ALERE MANAGER MODULE

A great deal of the set up for establishing a company in ALERE is done in the Manager Module. However, it has its share of features to.

One of the best features is how ALERE handles customers, suppliers and other companies. Instead of treating them as separate they are simply all seen as companies with attributes. The attributes define what relationship the company and their locations have with your company. For example, do you ship to them? Do you send them invoices? Do they also sell to you and send you invoices?

The list of companies is both entered and displayed using what we call "Treevision". Treevision works like Widows Explorer. Just click to open and close different levels. You can enter companies' right on the screen.

This approach to handling companies closes a hole that is present in most accounting packages. You only have to enter a company once instead of possibly two times, once as a customer and once as a supplier if you ever buy something from them.

A number of other capabilities now exist. Credit memos can be directly turned into payables. Invoices can be offset by payables from the same company. Common practices like sending a refund check become easier to do and cost your company much less time and money.

Companies are tied to Google Maps so that driving directions are available and even satellite views of company locations! This is an excellent way to verify that a company has a storefront location.

You can use the locations function to find a list of all companies in an area. Another use is to rank geographic areas by the revenue they generate.

The Manager module contains one central file for the creation and maintenance of system-wide codes. Whether you need a code for a unit of measure, customer term, price group, product class, etc. there is only one place you have to go.

ALERE takes what are usually difficult bank transactions and not only makes them easy but delivers that extra step. For example, when handling a returned customer check you can automatically recreate the customer invoice just as if the payment had never been made. Have to void a check? The payable can be reopened as if the payment had never been sent. Everyday activities like deposits, withdrawals, posting interest, and recording bank fees are a breeze.

It is amazing in today's world how convoluted even payment terms and sales taxes can become.

You can define rules that handle even the most complex payment terms such as prox terms where orders placed by a certain date are due on a specific day of the next month, or Christmas dating terms with percentages due for a certain number of months, or even terms for paying rent.

Individual sales tax rates for state, county, city, and local are defined and then combined into rule sets for different locations. GL account numbers can be assigned to each tax rate. Temporary taxes using active and inactive dates are supported. The value added tax (VAT), or goods and services tax (GST) is a consumption tax levied on value added. Those taxes are also accounted for in ALERE.

The Manager Module provides an executive overview of the performance of your company. Because of the real-time nature of ALERE the key financial indicators such as your accounts receivable balance, accounts payable balance, incoming orders, shipments, invoices, and even expenses, profits and cash balances are readily available and displayed on one screen. In each case you can drill down to the supporting reports.

Sales and invoices are graphically displayed in a variety of ways including comparisons to the previous year.

The ability to see up to the minute invoices, expenses and profit has proven to be very popular with management over the years.

ALERE can handle 99 companies. The data for each company is stored in a single folder. This makes it simple to move a company to a different location or copy it. Why would you copy it? Well, it makes it simple to back up and training people is much easier when you are working with real-life data from a copied company. Another reason is that each company can have separate folders where modifications are kept that apply to select companies. This approach allows you to copy a company and test new modifications before applying them to your live company.

For a mission critical application like ALERE, security has to be an important consideration. Extensive password security protection is available at the user level, the company level, and in very sensitive areas at the function level. You have control over the password size, how long it is valid for before the user must change it, if the same password can be used again and if so, when. For each function in ALERE that is password protected you can set the user to have unlimited access, password access, read only access, or no access at all.

Security templates can be constructed and assigned to users where they can be further modified.

Another key aspect of ALERE is its ability to be modified. Light modifications can be done right in the program to reports, screens and labels. More extensive modifications can be done by adding the Developers Source Kit (DSK).

A Data Dictionary is built into the Manager Module to provide information on tables, fields and indexes. The architecture of ALERE has been developed in a manner that, when the recommended modification strategy is followed, allows changes to be made very quickly. Furthermore, those changes can be brought forward into new releases with little or no effort.

Extensive reporting and sophisticated browsers with drill down are included throughout in the ALERE software.