR will then create a transaction catagory file with the specified number of dummy catagories and return you to the Transaction Catagory Maintenance Menu. SOAR creates dummy catagories with the following fields already filled in: Title: * Charge Factor: 1.0 Taxable: Y Summary Catagory: 7 (TAXABLE SALES) Since these catagories are not useable, you must now change them such that they can be used for entering transactions. In the following example several catagories will be changed to fit the partition we defined at the start of this section. (1) At the Transaction Catagory Maintenance Menu select 2, Change Transaction Catagory. (2) Enter 1 <E> to change catagory #1. The screen should now appear as (less the Summary Catagory portion): CHANGE TRANSACTION CATAGORY XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX X 1. Title: * X X 2. Charge Factor: 1 X X 3. Taxable (Y or N): Y X X 4. Automatic Billing (Y or N): N X X 5. Bill To: X X 6. Summary Catagory Number: 7 X XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Line to Change (S = SAVE, ESC = ABORT): S Changing Transaction Catagory No. 1 Page 26 SOAR USERS GUIDE (3) Enter 1 <E> to change the title. Now enter a new title as: Payment Received ... THANK YOU <E>. (4) Enter 3 <E> to change the taxable code. Enter a new status as: N <E>. (5) Enter 6 <E> to change the summary catagory. Enter the new catagory as: 1 <E>. This causes payment transactions to report to the summary catagory defined for PAYMENTS. (6) Depress ENTER to accept the default option of SAVEing the changes. You will now be prompted for a new transaction catagory number. Repeat the process for the catagories you have defined. Note that the "Bill To: " line is for automatic billing. Enter the customer identifier for this line. You will not be able to change this line unless you have changed line 4 to "Y" for automatic billing. As another example, the following is for an inventory item. (1) Enter 200 <E> for the catagory to change. (2) Enter 1 <E> to change the title. (3) Enter a new title as: -ea Widgets @ $3.95 <E>. (4) Enter 2 <E> to change the charge factor. (5) Enter the new charge factor as: 3.95 <E>. (6) Enter 6 <E> to change the summary catagory. (7) Enter 7 <E> to have all sales of this item to report to Summary Catagory 7, TAXABLE SALES. Enter a few more catagories to have enough to experiment with. Don't worry about losing your work, you will save this initial work before experimenting with SOAR. Exit from the program when you are ready by depressing the ESC key. Remember, ESC will always get you out of a program and back to a previous menu. If you do not wish to add a single catagory you may skip the next section and go on to Chapter 8. 7.2 Adding A Single Catagory: If your business revolves around a very few types of trans- actions you can build your transaction catagory file one at a time. This method has the drawback of not allowing "gaps" in the number sequence for adding new catagories. Therefore, you must be thorough when you prepare your list of catagories. To add a new transaction catagory do the following: (1) At the Transaction Catagory Maintenance Menu select 1, Add Transaction Catagory. (2) You will be prompted for each entry. The catagory number you are adding will be displayed at the top of the screen. Enter all the required information. Page 27 SOAR USERS GUIDE (3) After the last entry you will be given the option of changing the data or saving it. To make changes just enter the line you want to change. You may exit the program (not saving the new catagory) by depressing ESC. If there are no changes, select the SAVE option. (4) Enter enough catagories to allow you to experiment with SOAR. When finished, exit the program with ESC. Page 28 SOAR USERS GUIDE SECTION 8 EXPLORING SOAR The most difficult part of any accounting program is setting up the data files. You should have entered enough data to allow you to begin experimenting. After experimenting you can go back and finish entering your customers and transaction catagories. Before continuing it would be best to get a hard copy of what has been done thus far. (1) At the Main Menu select 5, Reports Menu. (2) At the Reports Menu select 8, Summary Catagories. (3) Make sure your paper is aligned in the printer and press any key when you are ready to continue. A report of all your Summary Catagories will be printed including title and totals. (4) At the Reports Menu select 3, Customer Master List. You will be prompted for the starting and ending customer. Use the defaults (depress ENTER) to get a list of all customers. Note that you can select a range of customers by selecting the starting and ending customer. The manual covers this in detail. (5) At the Reports Menu select 7, Transaction Catagories. This report will list all the catagories you entered except the dummy catagories. The dummy catagories are excluded because you may have allocated a large number of catagories. Note that the catagory number is printed so you can tell where the gaps are for future growth. Carefully look over the reports for errors. If an error is found, go to the appropriate menu and make corrections. 8.1 Saving Your Work: You have gone to a lot of work in getting this far and it would be a shame to mess it up with the exploring and experimenting to follow. You can protect your work by copying it onto a floppy disk and then restoring it when you are through exploring. The procedures are different for hard disk and floppy disk users. Exit SOAR by either <E> or ESC at the Main Menu. Hard Disk Users: (1) Go to the SOAR sub-directory by: CD \SOAR <E>. (2) Put a freshly formatted diskette in Drive A. (3) Type: COPY SOAR.SYS A: <E> (4) Type: CD DATA <E> (5) Type: COPY CUSTOMER.MAS A: <E> (6) Type: COPY *.CAT A: <E> (7) Type: CD \SOAR Page 29 SOAR USERS GUIDE Floppy Disk Users: (1) Put SOAR Disk #1 in Drive A. (2) Put a freshly formatted diskette in Drive B. (3) Type: COPY A:SOAR.SYS B: <E> (4) Put your Data disk in Drive A. (5) Type: COPY A:CUSTOMER.MAS B: <E> (6) Type: COPY A:*.CAT B: <E> (7) Put SOAR Disk #1 in Drive A. All the data files have been copied to the floppy disk. If you do a DIR A: <E> (DIR B: <E> for floppy users), you should see a list of the following files: SOAR.SYS ......... Defines your system CUSTOMER.MAS ..... Your customer master file SUMMARY.CAT ...... Your Summary Catagories TRANS.CAT ........ Your Transaction Catagories Save this backup to restore the data files after exploring. Go back to SOAR by typing SOAR <E>. Floppy users should put their Data disk back into Drive B and SOAR Disk #2 in Drive A. 8.2 Entering Transactions: Now there is something to work with! SOAR uses the trans- actions you enter as the basis for crediting payments and applying charges. To get a feeling what SOAR does with the data you should do the following: Go to the Customer Maintenance Menu and: (1) Give one customer a present balance. (2) Give another customer a past due balance and make sure the customer has a service charge rate (e.g., .015) so you can see how service charges work. (3) Give another customer a past due balance and a service charge rate of 0. Go to the Transaction Menu by entering 1 <E> at the Main Menu. You should see a display similar to the one below. TRANSACTION MENU XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX X 0 - Exit to Main Menu X X 1 - Enter Transactions X X 2 - Apply Automatic Charges X X 3 - Apply Late Charges X X 4 - Delete Transactions X X 5 - Post All Transactions X X 6 - Post Payments X X 7 - Post Charges X XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Command: Page 30 SOAR USERS GUIDE To enter transactions, select 1 <E>. You will be asked for a transaction file name. Since this is your first entry there are no transaction files. If you had files but couldn't remember their names, just depress ENTER and SOAR will display the names of all transaction files it knows about. Transaction files should reflect the billing period you are currently using. The author uses a scheme like "APR-87" as a transaction file for April, 1987. For our exploring enter the following: TEST <E>. Note: if there is already a file by that name SOAR will inform you and ask if you want to create a new one or append to the old one. In almost all cases you will want to APPEND to the existing file; i.e., during a billing period you will keep adding to an existing file. You were also asked if you wished a control report. This report will show all transactions entered and allow you a change to review your transactions for correctness. It is good practice to always get the control reports. You are now presented with the transaction entry screen and are prompted for the Customer ID. Enter a customer that you have on file. If the customer is not on file you will receive an error message. Once you enter a Customer ID it will become the default value until a new customer is entered. Next you are prompted for the transaction date. The default is today's date. You may either change it or accept the de- fault. If you change the date, then the new date will be the default until it is changed again. The next required entry is the Transaction Catagory. The bottom half of the screen displays the first 20 Transaction Catagories. You can move about your entire Transaction Catagory file using the cursor keys on the right of your key- board. The keys work as shown on the next page. Page 31 SOAR USERS GUIDE PgUp ..... Move up to the previous screen. PgDn ..... Move down to the next screen (next 20 catagories will be displayed). Home ..... Go to the first screen. End ...... Go to the last screen (end of the transaction file). Up ....... Up Arrow. Move up one half of the way to the first screen; e.g., the Transaction Catagory numbers will be one half of those currently displayed. Dn ....... Down Arrow. Move one half of the way from the current screen to the end of the file. CTRL PgUp Move 100 catagories toward the first screen. CTRL PgDn Move 100 catagories toward the last screen. The last two commands are executed by holding down the CTRL key (on the left of the keyboard) and then depressing the PgUp or PgDn key on the right of the keyboard. Experiment with the keys and learn how to move about the file to see the trans- action catagories. Select a catagory for this transaction and enter its number. For example if you are entering a payment and you have Transaction Catagory 1 as Payments Received, then enter 1 <E>. SOAR will fill in the screen with the information it extracted from the transaction catagory. Now you are prompted to enter the amount or quantity of the transaction. If this is a variable catagory (Payments, for example) enter the amount of the payment. If this is an hourly charge, enter the number of hours. If this is a fixed price, enter the quantity; e.g., 3 if you sold 3 widgets. SOAR will now display the complete transaction including total price (less taxes) and the taxes (if any). You are now given the opportunity of changing any of the fields you entered. If everything is correct, accept the default to SAVE the data. The last entry for a transaction is the comment field. You may use this to include a comment on the transaction to give more information to the customer. For example, this can be used to identify what the 2 hours of consulting were for or what was purchased under a general Miscellaneous Taxable Sales catagory. If you do not wish to enter a comment, just press ENTER. For payments, the Comment field will be changed to a Check Number field. If you enter a number it will be included in the customer file and on the bill. If you wish not to include a check number, just depress ENTER. You may also include any comment here provided it does not start with a digit (number). SOAR scans the comment field (check number field) for payment transactions and converts leading numbers to the check number for the payment. Page 32 SOAR USERS GUIDE This completes your first transaction entry. Easy wasn't it! You are now prompted for a new customer id. The default is the customer you just entered; this simplifies multiple entries for the same customer. Keep entering transactions until you have entered some for at least three or four customers. You may exit this screen by entering ESC. If you opted for a control report, you will be prompted to align the paper. Depress a key and your control report will be printed. Scan the report for errors. If there are errors you CANNOT correct them; this preserves all entries for audit purposes. However, you can DELETE the transaction if it has not been posted. The transaction number is shown on the control report and this is what you use to delete a transaction. You can do this through selection 4, Delete Transactions on the Trans- action Menu. Suppose you forgot to enter a transaction several days ago and you have since entered more transactions. No problem, just go to Transaction Entry and enter the transaction using the correct transaction date. SOAR will place all transactions in date order when bills are prepared. 8.3 Posting Transactions: Posting is the process in SOAR where payments and charges are used to update the customer files and the summary catagories. Once posted, a transaction cannot be deleted. If an error was discovered AFTER posting, the only way to correct it is to generate an offsetting transaction; i.e., enter a payment or credit to cover the improper charge and vice versa. Some business post transactions at the end of a business day while others post after they are entered. SOAR gives you the option of doing it which ever way you wish. The author uses the second approach since customer files are therefore always up to date. To post transactions, select the desired posting option from the Transaction Menu. For our experiment, enter 5, Post All Transactions. You will be prompted for the trans- action file name and the option for a control report. Enter the file name as TEST <E>. You may be interested to see what was done during posting. Go to the Customer Maintenance Menu and VIEW one of the customers for which you entered transactions. The customer file should have been updated with the new data. Charges will be applied to the Current Charges Field and payments will be shown in the payment history portion of the record. Page 33 SOAR USERS GUIDE 8.4 Applying Automatic Charges: If you entered some transaction catagories for automatic billing, you can have these added to the transaction file by selecting 2 at the Transaction Menu. You will be prompted again for a file name and given the option of a control report. Automatic charges are like other charge transactions except they can only be applied once a billing period. You will also be asked if you would like to include a comment with each transaction. For instance if SMITH is automatically billed for some service you might want to include a comment such as: Service for 3/87 to 4/87 The comment will be part of the transaction and included in the bill. As each automatic billing transaction is prepared you will be prompted with the customer id and a request for a comment. If you don't want to include a comment for a part- icular customer, just depress ENTER. 8.5 Applying Late Charges: You should always apply late charges even if you have not in- cluded a late charge percentage in the customer file. This ensures that ALL customers with outstanding balances will be billed. As you experiment with billing, note the difference in the bills for customers with a late charge percentage and those without. Before applying late charges you must be sure that all payment transactions have been entered. This ensures that customers receive credit for payments. SOAR will scan the transaction file before computing late charges to ensure that all payments have been posted. However, SOAR cannot post what has not been entered. The author uses the practice of entering transactions on a regular basis and applying late charges and again posting all transactions as the last action before preparing bills. It works for him .... 8.6 Preparing Bills: The whole purpose of any business is to make money. This can't be done unless we provide bills to those for whom we do work, provide a service or sell goods. Thus, SOAR was primarily developed to simplify the process of billing and to allow more time to be spent on the actual business of earning more money. SOAR serves this purpose well. You are ready to bill when you have entered all transactions, posted payments (and charges), applied automatic billing and late charges, and posted all payments and charges. It may appear that there is a lot of posting going on, but it is one way to insure that things are properly entered and kept track of. You can post as many times as you wish; if something has been posted once, it will not be posted again. Page 34 SOAR USERS GUIDE To prepare bills, goto to the Main Menu and select 2, Billing. As in any of the SOAR modules that deal with transaction files, you will be asked for a file name and the option of a control report. You may have wondered why SOAR keeps asking for a file name. SOAR was designed such that you can have multiple trans- action files effective at the same time. For example, you may have one file for out-of-state customers, another for this or another for that. Since SOAR does not know how you are going to run your business, you are asked for a file name. SOAR now sorts the transaction file by customer, date and transaction number. This means that all transactions will first be grouped by customer and then in date order for each customer. Transactions entered for the same customer on the same date will be grouped in the same sequence as they were entered. This was done to ensure, among other things, that comments and messages (' Note transaction catagories) could be contiguous and not scrambled. You will also be asked if you are going to bill all customers or specific customers. If you choose specific customers, then a bill will only be prepared for a specified customer. When done, you will be asked for another customer name. This allows you, for example, to bill a single customer out of your normal billing sequence. Once billed, that customer will not be billed again during the billing interval unless more trans- actions are entered. You will be asked if you want the billing to go to a billing file. This means that SOAR will write the data to a file so you can edit it with a word processor. You will be asked if you want to print the bills. You have the option of both printing the bills and sending them to a disk file for record purposes. You must specify one or the other or both; you must either print the bills, send them to a disk file, or do both. Otherwise, why are you in the billing pro- gram in the first place? You will be asked if you want a mailing label file to be generated. This allows you to prepare and print mailing labels for those customers billed. The file is prepared during billing and printed from the Utility Menu, 3, Mailing Labels. If you want to check your paper alignment you can request a test mask to be printed. This is most useful when using pre- printed forms. After answering all these questions, SOAR will then process the transaction file and prepare the bills. During processing a billing register and summary file are created or appended that give you a report of the bills prepared and a summary of where the charges or payments were directed (summary catagories). Page 35 SOAR USERS GUIDE Using the experimental data you have been tinkering with, prepare some bills. This is what you have been striving for these last 30 pages or so. You should have found the billing to be easy and painless. It takes almost more time to fold, stuff, and stamp the bills than it does to prepare them! 8.7 End of Period Processing: Once bills have been prepared it is necessary to inform SOAR that there are no more payments or charges forthcoming this billing period and to update the customer and automatic trans- action catagories. End of Period adds the Present Balance to the Past Due, replaces the Present Balance with Current Charges and zeros the Current Charges. End of Period also clears the billed flag from the automatic billing transaction catagories so they can be used during the next billing period. To perform End of Period, select 3 from the Main Menu. From the End of Period Menu, select 1, End of Billing Period. Thats all there is! 8.8 More Exploring: Thus far you have been exposed to all the menus of SOAR. It is not possible to discuss all the features in a USERS GUIDE. You are encouraged to become a registered user and to receive the manual describing SOAR in greater detail. Besides, it gives the author a warm feeling to be able to put money in the bank. Some of the features that were briefly touched upon include the reporting capability. Try different reports using the controls to limit the printing. For example, try printing a sorted transaction report. Use the example, TEST, and select some different sort parameters. One such set of parameters is sorting by (A) Summary Catagory, (B) Customer, and (C) Date. The result allows you to examine transactions for a specific catagory; e.g., if you only want to see the payments received from a transaction file, set the limits for Summary Catagory to 1 and 6. Try using the mailing label portions of the program. Labels are printed on standard 3.5 X 15/16 continuous feed labels. These can also be obtained from Business Automation Company as described earlier in this GUIDE. The data file merging option in the Utility Menu lets you combine several transaction files into one. For example, you may wish to generate reports for the entire quarter. To do this, merge the three monthly transaction files into a quarterly file. The result is a transaction file that can be sorted, summarized, etc. through the Reports Menu. So, experiment with SOAR and learn what it can do. When you feel comfortable, go to the next section and begin to use SOAR for your billing. Page 36 SOAR USERS GUIDE SECTION 9 PHASING SOAR INTO YOUR BUSINESS Hopefully you have explored SOAR sufficiently to feel comfor- table with it and to find it of use. Now you can get rid of the files created while exploring and restore your original files to put SOAR to work. The first thing we must do is purge the system of the data files created during the evaluation. Again, this is different for hard disk users than it is for floppy users. Hard Disk Users: (1) Exit SOAR from the Main Menu by <E> or ESC. (2) Type: CD \SOAR <E> (3) Type: ERASE SOAR.SYS <E> (4) Type: CD \DATA <E> (5) Type: ERASE CUSTOMER>MAS <E> (6) Type: ERASE *.CAT <E> (7) Type: ERASE TEST.* <E> (8) Load your copy of your original files into Drive A. (9) Type: COPY A:CUSTOMER.MAS . <E> (10) Type: COPY A:*.CAT . <E> (11) Type: CD .. <E> (12) Type: COPY A:SOAR.SYS . <E> Your original files are now restored and you are ready to pro- ceed to Section 9.1. Floppy Disk Users: (1) Exit SOAR from the Main Menu by <E> or ESC. (2) Type: ERASE B:*.CAT <E> (3) Type: ERASE B:CUSTOMER.MAS <E> (4) Type: ERASE B:TEST.* <E> (5) Type: ERASE A:SOAR.SYS <E> This assumes that SOAR Disk #2 is in Drive A. (6) Load you copy of your original files into Drive B. (7) Type: COPY B:SOAR.SYS A: <E> (8) Load your SOAR Disk #1 in Drive A. (9) Type: COPY B:SOAR.SYS A: <E> (10) Load your Data disk into Drive A. (11) Type: COPY B:CUSTOMER.MAS A: <E> (12) Type: COPY B:*.CAT A: <E> (13) Put your Data disk in Drive B and SOAR Disk #1 in Drive A and proceed to the next section. Page 37 SOAR USERS GUIDE 9.1 Completing Your Data Files: You are back to where you were when you started experimenting. You must now continue entering the rest of your customers and the transaction catagories you will initially be using. You have experience at this so it shouldn't be a problem; just time consuming and frustrating (at times). You actually have two ways of completing your data files. These are (1) all at once in a binge of data entry, and (2) as you need them during transaction entry. Perhaps the best way is to compromise; i.e., enter those customers and catagories you KNOW you will definitely need. Then, as new customers or catagories come up, enter them before entering transactions. 9.2 Running Parallel: Once your data is setup, you should start using SOAR for entering transactions. However, since this is a new step for you, it is best to keep doing it the "old" way until you have gained experience and confidence. If you make errors, you can correct them through one of the SOAR menus. The key thing is to track SOAR with your manual method and see if it is any easier, saves you time, and gives you the management informa- tion you need to run your business. If it does these things then you certainly should be a registered user. A registration form is included at the end of this GUIDE just for this reason. Page 38 SOAR USERS GUIDE SECTION 10 HOW OFTEN TO USE SOAR There is no absolute guide as to how often you must do certain things. The guidelines following are based on the Author's ex- perience and are biased by the number of times he has been bitten by Murphy's Law. You must make your decision based on the volumn of your business and the number of transactions your process. If in doubt, do it often! 10.1 Daily: Enter transactions as they occur. Don't put it off; the surest way of forgetting to bill someone is to wait until tomorrow. Enter the transactions and review the reports to catch errors. Post as often as you think necessary. If you don't know, then post as soon as you finish entering transactions, reviewing them, and making corrections. Backup your data files after entering transactions and posting. There is nothing more frustrating than to lose your data and trying to enter it again. You can backup your data files using the procedures defined earlier but including the command: COPY <filename>.* A: All data files reside on the same drive or in the same directory as your customer and catagory files. Floppy disk users should modify the command above for their system. Note that <filename> refers to the name given to a transaction file during data entry. 10.2 Monthly: End of month is traumatic for some people. For SOAR it is a breeze! Assuming you have been entering transactions on a regular basis, just do the following: (1) Apply Automatic Billing (2) Apply Late Charges (you did enter all payments?) (3) Post All Transactions (4) Backup you data files (5) Prepare bills (6) Perform End of Billing Period Processing (7) Generate the reports you need. Obviously you should be preparing reports as you go along, but it is important at the end of the month so you can gauge how well your business did this last month and make any necessary changes in your efforts. Page 39 SOAR USERS GUIDE 10.3 Yearly: End of year processing is a simple step that follows after end of month. To do this simply do your normal End of Billing Period Processing as described above and then do End of Year processing. These are done via the End of Period Menu. 10.4 Final Note: The most important thing to stress is maintaining good copies of your data. SOAR, and, for that matter any other program, is less likely to cause problems if you have backups of your data. When in doubt, back it up! So often we get lazy and put off the FEW minutes to make copies of our data and spend hours or days trying to recover from some act of nature. The easiest way to defeat Murphy is to have good copies of all your work. The author well remembers the work that went into writing a specialized interpreter in assembly language for testing electronics components. He failed to backup his data on the day there was a major disk crash and lost six months of work. Of course there were hard copies, but these had to be keyed in by hand and took weeks. Needless to say, there are lots of backups of SOAR in his office; the source code is over 150 pages long and he is very slow at the keyboard... Page 40 SOAR REGISTRATION FORM As a registered owner of SOAR you will receive the latest version of SOAR, a complete SOAR manual, and notification of updates. SOAR Registration at $49.00 ......... __________ Shipping/Handling at $3.00 .......... __________ California residents add 6% tax ..... __________ ------------------ Total Amount Enclosed ............... __________ Name: ___________________________________________ Address: ___________________________________________ City: ___________________________ State: _______ ZIP: ____________ Telephone: (____) ___________ Please send your check or money order to: E.B. Croson or Business Automation Co. P.O. Box 1575 P.O. Box 1330 Ojai, CA 93023 Camarillo, CA 93011