Archive: September, 2017
Manage Sophisticated Multi-Tiered Projects and Jobs with the InOrder ERP System
Keeping tracking of costs is crucial for keeping your business afloat. Without it, you wouldn’t know what to charge your customers for your products or services. Materials, labor, even your fuel bill – these are all important considerations in pricing your products and providing estimates for services. It makes sense that your ERP system has a strong Job Cost functionality to accurately account for everything and increase your efficiency. InOrder fills those requirements, and more. Here are just a few highlights:
- Invoice billable jobs.
- Both one-time jobs and perpetual jobs are supported, including periodically billed jobs for service contracts or other on-going billable jobs.
- Create jobs from job classes, from standard jobs you have created ahead of time, or by simply copying similar jobs.
- Define unlimited job specifications by Job Class.
- Jobs may consist of one or more functions and each function consists of one or more tasks. Within each task, InOrder tracks billable services performed, labor, and materials needed/used.
- Accrue Job Services from timesheets, warehouse data capture, manual entry, or by counting various qualifying transactions performed throughout InOrder.
- Capture labor through timesheet entry, or by time capture using a barcode scanning or other data capture interfaces. Labor is categorized by job and by kind of work.
- “Reserve and order materials” function allows inventory to be reserved and allows additional inventory to be ordered and received using inventory hold access codes linked to each job, for enabling optimal inventory planning.
- Inventory depletion occurs as material usage data is entered. Kit assembly jobs are also supported. In this case, kit assembly transactions are generated directly from the Job Cost module where services provided can accrue in tandem with inventory adjustments.
For more information about managing jobs with InOrder ERP, contact Morse Data Corporation.
Don’t let your packing stunt your business’s growth!
You might not think about packing materials every day, but how a product is packed can play a big part in a customer’s perception of a product’s quality. Just as packaging can mean the difference between a customer buying a product or not, if you ship orders, also consider how important your packing material is to your customers.
Here are four simple tips to keeping your packing options competitive:
- Make your packing materials interesting and entertaining to identify your brand. Packing materials also represent your business.
- Educate your customers – Use this as an opportunity to reach out to them. It exceeds their expectations and builds loyalty. It also encourages them to place more orders.
- Advertise your brand – Often, when a package is delivered in a plain, unmarked box or simple padded envelop, it’s a missed opportunity. An unmarked package, which travels across the country, could have been broadcasting the brand it carried all along the delivery route. Inserts and catalogs are great, but using packing materials to encourage your customers to place more orders is brilliance. There are many ideas, such as printing pictures of items you sell with taglines. Because of the expense, it might be worth discussing a cost-sharing arrangement with your vendors to purchase boxes printed with their logo. Likewise, vendors might consider printing boxes with their logos and making them available to their distributors.
- Reduce waste – People don’t usually want to be wasteful, and they’re willing to recycle. Whenever possible, use materials that are easy to reuse and recycle, and your customers will take care of the rest.
As you do for retail customers, give your business clients the same attention. Packing options must be flexible and customizable. Otherwise, you might not have the capability to sell merchandise that clients (or prospective clients) request. You’re not in business to miss out on opportunities, so be sure you have what you need to deliver.
Is Your eCommerce Site Secure with HTTPS?
Did you get a message from Google about marking http pages with forms as not secure? If so, you’re not alone. Google is sending notifications that Chrome will warn users when certain HTTP pages are not considered secure. These pages include those in Incognito mode, forms, pages that accept passwords, credit cards, etc. The message from Google also includes information about how to prevent the warning by using only HTTPS pages when collecting user data.
Google’s Security Blog provides complete details about this change, including dates and updated information. It also provides links to assist developers with enabling HTTPS pages. As the Blog explains, Chrome will consider all HTTP pages as non-secure and display the following to users.
InOrder is a PA-DSS-validated payment application, and the InOrder responsive eCommerce web site automatically switches between non-secure (http://) and secure pages (https://) using a TLS certificate. So, if you’re using InOrder, your customers can be sure they’re using secure pages when entering sensitive information on your site.
Contact us if you need help making your InOrder eCommerce website more secure, or for more information about using InOrder for your eCommerce business.