Put Cash Back In Your Pocket - Take Charge of Your Accounts Receivable

“Our company was struggling. Although we had plenty of customers, our accrual based accounting system showed revenues were strong and we were making a profit, we were still struggling to pay our bills. We were burning out worrying how we were going to pay our vendors.” writes Rosanne Wiesen, a Tailwind client.

In a tough economy you can’t afford to be your customers’ bank. We want to share practical, proven ways of putting cash in your pocket where it belongs, so we've written a White Paper on how to take charge of your accounts receivable.

Wiesen manages a trucking company, NW Shippers, Inc., in Washington State and has first hand experience with how managing A/R can make a huge difference to cash flow and the bottom line.

Read the White Paper free of charge on our website to see step by step how NW Shippers became more profitable.

Roadcheck 2009

Please be aware that the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance will be having their annual 72 hour inspection blitz from June 2nd to 4th in Canada and the U.S. Make sure that your drivers are keeping their logs and mechanical inspections up to date.

http://www.landlinemag.com/todays_news/Daily/2009/Feb09/020209/020509-07.htm

What's New in CMS 5.4

It's been almost a year since 5.3 was released, and we think you'll be excited about what we've got in store with 5.4.

As always, the complete change log is available in the Tailwind Wiki, but here's a summary of the most significant improvements:

• Added integration with Crimson Logic, providing numerous new enhancements to our ACE offering including:

• Ability to view status of ACE manifest from within CMS
• Ability to request sec 321
• Ability to clear using an IIT bond #
• Ability to request FDA inspection
• Ability to submit a brass line release

• Added integration with Internet Truckstop (Load Posting)

• Added ability to specify multiple receivable charges on a quote

• Free-form dimension fields have been replaced with cubic dimensions (length, width, and height)

• New, more flexible EDI configuration system that allows Tailwind Staff to create custom mappings for clients who exchange EDI messages with customers or vendors

• Most comprehensive testing of any CMS release. We have a dedicated testing staff who have checked these improvements and new features thoroughly, ensuring that 5.4 is the most stable version of CMS ever.

For further details or assistance with getting 5.4 into your hands, shoot us an email or give us a ring today!

Tickets, Please?

The fact that many of you know our entire support department by name is a good thing in my books. It seems rather rare in this day and age to immediately recognize the voice on the other end of the support line, much less recognize it as something other than the computerized voice of an automated switchboard.

For me, the human touch is imperative, and to that end we make great effort to ensure all of our calls are answered by a live person.

All that being said, there are times I call support and I know what my issue is, or have already reported it and am simply looking for a quick status update. In cases such as these, having to listen to Liam chat enthusiastically about his weekend while he searches for my ticket might not be what I want to hear at 6.30am on a Monday morning.

(No offense, Liam!)

So, there has to be balance - and in the same way that I value the ability to speak to the friendly teller, I place equal value on the ability to complete my banking online.

To that end, we have begun thinking about ways in which we can enable and empower you - the loyal customer, and make your interactions with us as pleasant and efficient as possible.

Some of you may have noticed in calling support or corresponding over email the use of 'ticket numbers'. These represent the unique tracking numbers assigned to the issues or features you have reported or requested. Up until now, these numbers have ever only benefited you indirectly, in that they ensured your issue was tracked through our business all the way to resolution.

Based upon customer feedback and internal suggestion, we have decided to begin sending these ticket numbers by email whenever an issue is reported, for quick reference when calling in future, or for managing the ticket online - (Did you know you can add, edit and prioritize tickets online!? I'll be writing about this topic in my next article...)

- The idea being of course being that you get served faster when calling, have better tools for managing your existing support issues, and only have to hear about Liam's weekend if you ask!

So what's the moral of the story? Well, don't be shy about demanding a little more out of our already exceptional service - especially if you know your ticket number.

Cheers

Invoice and Bill Adjustments

Perhaps the biggest change in CMS 5.0 is the way that adjustments to invoices and bills are handled after posting. These changes were designed to prevent problems such as discrepancies between CMS and your accounting software (caused by changes to invoices and bills after synchronizing), and invalid payment situations (such as payments applied to different customers or vendors than their related invoices or bills, and overpayments with no audit trail).

In order to make a change a posted invoice or bill that affects accounting, users must now explicitly choose "File-->Modify" before they will be able to make the change. Fields that are synchronized with accounting or affect financial reports are considered "restricted" fields. If you change any restricted fields on a posted record that has been synchronized to accounting or paid, then the current record will be reversed, and an adjustment record will be created. If you only change non-restricted fields (such as the invoice received date or invoice postmarked date on a bill), then the record will be directly modified and no adjustments will be created.

As an example, if a user opens posted invoice "373" that has been exported to QuickBooks, and changes the total amount from $1000 to $1500 and clicks save, you will end up with the following in your CMS database:


The advantage to this functionality is that to export these changes to accounting, CMS simply needs to export two new invoices, and any past invoices that may have occurred within a closed period will not be modified. If we make a second adjustment to this invoice on Feb 1st, and change the amount to $800.00, then the following will be the result:

Notice that CMS leaves you with an audit trail of all changes to this invoice after posting. Furthermore, if you attempt to open invoice 373, CMS will open the latest version of the record automatically (in this case INV-373-A2), so you always know what the total invoice amount is.

We feel that this change is one of the most significant of our 5.0 offering, and many customers who have switched to 5.0 have found that it significantly reduces synchronization errors and inconsistencies between CMS and their accounting software. Please call us if you have any questions about this change and one of our friendly customer service staff will be happy to explain further.

Change can be a good thing!

How familiar does this sound: You've found a fantastic software package that you love - it saves you time, keeps you organized, and even makes formerly mundane tasks fun. Then they release a new version - and everything's different. They've moved all the menu options, the settings have completely changed, and what used to take 5 minutes now takes 30 minutes of tedious searching through menus and configuration settings for what you need.

Many people are naturally resistant to change, but even technophiles among us can sometimes be heard saying "the last version was WAY better". At Tailwind, we know that we've caused some of you to say this about CMS in the past, and we want you to know that we've been listening.

In the past year, Tailwind has made a number of policy changes to ensure that new versions of CMS are as bug-free as possible, and do not change existing functionality. Here's what we've done:

1. Rigorous Pre-Release Testing: We now have dedicated testing staff who check all candidate builds before they are released to customers. Changes and new features are the focus of this testing process, but all standard functionality is also tested extensively. The build is not released unless they sign off on it.
2. Automated Testing: We are in the process of separating business logic code from the user-interface in CMS. This has a number of benefits for customers, including the fact that we can create automated testing functions for critical functionality within CMS. Once these automated "unit tests" are in place, all new builds of CMS will need to pass these tests (in addition to the manual tests done by our staff) before being released to customers.
3. Leaving Current Functionality As-Is: If we feel that certain functionality should be changed to improve the way it works, we create a system configuration flag which defaults the system to the old functionality. A recent example of this is the "Dispatch: Allocate dispatch revenue based on mileage only" setting. When enabled, CMS uses a much more intuitive algorithm based on mileage only for determining how much revenue should be displayed when multiple trucks or carriers are moving a single load. However, to prevent your dispatch revenue figures from suddenly changing unexpectedly, we made this a configuration flag. Check your configuration settings regularly after updates to look for new settings. HINT: Any settings that are set to values other than what we recommend will be bold in your system configuration.
4. Change Notification: Whenever a stable build is released, if it contains a bugfix or feature your company requested, we'll send you an email to let you know that the new version is available for download from the customer portal. Furthermore, you can now click on What's New to see a complete list of all changes between your current version of CMS, and the new version.
   

The result of all of these changes is that Tailwind is now releasing less frequent, higher quality builds. We think this is a good thing, and we hope these changes make the upgrade process a lot less stressful.

Ability to search for suppressed records in CMS 5.3.38

A common error customers encounter when exporting invoice and bill payments to QuickBooks is "Related invoice/bill does not exist in accounting." This is usually caused by the fact that someone has suppressed an invoice or bill for one reason or another. Until now, determining which records have been suppressed from exporting to accounting has been very difficult. So, to help with this, we have added the ability for users to search for suppressed records from the receivables and payables module.

After clicking on the search icon (binoculars) from the receivables or payables module, the search form now includes the option to search for suppressed records. This can greatly help users to reduce errors when exporting to their accounting software.