Category: Morse Data News and Events
10 Surprising Ways InOrder is Like Super Heroes
Super heroes always stand above the crowd and are favorites because they can do amazing things. Here are just a few of the many ways InOrder reminds us of these super heroes.
- Batman – Both are always available to save the day when a crisis arises.
- Captain America – Both have the determination and ability to improve. InOrder is always improving and adding surprising new tricks; just check out our blogs for some of our newest features. Our customers also get our monthly InOvation for a more thorough overview of new features.
- Green Hornet – Both have a sidekick who helps them along to solve the problems of the day. InOrder’s sidekick is Crystal Reports.
- The Hulk – Both have incredible strength and can handle unexpected workloads.
- Iron Man – Both are smart, and can conquer just about any order, warehouse, or customer challenge.
- Superman – Both are sighted in many places. InOrder can be seen operating in many places from Maine to Hawaii, from New York to Chicago to LA, all along the east coast and as far Northwest as Portland, Oregon. InOrder has even been seen operating in several European countries as well.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – All are willing to go the extra mile to help you.
- Wolverine – Both have a complex history that resulted in success and made them what they are today, with experience and wisdom that others don’t have.
- Wonder Woman – Both have amazing versatility and can adapt quickly to do what is needed.
What other super heroes can you compare with InOrder?
Click here for more ways InOrder can help with your Enterprise Management.
InOrder ERP Supports USPS Changes Prices for Priority Mail Services
USPS has recently announced price changes for its Priority Mail Service. These changes, which begin on September 7, 2014, include an increase of prices at Post Offices and postal retail outlets, and a decrease of prices for Commercial Plus and Commercial Base online shipping services.
Please obtain the new rates from USPS and be sure to import them into InOrder before September 7. For assistance importing these new rates, please contact InOrder Customer Support.
If you use the Endicia software interface to InOrder, you must update your Endicia software by August 31, 2014 to a version that supports these new rates and services. The updated Endicia software will print the correct postage for packages postmarked September 6 or earlier, as well as advanced date postage at the new rates.
If you use any other shipping interface for USPS rates, please contact your vendor for instructions.
City of Lockport to Host Golf Outing for 144 Veterans
On September 5, 2014, the city of Lockport is hosting a free golf and dinner event for 144 veterans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Activities will include dinner, golf, prizes, and gifts.
This event is in cooperation with the Lockport Veteran’s Commission, Kozol Brothers Distributing, and the Miller High Life ‘Welcome Veterans Back to the High Life’ program.
We would like to say thank you to all veterans, and to everyone involved in organizing these events! Morse Data Corporation has taken this opportunity to show our appreciation for veterans’ service to our country by sponsoring a “hole” for this outing. If you would also like to support this event, please contact the Lockport Veterans Commission in Lockport, IL.
Change your Passwords to Guard Your Information Against the Latest and Largest Theft of Credentials
As you may have heard today, over a billion records, including usernames, passwords, and email addresses were stolen from 420,000 websites. This is said to be the largest known collection of stolen internet credentials.
According to the NY Times, victims are not yet identified and most of the hacked websites are still vulnerable, and the stolen data may already be used. Is your personal information part of this collection? You may never know, so watch your credit card balances, keep track of your credit report, change all your passwords, and use a different password for each website. Here are good things to keep in mind when you change your passwords:
- Do not use group, shared, or generic accounts and passwords.
- Change your passwords at least every 90 days.
- Use a minimum password length of at least seven characters.
- Use passwords with both numeric and alphabetic characters.
- Do not use a password that is the same as any of the last four passwords you have used.
If you have additional advice for keeping your personal information safe, you’re welcome to add it here.
InOrder Enterprise Management Software Version 9.7 is a PA-DSS Validated Payment Application
We are proud to announce that InOrder version 9.7 has been successfully validated according to Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS) Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS) v2.0, and may be used by merchants who are PCI-DSS compliant.
The PCI Security Standards require merchants and service providers that store, process or transmit customer payment card data to adhere to information security controls and processes that ensure data protection.
InOrder has been successfully revalidated annually since it was originally certified in 2012. To achieve PA-DSS validation, a report documenting all software changes since the previous validation was provided to Trustwave, a PA-DSS Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) who audited compliance of the software, and submitted the report with the InOrder PA-DSS Implementation Guide to the PCI Security Standards Council. These reports are also available for our clients and their PCI-QSAs.
Trustwave is a security company that provides services and solutions that include security for compliance and risk, SpiderLabs, and managed security, as well as network, database, and application security services and products. For more information about Trustwave, please visit their website.
For more information about PCI-DSS and PA-DSS, please visit the PCI Security Standards Council website.
10 Signs that it’s Time to Shop for Order Management Software
- Your computer doesn’t have a mouse.
- Your computer still has a floppy drive.
- Your reports print on greenbar paper with tractor feed holes down each side of the paper.
- You have to run a 700 page report just to see the totals you need.
- Reports take more than a few minutes to run – in some cases, hours.
- You are frequently asked to close Windows because you are locking other users.
- You often have to tell customers to call back tomorrow because you can’t see the order they placed on the website yet.
- Your inventory is never accurate.
- The totals on your accounting reports don’t match.
- People in your office refer to their job functions as a series of numbers. For example, “I enter payments using 4,3,7 . . .”
Making Reports Run Faster When Comparing a DATE to a DATETIME in SQL
When Crystal Reports runs a report, it retrieves as much information as it can from the SQL Server and brings it back to the local machine to finish processing. Depending on the complexity of the report, this can mean a lot of processing taking place on your PC. As your database grows, you may notice that your reports aren’t running as fast as they once did. One way to speed up the running of a Crystal Report is to push as much as possible of the work down to the SQL Server.
There are a number of different ways to do this, not all of which we’ll discuss here. If you have a SQL professional in-house, you may choose to write the entire report selection as a SQL stored procedure or view and just using Crystal Reports as a viewing interface to display the results. If you’d rather keep the “building blocks” of the report in Crystal Reports, make sure your record selection is done wisely; don’t use formulas or data conversions on fields within the record selection. You can tell you’ve done this when you see most or all of your record selection in the WHERE clause of the “Show SQL Query” menu option.
Here is an easy example using dates.
For most reports that have a date selection, you only want to choose a beginning and ending date, not date/time. But, most date fields in InOrder are date/time fields. Comparing date to date/time is a data conversion.
Here is a pretty common record selection, converting the date/time of an InOrder field to Date, and comparing it to the input parameters for start and end date:
Here is its corresponding SQL Query. Note that it is not asking SQL Server to do any filtering of the results by date.
Now here is the same record selection using a SQL Expression.
Here is the corresponding SQL Query. It’s asking SQL to do the work to filter by date.
You can make your own SQL Expression to carry out calculations and conversions in the Field Explorer of Crystal Reports.
Any time you need to use a formula or data conversion for record selection, sorting, grouping, or totaling – you may want to consider building a SQL Expression instead.
Generating Income with InOrder Using Promotions
As we previously said in our article about generating income with your ERP system, promotions provide incentives to customers for ordering, or for increasing the size of their orders. For example, you might include a free item with every order over $100. Promotions can also be used to entice customers to buy from other product categories they have not tried yet, or to test prices and new product offerings.
Here are more profitable ways to use promotions:
- Use promotional shipping charges to offer free or discounted shipping for an order.
- Offer buy-one-get-one sales. These are popular ways for customers to buy two gifts for less, or give a gift while shopping for themselves.
- Encourage customers to spend more using tiered discounts. For example, give a 5% discount to customer who spend $50, 10% discount for spending $100, etc.
- Offer discounts on items related to each other when they’re bought together, such as batteries or cell phone accessories.
- Host a sale for a preferred group of customers. Send an Email with exclusive access to the sale.
Use InOrder to easily tailor promotions to your business. Keycodes, which are uniquely connected to mailing lists used in promotions, may be used with Google click-tracking. You can use this to track the links clicked by your customers from Email messages you have sent to them.
Generating Income with Loyalty Programs
Loyalty Programs continue our series on 5 ways to generate income with your ERP system. Loyalty programs give customers incentives / reasons to buy. They bring customers back so they buy more and buy again.
Loyalty programs provide benefits for both your business and your customers by generating additional income and expressing appreciation to your customers. You can reward your loyal customers by offering free or discounted items and other incentives. For example, offering points for placing orders or spending a minimum amount encourages order building while giving something in return. You can offer points for many more activities that build your business, including these:
- Each dollar spent
- Placing the first order or creating an account
- Buying a specific item
- Spending a minimum amount
- Ordering during a specific time
- Referring a specific number of friends to your website
- Joining a mailing list
- Ordering frequently
- Buying extra points
You can even offer points for sale. There are many, many possibilities. With InOrder, the loyalty earning level for an order can be changed while editing the order.
Points are earned and redeemed by placing an order. When a loyalty award is added to an order, the points are instantly deducted from the customer’s loyalty award account. You can give your customers choices, and redeem points in the form of free merchandise, dollar amounts, merchandise credit, and shipping discounts.
You set the limits. Points and awards may be handled a number of ways:
- Points can be awarded based on dollars or using resolutions based on quantity.
- Award points for the items of your choice.
- Assign earning levels based on customer types and order classes.
- Points may be manually overridden.
- Points are awarded when the order posts.
- Points may or may not expire.
- Identify the awards to offer.
Track point balances and redemptions. Reports list each customer’s loyalty point balance and point redemptions for a date range by inventory item. Customer service reps can view earning details, balances, and access orders/transactions that generated or redeemed points. Customer may view their point balance and history on-line.
Generating Income with InOrder Using Installment Billing
As we said in our article about generating income with your ERP system, installment billing can help you generate income by making your products available immediately to your customers while accepting payments over time. Installment billing can be used for subscriptions or large purchases, which customers might otherwise put off indefinitely. With installment billing, your customers can buy when they’re ready to buy. You can even link an installment plan to a promotion so your customers can take advantage of special purchasing opportunities before an offer expires. Installment billing is the perfect tool for providing your customers with a personalized and professional shopping experience.
InOrder provides an accurate and efficient payment schedule for each order using a billing plan. Simply add the payment and InOrder does the rest. InOrder Installment Billing Plans work with Customer Service orders, Order Entry orders, and with orders entered on your web store.
Setup is easy. Installment plans are defined to identify the installment plan, determine the minimum amounts, dates, payment schedule, order classes, and promotions. Associating installment plans with order classes provides templates for each of your order types. They provide default settings for shipping, handling, promotions, territories, pricing, payments, messages, etc. This gives you control and consistency, while still being flexible with the ability to verify or override specific information.
Automatically generate payment transactions and invoices. Simply run the installment processor. You can even schedule it to run automatically, and notify your customers of payment transactions with Emails InOrder.
Users with the proper security may edit installment schedules – even for posted orders. 
Statements, reports, and dunning letters support Installment Billing information display. Future installment payments are shown in the A/R Lookup window. For each customer with an installment plan, you can see how much is due, and when it is expected.
Merchandise returns are handled as efficiently as always. Issue a credit memo for the original invoice for the refund amount and receivables will be reduced.