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Small Business Management Software
Review of AvailSuite Software
By: Margarita Ustinova
Business management software can be
a great tool for your field service business, allowing you to keep track of all
your data, and easily produce reports for effective control and planning.
Because it will be indeed the engine of your business, it's important to ensure
that you pick the software that's right for your business and your needs. Please
find below the review of AvailSuite software.
BusinessWare Technologies has
recently completed a significant upgrade to its AvailSuite line of field service
software, with comprehensive tax reports, improved user interface, and
QuickBooks synchronization.
The company also split the standard
version of AvailSuite, with its lineup now comprised of Standard and Personal.
Standard version is appropriate for companies with 5-50 employees because of its
networking capabilities. It organizes customer information, manages products
and/or services, schedules and dispatches staff, helps to keep expenses under
control, handles invoicing, synchronizes data with QuickBooks, and much more.
The Personal version is available for micro businesses or one-person companies.
It has most features of the Standard version, but with limited number of
employees. Pricing for Standard is $299 for a single-user license (with
non-limited number of technicians); pricing for Personal is $69.99.
Standard and Personal version are
built on the same code base, allowing for instant upgrading or quick migration
between them. This supports business
growth and allows staying with the same program and avoiding retraining of
staff.
Help & Support Options
A new software product requires some
time for learning even how to start working with it. AvailSuite quick start
wizard provides excellent assistance during the process of setting up company
information, adding employees and customers, creating orders and invoices,
entering payments, and running reports. You can choose "Show me" tutorial movie
or "Do it for me" option. The quick start wizard could be accessed at any time
by clicking on "Quick Start" button in the main menu. This built-in assistance
feature and traditional Help (press F1 button to access) are very useful. Free
unlimited email support is provided for both Personal and Standard versions.
Ease of Use Functionality
Main menu provides seven general
areas of work: Sales, Production, Receivables, Payables, Inventory, Reports, and
Calendar.
AvailSuite offers several
customization features that enable users to set up layouts of navigation panel
and pages. You can hide groups of main menu or replace them with a small icon
and view only those that are used frequently. All pages can be customizable in
the same way – you can add or hide columns, change their places, sorting them,
grouping data etc. For instance, Customers view could have 1 or 21 columns.
Sales
This is Customer management module where you can click on a client and
immediately view or add new orders, tasks, invoices, payments, service history
and next task date, default discount, billing address, notes and so on in a
single window. The system provides excellent assistance with a workflow, for
instance, if you add an order, you will be asked about creating a task for this
order, and then you can schedule your appointments. Recurring Task Wizard will
assist you with scheduling recurring appointments. You can set very flexible
recurrence pattern, like "every 3rd Friday each month", or "on Monday and
Thursday every 2nd week".
If you want to work with your
customer base, you can view your recurring appointments to be done in the next 7
or 10 days and send reminders for service to your customers by email. View
one-time jobs performed within last month to make the list of customers you want
to call and schedule next appointment.
All orders have a status, so they
could be viewed as Draft orders, Complete Orders, Negotiated Orders, Canceled
Orders, and On Hold Orders. Also you can quickly get some statistic data about
orders sorted by customers or by month.
Here you can also create invoices.
As far as the system keeps info of all your customers, so when you create a new
invoice, their billing information is automatically included, and you can
specify the tasks they need to pay for from the drop-down list. Invoices could
be customized. To include your company logo and set up the text to be printed on
the invoices you must fill out company settings form and then all this
information will automatically appear in your documents. All documents may be
printed or emailed to clients as PDF files directly from the system.
Production
This is a module to manage employees and all expenses you made to provide your
services. You can enter/view all information about an employee such as name,
address, photo, working days and time, hourly rate and/or monthly wage; add new
task or time card – all in one window.
Employees could submit time spent
reports using Time Cards functionality. This is very useful feature to track
working time so you can always be certain that every employee's time claim was
accurate.
Employees could have various level
of access. If you want your technician to view tasks and submit his/her time
cards, you must specify his/her login name and password in "System access" tab
of employee card.
Receivables and Payables
AvailSuite`s accounting functions
are very basic, so for more complicated accounting you need to have additional
software like QuickBooks. In account receivables module you can analyze your
customers` debts as well as all invoices and payments sorted by customer and by
month. On accounts payments screen you will see payments to your vendors and
employees and invoices from your vendors grouped by status as Drafts,
Negotiated, Completed, Cancelled, and On Hold.
Inventory
AvailSuite Standard now offers
support for multiple warehouse locations, with the ability to track vendors,
purchase orders and all products you have, their location, warranty information,
on-hand quantities, price and so on. Using the Vendors module, you can quickly
review your buying history, credit limit and discount offered, and all about
vendors – their contact info, grace period, terms, and price list.
This feature is more than tracking
your inventory. AvailSuite notifies you on a shortage of items in stock when
saving an order. Also you can view a list of products, the quantity of which is
less than a given threshold value. You can create and print Purchase Orders,
track their status and your payments, view POs grouped by vendor or by month.
Reports
This is one of the things you need
business management software for. AvailSuite provides about 40 reports about all
aspects of business, allowing owners to have key information at their
fingertips. Users have one-click access to Profit & Loss report, P&L
comparisons, payables aging, purchase orders or whatever items are needed. A
menu groups all available reports by various categories such as Sales reports,
Receivables reports, Payables reports, Inventory reports. All reports can be
exported into PDF, XML, XTML, Word and Excel for further modification.
Calendar
This is the one of the distinguished
AvailSuite's features, very flexible and easy to use. It allows scheduling
appointments directly on the Calendar screen and coordinating technicians`
workload, so you can view all tasks of all your technicians in one screen or
view only personal schedules. After an appointment is on your calendar, you can
set up an alert to remind you when the appointment is approaching.
AvailSuite's Calendar has all the
point-and-click and drag-and-drop capabilities to easy scheduling. You can move
tasks from one day to another day with a single mouse movement or re-assign them
from one person to another. Resizing task bar will change the task's duration.
Double-clicking on the task bar opens a screen with complete task details. On
the same screen you can view all unassigned tasks.
Once the scheduling is done, you can
print the daily job lists for employees and get them started.
Expandability
Tiny business should strive to
become a large one, so an easy upgrade path is needed. You've got it. Starting
with one license if AvailSuite Standard, you can buy some additional ones, and
AvailSute will work in multi-user mode. Adding new users is just a matter of
buying the appropriate number of user licenses.
If you outgrow AvailSuite Personal,
moving up to another product requires little effort. So whether or not you'll
stay small, AvailSuite Personal is the best way to start. No other business
management software fits so well with micro-businesses and start-ups.
Data migration
New users can import existing data
(customers, vendors, services, and inventory) from their legacy software using
Microsoft Excel files. A wizard makes the tedious setup process palatable. If
your software can't save data in Excel files, try to send an inquiry about
migration process to BusinessWare Tech's support team. Currently they run a
promotional campaign and offer data migration for free.
Customization inquiries
One of the most common errors is
that software customization and adding new features would be very expensive so
it's useless to ask about it. Have you ever thought that on the other side there
is a software product manager who's thinking about the same new features but he
doesn't add them to software development plan because "No one asked about them"?
So please ask all what you want. That manager is waiting for your feedback and
he will appreciate it.
AvailSuite website:
http://www.availsuite.com
AvailSuite demo movies
http://www.availsuite.com/demo
AvailSuite Personal download page:
http://www.availsuite.com/personal/download
About the author
Contact
Margarita Ustinova by clicking on this link or visiting
the website @
http://www.availsuite.com
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