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User eNotes - April 2020
Presidents Comments
Rod Hatcher
These have been a challenging couple of months for all of us. It is important to know that the staff of TIW, and your Dealer, remains available to support you. Maybe you are too busy to give us a second thought or maybe you could use some additional help to meet your company needs. Call us, and we will work to answer your questions.

Our development is continuing to move forward on our next release. It may contain functionality that you could use. That includes job costing, BOM with adjustable children, TaxJar links, and manufacturing intercompany sourcing. We are also investigating integration of Shopify as a web cart solution. We expect to release v16 later this year.

We invite suggestions for new ALERE features and functionality. Stay healthy and positive.
Help for PPP
The Paycheck Protection Program is being offered by the federal government. The program provides small businesses with funds to pay up to eight weeks of payroll costs including benefits. Funds are provided in the form of loans that will be fully forgiven when used for payroll costs. The application and forms are available through any federally insured depository institution.

A spread sheet, showing payroll and related expenses for twelve months of 2019, is the starting point for the program calculations. This information should be easily available using the 12 Month Income Statement found in ALERE by going to Finance > Compare > 12 Month Income Statement.

Enter period one of 2019 into the first set of fields. Run the report using the Screen button. All 12 periods will be included on the report. It may be desirable to sum up the total under one account number, if your chart of accounts has multiple segments, by setting the Detail option to Account Major.
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When you have the desired report format it may be printed. This should provide the twelve months of information that you will need to enter into program spreadsheet calculations.
Payment and Invoice Don't Match
Mistakes happen. Unfortunately, a small mistake can consume a lot of valuable time to try and make it right. Take, for example, receiving a customer payment in the amount of $499.89 for an invoice that came to $499.99. Is there a real benefit in chasing that dime?

Fortunately, ALERE provides several convenient options that can be used to handle the situations where payments and invoice don’t match!

When the payment is less than the invoice, like the example above, the following screen is displayed:
Apply Cash to Invoice Screen
Full Amt - The full payment is applied to the invoice and the difference is allowed to be posted to any other document with a credit balance. If none are available then this option is not valid.

Cash Amt - The payment is used to reduce the open balance.

Disc & Cash - The discount required to fully pay the balance is calculated and entered in the Discount field and the payment amount is entered in the Amount field.

Should the payment exceed the invoice, then this screen is displayed:
Apply Difference to Discount Screen
This provides the option to apply the over-payment to the customer’s prepayment account or by answering “No” to apply it to other invoices the customer has outstanding.

In every case the appropriate GL entry is made on the GL Journal Entry screen. The invoice is marked as Completed and closed. This provides a pleasant conclusion to what is typically a paperwork nightmare.
Real Time Inventory with Scanner
Keeping an accurate inventory is a benchmark requirement of any company with stock inventory. The traditional method of manually counting items in inventory is fraught with challenges however. In the time between recording the count and entering it into inventory, items may have been issued to jobs in the shop, shipping may have occurred, receipts from suppliers may have arrived, and so on.

These challenges have led to convoluted and difficult procedures to ensure the physical count is accurate. The use of real-time data acquisition technology in ALERE has resolved that accuracy problem.

At the moment an item is scanned, the counted quantity and the quantity in inventory for that location/store/bin/lot/etc. is stored in the file IMCOUNT.DBF.

Real Time Inventory
When the count is posted, it will continue to show the counted and original counts on the screen. The result is only the DIFFERENCE between those numbers is posted. Even if issues or receipts since that point in time have been done, it only posts the change, thus negating the requirement to freeze inventory.

Conversely, when importing from an Excel spreadsheet or entering manual counts, there is not a way to determine the expected on hand at the instant it was counted.

In summary, when physical inventory is done using barcode scanner technology, it does not require the tedious process of freezing inventory.
Technical Seminars - Your Source of Training
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TIW's next Technical Seminars in Easton, PA will be held in April.

The Manufacturing Seminar will be held April 27th and 28th.

The Accounting Seminar will be held April 29th through May 1st.

Invest in yourself and keep your knowledge of ALERE up to date!

Make your reservations now at Technical Seminar Reservations or by calling Chris at 610-258-5161 x105. Current users on SMAs have certificates that entitle them to a free seat in a seminar.

Send employees to recurring training to educate them on how to use the new features in a just released version. Use it as comprehensive training for new additions to your staff to familiarize them with the capabilities of ALERE. Don't let that free seminar seat go to waste!
TIW Technology, Inc. | Phone: 610.258.5161 | Fax: 610.258.6217