ALERE Acccounting v3.1 New Features

ALERE v3.1 New Features

Business Consolidation - Combine the financial results of two or more companies into one Income Statement and one Balance Sheet! Use any company to run the consolidation just by selecting from a list the companies to include! Rerun it with different combinations of companies! Run the consolidation once a week, mid month, month end, anytime because ALERE is a real time system! Should GL adjusting entries be required when combining multiple companies, create a separate company just for doing consolidations. All settings and journal entries are retained so company consolidations can be run not only for the current period but for any period you have on record! The fiscal periods of the consolidation company are used to set the date ranges.

Executive Advisor - See a summary of your company’s financial information at a glance! Up to the minute sales and purchasing information, current accounts receivable and accounts payable balances, and inventory and in-transit values are all displayed on one screen. Best of all, since ALERE is a real time accounting package, income, cost of goods, expenses, and profit period-to-date and year-to-date are all available. Even your current cash balance and the cash flow your company is generating can be monitored! Executive Advisor is the leading edge of a set of management tools under development for ALERE.

Date Based Income Statement - The addition of this major Income Statement enhancement provides a company with the ability to analyze financial results from a whole new perspective. Instead of being limited to predefined periods, the Income Statement can be run for any beginning and ending dates. This means that daily, weekly, quarterly, and semiannual statements can be produced. Even multi-year statements are available.

Date range comparisons can also be done. Match up this year’s first quarter results with last year’s. Compare the last two years with the two years before that. Check this week’s performance with the same week last year. Literally any two date ranges can be compared!

Export to F9 - With a simple click of the button, detailed financial information can be sent from ALERE to the Lasata Software F9 financial reporter. There you can do budgeting, data mining, extended financial analysis, drill down on general ledger data, and much, much more!

Reopen Closed Years - An Undo button on the Year Closing screen will reverse the closing transactions and reopen the year.

Whole Order Discount Visibility - The Inquiry tab on the Pricing screen in the Sales Module displays information on whole order discounts that may apply to different pricing schemes. Whole order discounts are over and above individual item discounts and can be a major factor in developing quotes for customers.

Enhanced AR/Cash Receipts - The process of entering new cash receipts, and correcting ones that have been made, has been simplified by combining the two into one screen! Easily review receipts by paging backwards and forwards through them.

When entering new receipts, a Find button permits the invoice number or the customer’s purchase order number to be used to locate the correct customer record. The invoice is automatically checked for payment and the amount entered.

Now negative discount amounts can be used to solve the irritating problem of payments being greater than the invoice amount. Take, for example, an invoice for $89.95 and a payment for $89.99. Normally that small difference of 4 cents is applied as a credit to the customer account and you end up keeping track of and/or refunding it. To avoid creating a credit for these small amounts, the overpayment can be entered as a negative discount amount and the total payment as the amount. The difference can then be charged off to miscellaneous revenue leaving you with a nice, clean customer account.

The unique ability to correct receipts has been further extended to allow the date of the posting to be changed. In addition, a Void button has been added to permit a receipt to be completely reversed!

Multiple Transfer Order Improvements - Continuously add line items on transfer orders without having to save each one! Add lines to accepted or partially complete orders! Track status of orders by percent shipped and percent received! Finish incomplete orders with a Done button!

Account Status - Individual general ledger accounts can either be marked active or inactive. Inactive accounts will not allow journal entries to be made against them. They can be reactivated at any time. Controlling the account status is a good way of managing the release of new accounts.

Sales Return Date - The date that a sales return is received can be edited to provide control over the period in which it is posted.

Bank Reconciliation Reload - A Reload button on the Bank Reconciliation screen will undo the reconciliation back to the last saved version. A great way to restart a reconciliation from a known point.

Report Preference Selection - The ability to save report preferences on each report has been enhanced. The preferences saved become the default conditions whenever the report is run. Most importantly, the preferences are by user.

Logins Report - This new report in the Manager Module lists user login information. It is a great way of periodically printing a list of user passwords for secure backup of this important information. The expiration date range option on the report can then be used to notify users of the impending expiration of their passwords and of the necessity to enter new ones.

Open Order for Statements - An Open Order format has been added to the Statements report. This format lists all open orders with the original amounts, the remaining balance amounts, and a total.

Non-Stock Items Report - This new report has been added to the Manager Module and is dedicated to providing information on non-stock items. Clients not using the Inventory Module now have a way of more easily managing these items.

Sales Invoice Report - A new option allows the invoices to be ordered by their ID number or by their customer ID number.

PO Open Orders Report - Use this report to help manage the purchase orders that have been placed. Quickly find out which orders are due and from which suppliers. See a list of the items on order and their associated quantities. Keep on top of purchase orders that are only valid until a given date. Track the distribution of incoming material by location.

Master Item Report - A new option has been added to this report to show stock, non-stock, and all items. The report can also be filtered by the miscellaneous codes.

Receipts & Issues Report Options - The types of documents that the Receipts and Issues report will track have been expanded to include sales returns and purchase returns!

Expanded Sales Tax Listing Report - An Include option controls the listing of invoice items that are taxable, nontaxable, nonzero, and all categories. A Summary option permits only the totals by tax district to be listed on the report.

Company Reindex Utility - A utility has been designed and included with ALERE that makes it easy to automatically delete and rebuild company indexes! Called TIWINDEX.EXE, this executable utility is located in the program directory and runs outside of ALERE. The reindex utility deletes and rebuilds indexes based on the WSINDEX table. Thus, new indexes and changes made when customizing ALERE are automatically included when added into this table. The TIWINDEX utility is great way to make it easy to recover from damaged indexes without even starting ALERE!