The single biggest reason driving small business owners into expensive mid-market accounting/ERP systems is perhaps the absence of extended price management features within their existing systems. Such a move can increase business-system costs by a factor of 10x. Not having these capabilities becomes a major impediment to serving customers when the business grows and pricing experience is concentrated with only 1 or 2 persons within the organization.

AltOrder closes this gap in the business process; allowing you to stay in your Sage 50 Accounting and save $1,000's.

AltOrder is offered with a FREE 30 DAY TRIAL as well as a 30 DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE.


PRICE CONFIGURATION

AltOrder provides maximum flexibility in the creation and management of pricing rules for your business. This includes powerful search and filtering capabilities, mass updates to pricing, and tiered price-rule creation that is applied on the order based upon the level of specificity.

‘Regular’ pricing method – Pricing can be tiered by ‘Customer Group’ or ‘Product Group’, or very specific down to individual customer/item. If multiple rules are in-play, the rule with the most detail wins. For instance, ‘Customer A’ may be part of a ‘Product Group’ of ‘GENERAL’ which would normally assign a price of $10 for ‘WIDGET’. However, if AltOrder found a more detailed rule for ‘Customer A’/'Widget’ at $8.50, this would be picked up for the order line.  The ‘Margin %’ field represents a calculated value for the ‘Regular’ method of pricing.

‘Cost-Plus’ pricing method – The user can build the price dynamically at the time of order entry using the last cost from purchasing as the basis. He/she could then apply optional overhead rates based upon specific items or a higher-level product classification. Next step is to apply a freight percentage. The last factor is to apply a required margin for the item. The tiered pricing aspect described in ‘Regular’ pricing applies to this method as well. The ‘Margin %’ field represents a manually entered (or desired) profitability for the ‘Cost-Plus’ method of pricing.

Volume Discount Schedule – Represents and optional level of discounting based upon user-defined volume breakpoints. Discounts are represented as percentages for each level and AltOrder will present an expected margin at each level. AltOrder supports an unlimited number of breakpoints for volume discounts.

Item tiered-pricing by order total quantity – Merchants offering total quantity discounts for mix and match items can apply item-level tiered pricing. For instance, A customer purchasing 5000 T-Shirts, represented by 5 different Item IDs, can have different tiered pricing for each triggered at 5000 overall units. (Similar to Sage 100 ERP)

Pricing by ShipTo – Sprecial pricing by Customer/Item/ShipTo location.

Rule Comments – Comments associated with the individual rules will be readily available to the individual taking customer orders.

Unit of Measure – All pricing is applied in terms of the ‘stocking units’ of the items in accounting.

Audit Trial of Price Changes – Any price changes made within the order/invoicing screens are annotated on the pricing master record. This includes the original price, new price, user id, and date of the update. This reference is made in the comments section and is easily viewed during future orders for the item.

ORDER ENTRY/INVOICING

AltOrder’s Order-Entry user interface (U/I) has been described as being more efficient than Sage 50’s own. This due largely to the support for special pricing by customer/item (no delays in looking up external price references) and the ‘Customer Items’  fast entry format based on a customer’s past order history.  For wizards of the keyboard, use of the mouse for navigation and selection is kept to an absolute minimum.

Easily toggle between Ordering/Invoicing – The drop-down option list allows user to easily toggle between Invoicing or Order Entry modes of operation. Access to either mode is controlled by a separate user configuration screen.

Item Selection – Item selection in the Item ID column is constrained to active items only; thus eliminating any confusion with items that are flagged as inactive in Sage 50. The ‘Inactive Items’ tab provides a clean segregated view of inactive items that can be used to quickly add desired items to the order.

Filter orders/items by customer – If the mode is Invoicing, the ‘Customer ID’ and ‘Material ID’ fields can be used to further constrain the open orders by these variables.

Multiple invoices against single order – The Invoicing mode recognizes the balance of item quantities to be billed.

No order required to invoice – Users can direct invoice without having to associate an order. This is called ‘Adhoc’ mode.

Fuzzy Search Items – While on the order-line, the user may press the F5 key to lauch ‘fuzzy search’ capability for items. Any fractional representation in the ‘Search text’ field, shown in the example, will display any related options available. The example shown displays all item with the text ‘10’ in either the Item ID or the sales description.

Fuzzy Search Customers – Similar to the item search, is also available for looking up customers. This search is applied to any component of the billing contact information.

Proper Tax Calculation – Invoicing properly calculates tax based upon the sub-authorities that can be configured in Sage 50.

No multi-user Order Number conflicts – Next order/invoice number conflicts between multiple customer service representatives entering orders at the same time are avoided. AltOrder has business logic that will assign an appropriate next order number for orders placed within milliseconds of each other.

Sort by Item ID – Option to sort all line-items prior to saving the invoice into Sage 50. This supports business processes where the order of warehouse picking/packing is driven by the Item ID.

Memorized special instructions – Special instructions associated with the customer are updated on-the-fly from within the Order Entry screen. When present, they are denoted by the highly visible yellow tab in the order header information.

Tier-based Rule Application – Pricing for the selected items reflect the application of the most applicable rule. In the example shown, the user may right-click within the order line space and select to see the detail of the rule applied. Any comments associated with the configured rule displayed within the pop-up window seen.

Audit trail of price changes – Notice in comments section the pop-up detailing the price rule that any changes are date/time stamped by user.

Apply alternate price-level on-the-fly – In addition to establishing a ‘special’ price for a customer/item combination, the CSR may also create a customer/item/price-level rule that is different from the customers default price-level in Sage 50. These 10 standard price-levels appear in the ‘Price per Unit’ drop down for each line-item.

Color coding of special prices – AltOrder clearly indicates those items on the order that have associated ‘special’ prices by highlighting the ‘Price per Unit’ cell green. Line items where the ‘Price per Unit’ is an assigned price level other than the customers default price level get a highlight of light blue. This allows the CSR to easily identify all values that fall outside of default pricing.

Inventory availability flagging – The color coded ‘Quantity’ field will indicate red if there is insufficient stock for fulfilling the desired order quantity of the item.

Validation of price changes – At the time of creation, AltOrder evaluates the pricing of each line item has requires the user to verify the update to the existing rule or to indicate that pricing is for one-time only.

Fast Entry Format – Fast visibility to the customers past ordered items. The default historical window is 2 months but can be changed easily via the date picker shown. Items are returned in a a list alphabetized by Item ID.

Fast Navigation/Entry – Use the Up/Down arrows an the numeric keypad to quickly indicate quantities desired items. Tabbing with the left hand automatically moves you to the next entry field.

Indication of Included items – When finished, click the ‘Add Selected Items to Order’ button. Items that are subsequently highlighted to indicate that they have already been added to the order.

Quantity Recommendations – If your customer is not exactly sure how much of an item to order, clicking the ‘Sel’ checkbox for the item will result in AltOrder retrieving the most common order quantity for the item in the recent historical window. In statistical terms, this is referred to as a ‘modal’ quantity.