We Moved On Up!
Hooray! We're here!
Well, we made it. And no lives were lost! Hopefully our transition did not cause you inconvenience (but -please- let us know if it did, of course!) But at the risk of being tedious, we'll keep repeating that new info for a few more issues...

Effective Immediately! Our official contact points are:

Please note that the old info is still good for at least the next six months. After that? Who can say! So please update your records now if you would be so kind.

Thanks!
 

SAFE Tutorial: What Is A Product's 'Value'?
We get a lot of questions regarding the term 'value' with respect to inventory. The problem is that, before we can discuss how to get you the information you want, we both need to be speaking the same language. The challenge for us, is that there are so many of you and so many scenarios. For example, some of you carry an inventory and some do not; some track pricing based on a forms management value for their customers; and many of you happily go through life as true manufacturer's reps, not having to know what any of this stuff means!

But assuming you do need to use SAFE for inventory control and/or forms management, let's start by describing what we mean by the term 'value'. Perhaps once this is clear, it will answer many questions regarding which report to select or it's interpretation. Are you sitting comfortably?

We track three dollar values in SAFE for every Product.

• The Priced Value
• The Costed Value
• The F/M Value

Now: You have the luxury of mixing and matching terms and can 'know' what you mean in a particular context. For example, you can talk to a customer about 'cost' and they know that you're talking about their price.  Sadly, SAFE is not nearly so bright! So we use the following terms always:

• The 'cost' is always what you paid the vendor for product
• The 'price' is always what you sell the product for
• The 'f/m' is always what your customer wants to value the product at

As an example, you have 10 cartons of stock paper

• The costed value is how much you paid for the paper
• The priced value is how much you intend to sell it for
• The F/M value is how much your customer considers it to be worth

So: how can the F/M Price be different? It can vary in a couple of ways
1. If you use Average Costing of Inventory (set in Inventory Setup)  you may wish to declare the F/M Price to be the average value of all releases to the customer over a period of time. This average value might be based on the total sale price of the original production orders.

2. If you use FIFO Costing (also set in Inventory Setup) you may wish to declare the F/M Price on a lot by lot basis. For example, the F/M value might change based on how long it's been in storage.

3. If you are writing off inventory in storage, you may need to adjust the value for one or more releases to reflect that they simply are not worth as much as they were when you initially released the items.

One way to think of F/M Price is that it is your customer's asset value of the products you have sold to them.

Taxing Decisions
And because F/M Price is their value, it is important to understand that you have a number of options as to how F/M Pricing is calculated. Globally, you need to decide whether or not you will include the tax and freight you charge your customer as part of the F/M Price. In other words, do they consider the sales tax and freight they paid to increase their asset? If so, SAFE will automatically include these for you. Now if you ran a forms management report showing releases over a period of time, the F/M Value of those releases will be greater than the total Priced Value, since your Priced Value will not include tax and freight.

Adjusting To Loss
The F/M Value of a product can also be affected by losses or 'father time'. Occasionally, a client may call and declare that they wish the F/M Value of a product to be arbitrarily higher or lower. This may be because the forms are becoming obsolete or have been written down in value. You can easily make these changes to their forms management history in SAFE in a number of ways.

OK, so we've learned what price, cost and f/m value mean in SAFE. And we discussed how f/m value can diverge from the priced value for a product. Hopefully, this will make interpreting SAFE's various inventory reports easier.

In a future article, we will discuss how you can tell SAFE when to recognize various transactions for inventory purposes and why this date might not always be the same as entries to your G/L. (But that's a good thing!)

'Til then...

Last Chance: Save $200 On PDFxtensions Now!
Have we gone insane? . PDFxtensions™ is now on sale for $495 until October 18, 2004. To refresh your memory: PDFxtensions is a SAFExtension which allows you to print any report or form directly to an Adobe Acrobat document.

HOW IT WORKS
PDFxtensions is completely transparent. After installation it adds a PDF button to the Print Preview on all reports. To generate a PDF, simply press the button!

E-MAIL
Additionally, you can use PDFxtensions to e-mail forms to customers, vendors and contacts. For example, let's say you have a batch of purchase orders. Instead of printing them to paper, you can instead, e-mail them to their respective vendors, using the e-mail addresses you have set up in their Vendor Masters. With PDFxtensions, SAFE will generate a separate PDF for each PO, then attach that PDF to each e-mail. Your recipients get a clear, totally legible purchase order (no worries about readability as with faxes) and you get an audit trail of what was sent (your e-mail outbox).

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!
When you e-mail PDFs of forms, you can also attach other files such as graphics. So when you e-mail a PO for a given product, you not only attach the PDF, but also any artwork files you have already linked to the product in SAFE (remember how we did that in our last issue?) You now have a fool proof way to ensure that your vendor gets all the materials he needs to print your job; every time.

THE OLLIE CONNECTION: PDF FORMS
And if that wasn't enough, if you are accepting templated orders from customers on-line (using Ollie) these templated PDFs can automatically be attached to your POs as well. So your vendor gets not only the PO, but also the artwork (which your customer automagically created in Ollie!) and all you had to do was press the [Print] button!

This works great not only for POs, but also for customer statements (if you've ever received an electronic statement from us that's how it's done.), RFQs, invoices, forms management reports and in fact almost any document generated from SAFE. SAFE will route it to the proper e-mail address intelligently.

And you can get even more creative: for example, we use PDFs for our training contracts. We e-mail the PDF contract to customers and attach that PDF to the sales order so that we can always refer back to the original (there's that Linked Image idea again!) Maybe your company has forms or contracts that you can do the same with?

WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?
PDFxtensions is by far our most popular SAFExtension. Hopefully now you can see why. So order PDFxtensions today here or by calling us today at (206)-241-4859. You won't know how SAFE is really being used without it!

Ciaran's Corner: Q&A On Help and iClose-Up
Q: So how was your holiday? (You better say it was great!)
A: Oh it was the best, darling . What was particularly wonderful was that I wasn't around for the stress of moving.

Q: I found an error in the manual. I think I should get a new copy!
A: We constantly get requests for manuals. And, as hard as we try to prevent them, we regularly have customers point out errors in the documentation. (Ed. Smart Aleck! He means that we try to prevent errors in the manual, we would never try to prevent users from reporting these errors when they find them.) The good news is that we do revise the documentation with each release. Unfortunately, we just cannot afford to print up fresh copies and distribute to all customers four times a year. What to do:
1. You can always get the latest and the greatest help on line at www.suntowersystems.com/help. If you have a broadband connection, this is your best bet for the most current information.

2. You can always download the current help system to your own installation of SAFE at www.suntowersystems.com/downloads/safeee/safe.chm. This is updated weekly.

3. You can always purchase a fresh printed copy of the SAFE Help at http://www2.ondemandmanuals.com/suntower. This documentation is updated quarterly.

Q: I have had untold grief installing iClose-Up. And my 'network guy' tells me it's not 'SAFE'.
A: In this season of politics, it should be easy to see that you can have two well-meaning people who have completely different opinions on the same set of facts. Fortunately, this is not one of those cases. We're right and your network guy is completely wrong. (Sorry) While it is a great idea to be a bit paranoid about any software which uses the Internet, almost all of the opposition to iClose-Up comes from three factors:
1. Basic competence. Sorry, but those of you who've followed this column for more than a few months know that we are constantly fighting to raise the standards of PC Support types. There are still lots of guys who make a very comfortable living and do not know what they are doing. And some of them are your brothers-in-law. (Double-sorry.)

2. Unfamiliarity with the product. People don't trust what they don't know. This is understandable. Our beef is that there will often be an unwillingness to learn about the product. The included help system with iClose-Up is exhaustive. We know because we beat up on N/L until it was truly so!

3. Poor support from the makers of iClose-Up. This is pretty annoying, I agree. Until a better solution is available we'll simply continue to muddle through. Fortunately, installing iClose-Up is usually fool-proof. It's the stuff you need to do to configure your network which usually causes the trouble (more on this in a moment.)

With all that, once iClose-Up is properly installed it tends to run flawlessly forever. Almost 100% of problems people have with iClose-Up, after a proper install, come from making basic changes to one's network without thinking about iClose-Up, or having to re-install iClose-Up and not remembering to configure your network to allow for it (as was done initially).

But there is that lingering 'security' issue. So what I think I'll do for next time is write a somewhat boring piece, in layman's terms, which will hopefully explain why iClose-Up is safe to use. I know you cannot wait.

Til Next Time,

Ciarān Marron
Technical Support Manager
cm@suntowersystems.com