SAFE 5.0 Ships This Week!
Simple Accounting for Forms Experts version 5.0 will be released January 23, 2002. We have a raft of changes, designed to to allow you to sell in more ways, easier than ever. What's new is both under the hood and in the styling. Here is just a sample:

Automated Assemblies!	You can now automatically create Assemblies (a.k.a. Kits/Bills of Material) which consist of multiple component line items. The Assembly can then be used as a single line item on a Sales Order. Best of all? You can post separate A/P Bills to each component which maintains the correct overall profitability of the line on the sales order line item!
A/P Posting Within Sales Orders!	You can now control and view all postings to A/P directly from inside a Sales Order! Yippee! No more bouncing back and forth between Sales Orders and the Bills Browse to see which costs were posted to an order! The same applies to Purchase Orders for inventory. You will be able to receive in products and apply any number of costs to each line without leaving the Purchase Order screen.
User May Control Sales Order Line Item Numbering!	You can now change the order of Sales Order lines at will. In other words, if you add a line item to a Sales Order, you can make it appear as the first line of the transaction.
Easier Mixed Units Of Issue!	Selecting alternate package quantities has been made much easier. No more Unit/Lot/Package Quantity. You will be able to 'purchase by the thousand' and 'sell by the carton' and never have to worry about selecting the proper buttons or Units of Measure on Sales Orders and P.O.s. This will make the entire process 100% fool-proof, once and for all.
Complete Windows XP Certification!	We will have completed Windows XP certification from Microsoft. (Not that SAFE does not run under Window XP now, it's just that SAFE 5.0 has been tested and given the 'seal of approval' from Microsoft.) By the way, no other program in our industry can say that.
Payroll Import Extensions!	Eliminate tedious manual payroll entries by purchasing our Payroll Extensions for SAFE 5.0! Automatically import disk based reports from ADP and Paychex to your Check Register and General Ledger!
Built-In UPS and FedEx Tracking!	Right click on any line item to get detailed tracking information on any item shipped via UPS or FedEx! (Does not require external UPS or FedEx software.)
Improved Inventory Audit Trail!	You will now be able to view and manage, from a single Audit Trail, any Product's overall balance at all Sites, regardless of how many Site it is stored at.
Easier Cost Center Reporting!	Several Cost Center based forms management reports are now standard with SAFE. You can easily group releases and production orders together by Ship From or Ship To which makes reconciling inventory at each storage site easy.
One Click Shipping!	If the item you are releasing is shipping to a single Site, you can enter the Shipped Quantity and complete the line item with a single click!
Easier A/R Payments!	You can now automatically receive payments on all open invoices for a customer's check with one click (no need to enter separate line items for each invoice!) If the customer is on Summary Billing, you can automatically apply payment to all component invoices with one click! Of course, you still have complete control over editing individual lines if you need it, but for your smaller clients (who typically only have one or two open invoices at a time) or large customers on Summary Billing, this will save lots of time every day!

As always, SAFE 5.0 will be free to current Remote Support Subscription customers. Users of earlier versions of SAFE 4.2a may upgrade for $1,295. SAFE users who do not have a current Remote Support Subscription will also be required to purchase a new block at the prevailing rate.

All eligible users will receive an e-mail with complete instructions on how to obtain SAFE 5.0 the minute the update is ready for downloading!

But Wait, There's More!
There are many more features and improvements to SAFE, such as improvements to ThinSAFE and Ollie which we will be only too happy to impart to you, next time. Get all the details now at www.suntowersystems.com/whatnext.htm

Future: XML to XBLR?
Now that SAFE 5.0 has a built-in XML interface, is it premature to think about that next logical step? Financial Reporting Exchange. Most of you who are thinking of XML, think primarily in terms of linking to your vendors. But a new initiative started by AICPA promises to make sending, receiving and interpreting financial reports automatic. For example, let's say you require financial statements from a potential partner, XBLR will allow you to receive their reporting in the same format you already use. That's right: you will see their numbers, but in the format you are used to reading. This is a big deal as most of us are not expert at reading financial reports and many accountants present information in different ways.

For example, in the current Enron scandal, one recurrent theme was how difficult Enron's 50-60 page summary balance sheet was to read. XBLR will allow a recipient of a transmission to see the numbers in the standardized format your company routinely uses.

On a more practical scale, you could transmit your information to your banker, or potential clients could send you their reports and you could be certain that the information was interpreted accurately.

And if we can do that, what about payroll records? Or banking detail. The possibilities are limited only by the ability of business partners to supply standards. What is most impressive about XBLR is that, unlike a lot of things that are the next great idea, XBLR is coming into being now with most accountant's prep software expected to support it this year.

Will Suntower Systems support XBLR? You bet! Even though you may not be ready for it just yet. It's a great idea and, as with most XML standards, almost trivial to implement. The trick is getting the participants to work together.

Now: We're doing our part. We have the XML interface, so we can talk with any business partners that you want to partner with. So what will you do this year to get your favored vendors and customers on-board?

 

Personal Note: Dr. King
Tomorrow is Martin Luther King day here in America. There are apparently a lot of mixed feelings about this holiday in the United States. As someone who has grown up with a great deal of strife in Belfast, I should like to offer  a brief perspective on the man, who it seems, still provokes a great deal of controversy, 35 or so years after his death.

1. All kidding aside, Martin Luther King's life and accomplishments extend well beyond America's borders. He is more admired, in fact, in other parts of the world, apparently than in his own land.

2. Anyone in Ireland, for example, will tell you that MLK was the primary inspiration for peace marches and civil rights campaigns that finally ended segregation and lack of voter rights for Catholics in Northern Ireland, even though they make up 45% of the population. It is not an exaggeration to say that without his influence of non-violence, the deaths over the past thirty years would be many, many times greater than the 5,000 who have lost their lives.

3. If you are like us, it may not be practical to take the day off on Monday (even though we Europeans never met a holiday we did not feel was worth taking!) But be certain that, regardless of whether you are working or not, remembering (or perhaps brushing up on) this man's achievements would assuredly be worth of few minutes of your time.

---Seàn A. Marron

Ciaran's Corner: Back To Your Questions!
I entered an order for a school we sell to. I noticed that sales tax was being calculated, even though they are a non-profit. So I went back into the order and unchecked the Calculate Sales Tax? box for the Line Item. To my horror, the tax still appeared on the customer's invoice. What's up with that?

The Calculate Sales Tax check box does exactly what it say it does: it calculates sales tax. It isn't called 'Taxable/Not Taxable'. What it does turn on and off is SAFE's calculation of Sales Tax based on the Sales Tax ID. It also enables you to manually key in a Sales Tax dollar amount for a line item.

In other words, if you uncheck the Calculate Sales Tax box you are telling SAFE to not bother to re-calculate Sales Tax if you change Sales Tax ID.

Why would you want to do that? Well, SAFE calculates Sales Tax based on the Sales Tax ID you have selected. This defaults to the Sales Tax ID pre-selected for the Shipping Site. In some cases, however, the sales tax may not match with the quantity shipped to a single site. For example, say your customer is a large company and is paying for forms to be stored at ten branches. In that customer's original order, the place in which the forms will be shipped do not tell you the final sales tax jurisdiction. So you need to be able to override the sales tax at each destination to reflect where the forms will be used by the customer.

Once you uncheck the Calculate Sales Tax box, you are able to manually enter/edit the sales tax dollar amount for each Site on the Sales Order Line Item screen. You do this by double-clicking on the Sales Tax Amount column of the Sites/Quantities browse. Whatever you key into these fields then become the Sales Tax for those Sites.

If you accidentally uncheck the Calculate Sales Tax box by mistake, simply check it again and SAFE will automatically re-calculate the Sales Tax for each Site on the Line Item when you save the Line Item (by pressing [OK]).

'Til next time,

---Ciaràn

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