Our Fax Number Is Changing!
Effective Immediately, you can now reach us by fax at (206)428-6035. You can continue to use the old fax number for another 60 days or so but by August 1, 2009, this will be our main fax contact point. Please update your records accordingly. We're doing this as part of our new support for the MyFax Internet Faxing Service which is included free, Free, FREE in SAFE XI.

Anniversary Deal Time Is Running Out!
Just a reminder: Our Annual Loyalty Discount expires June 30. If you're planning on taking advantage of this discount (and why wouldn't you?), it's time to get a move on!

Effective immediately, your business will receive a credit equal to $100 for every year you've been a registered user of Simple Accounting (up to $500). Use it as you will. At the least, it will buy your company a custom report that might shave an hour or two off a particular clerical task every month (and how much is that worth). At most (and you know who you are, you swell people!) it might pay for an entire year's with of technical support or a SAFExtensions module (like the very cool PDFExtensions which let you print or e-mail any SAFE Report or Form directly to an Acrobat PDF).

OK, Here's The Fine Print.
1. You may use the Program Discount towards any SAFExtension, custom programming or forms design we offer.

2. The discount may not be used on any invoices billed prior to May 15, 2009.

3. You must take advantage of your discount by June 30, 2009.

4. You can pre-pay if you like for specific work to be scheduled with this discount, but you can't just send in a check to be used 'on account'.

5. This offer POSITIVELY ends JUNE 30th, 2009. That's IT!

6. Now here's the latest curve. You may also use this credit towards your next Remote Support Subscription as long as you show proof of purchase of an upgrade to SQL Server 2008 before your next RSS subscription is due and before 12/31/09. In other words, if you purchase your upgrade to SQL Server 2008, either from us or anyone else, before December 31, 2009 you can take the amount of your eligible discount off of your next annual RSS invoice (whenever that occurs from May 15 2009 to May 14 2010.)

Wherever you fall within the spectrum of SAFE longevity, please accept this as a token of our appreciation. Thanks, and, as they say, 'Many More!'

FAQ's
1. I don't want to purchase SQL Server 2008 at this time. Can I use the credit towards RSS anyway. Nope.

2. Can I wait until closer to my RSS renewal date to upgrade to SQL Server 2008? Sure. But your paid invoice for SQL Server must be dated and submitted after May 15 and December 31 2009.

Til Next Time!
 

SAFE XI Tip: PDF Folder Improvements!
Most of you use our PDFXtensions to save copies of your forms and reports or to e-mail documents to clients. A small but notable improvement to Simple Accounting for Forms Experts XI is the addition of personal and global folders for storing PDFs.

A Personal Folder is a place to store all documents for a particular Employee ID—usually but not always the currently logged in Employee ID (more on this in a minute.) A Global Folder is, as the name suggests a central storage place for documents to be shared by all Employees.

THE FORMULA
To manage this, we now have a very flexible file naming system for PDFs. Each form and report can be set to have an automatically generated file name. This is most useful in the Global Folder where you don't want Employees to be able to overwrite a pre-existing file.

A typical automatically generated file name formula might be something like:

RSOECC200906151315JOHND.PDF

Which means: Report Module Date Generated Time Generated Employee ID who generated the report.PDF

THE FORMULA
Now some reports also allow a redirection; essentially a cc. A redirection is simply a copy of the report which is sent to a folder other than the default Personal or Global Folder. For example, the above commission report may have been generated by JOHND, but the actual salesperson was MARYK. A rule can be inserted into the above report so that every time the report is generated a copy is inserted into MARYK's Personal PDF Folder--along with an e-mail telling her that it happened. Redirections allow you to automate the workflow of reports that should be seen by a group of users.

Another example? Every time you print an invoice for one of MaryK's customers, you could have a Redirection to auto-magically put a copy of the invoice in her folder. Or, when MaryK is on holiday, you could send a copy of each P.O. to her Personal Folder for her to review when she returns.

BACKUPS
The Personal Folders can (and probably should) be stored on your server, rather than on each user's workstation. In that way, you can make certain to have a proper backup of all documents. And with the new FileStream capabilities in SQL Server 2008, you can even backup all these documents inside the database on a daily basis automatically! (No external backup program required.)

CONCLUSION
The new PDF Folder system, coupled with individual formulas for each report and form and Redirections offers an almost complete document management system for all transactions in SAFE. It makes it possible to keep and distribute hard copy to all stake-holders on any SAFE task automatically which reduces errors, makes users feel connected and helps prevent action items from falling through the cracks. This new ability, coupled with the SQL Server 2008 FileStream improvements also makes having archived copies of this work completely fool-proof. That's quite a lot of bang for such a 'small' new feature!

Til Next Time!
 

Ciaran's Corner: Health Care & Small Business
Number 387 in a series that would seem unrelated to all things Simple Accounting. But it really isn't. In part, we make products that allow you to do more with fewer people. We cut labour costs. We improve productivity. Cool. But at the end of the day, what makes your company worth what it makes is the people. Same with you: very few of you do strictly commodity items. You prove every day that the value you add to the printing or t-shirts or labels or whatever are more than worth your fees to your customers. So, despite the obvious cliché, your people are the key to your success. And for most companies, providing health care has become almost job number one.

We've bounced between three carriers in the past five years. Every year now, we fully expect to have to hunt for a new plan. That alone is exhausting. And then feeling like we really accomplished something if we keep our increase under 15%. Woohoo! It's ridiculous.

As small business owners such as yourselves we want to encourage you to put your weight behind any number of small business initiatives for real health care reform. Right now. And here is what we think it should look like.

1. There needs to be a public option. We're saying that not as 'lefties' but as business people. We've given the HMO's twenty plus years to get the job done. And they've failed. If they hadn't failed, we wouldn't be saying this. The raw fact is that, all politics or philosophy aside, the private carriers are terribly inefficient. They take a huge chunk (up to 30%) for 'administrative costs'. They do this because they have had no real pressure to do otherwise.

2. Everyone needs to be insured. We can't be subsidising 45-50 million people who don't have care. Or the 30-40 million more who have only 'catastrophic' plans. If you have a 'catastrophic' plan, you're covered for a heart attack, but not for the diabetes or bloop pressure meds that would've prevented the heart attack. That's ridiculous. You and I are cutting off our noses to spite our faces. We refuse to pay for other people because that's not 'fair' and then ending up paying for them anyway in terms of higher rates or higher taxes. We can't any longer act like we have the option to refuse to pay these costs. We always end up paying these costs so we need to bring everyone into the tent.

3. We need price controls of some kind. I don't care what 3rd hand story you've gotten from 'Rush' or whoever, but health care works very well in places like Ireland and France. Do they have the latest new-fangled technology? Sometimes not. But for the vast majority of stuff that happens to folks like us who make less than 200k per year? They have better outcomes for a lot less dough.

Here's my anecdote: A couple of years ago, I had an MRI for a busted knee in Northern Ireland. A few months ago, I went in for another set of pictures because it was hurting again. For some reason (maybe my intrinsic geekiness) at the time I noticed that it was the exact same Siemens machine as in Belfast. Reading the statement from the radiologist I noticed that: The radiologist billed $1,235 for the MRI. But the insurance company actually paid $780.

I called the NHS service in the UK and got the figure for reimbursement of the same procedure I had two years ago. In USD, it turned out to be about $200. In other words, the UK radiologist did the same work on the same machine for $200. Or, put another way, my guy here in Seattle does the same thing for almost 400% more.

My conclusions? All that stuff about 'globalisation' and 'competition' hasn't seem to have reached the health care biz. Also, pity someone who doesn't have insurance! Not only do they have to pay a huge out of pocket expense, but they have the insult of paying a premium ($1,235 vs. $780) when they already can't afford the monthly payments and co-pays! How nuts is that!

I've decided that the main reason health care reform has languished is because, like the recent financial crisis, philosophy has over-ruled basic reality. I know that many people believe in free markets with a fervor that borders on religion, but frankly, I'm sick of praying to the free-market god when the only prayers he seems to answer are those of drug makers and insurance companies. Like the credit crisis, I know it's a hard pill to swallow that free-markets didn't self-regulate, but health care seems to me to be the same kind of thing. As small business owners, we need to try something desperate to get costs under control and get people insured. For our part, we're desperate enough to consider public intervention on a grand scale. I don't see how it could be much worse than the current mess. At this point, we're willing to try most anything.

Ciaràn Marron
Technical Support Manager
cm@suntowersystems.com

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End of E-News From The Suntower, Volume XI #13