Society Manager is a complete administrative information and accounting system integrated into a single seamless package. It includes unparalleled information management capabilities, combined with an advanced accounts receivable module and an equally advanced accounts payable module. Information from both of these modules flows through to the general ledger module. The program tracks time expended by staff and volunteers on projects and has a substantial sales order entry and inventory management module. Like AISA, it has a touch-screen cash register module built in.
Society Manager also manages events like conferences and seminars with a complete conference/events management subsystem.
Performing operations within one of these specialized subsystems will often cause operations within other modules to be executed automatically.
For example, when you register an individual for an event, you are not only adding their name to the list of registrants, you are also creating an accounts receivable or cash transaction for the applicable registration fee and an entry in the badge names file for generating badges.
Not all businesses are the same. Some have high-volume operations where a cash register-like interface is the best way to move transactions along. Others need more information and have a specialized inside sales function to handle sales orders. Still others have a low-volume environment where the sales order function is used intermittently by staff who have other responsibilities and who want convenient access to the sales order function without having to drop everything else that they're doing.
We don't know exactly which type of operation you have, nor which type you'll
have three years from now. Therefore, we include all three types of interface
to the sales order system, and let you decide which one to use on each of the
workstations in your system.
Society Manager has a to-do list built in.
No surprise there - any self-respecting system in this class will have a to-do list.
However, we've enhanced our to-do list beyond the norm. To-do lists have alarms and
alarm items have a field to indicate a user-defined function that executes when
the alarm is triggered. One of the functions available in the system is called
ExecuteReport which can execute any user-defined report in the system. Report forms
can do much more than simply print things on a piece of paper. They can write
information to a file, create transactions (event registration, sales order or ledger),
read information from a file, even communicate with any other computer on the Internet!
If you have a report defined which collates all the sales information from a remote
office or other site and writes it to a summary file and then sends that file to an
Internet server or an email address, and you have an alarm item set to execute that
report at 3am each day you've got an automatic sales reporting system implemented.
With this simple functionality, the possibilities are endless.
Communicating on the Internet in Windows is done via a mechanism called a socket. Society Manager knows all about sockets, which means that it knows how to talk to (and listen to) the Internet. In fact, you can designate a user code for the automatic Internet Server process. When this user code is logged on to a specific machine, that machine becomes a server on the Internet. Each time the machine sees data from the Internet, it calls a user-defined report. That report can use standard string manipulation functions to decode the contents of the data and extract messages from the data and then:
Society Manager is designed to give you maximum control over the information in your organization. You know what information you need to track and how you would like to use it. We give you the ability to track absolutely anything, find it and report it. If you need to track thousands of different dates or numbers for individuals or organizations, you can. You can create entire databases of information that relate to individuals or organizations. Conversely, you can relate individuals or organizations to each other, and to other entities that you define.
You can define your own data entry screens (unlimited numbers of them, in fact) using the data elements you have defined or using our pre-defined data elements. In the screen definition you can do simple validations of a field like comparing the data entered in the field to the contents of a table or ensuring that the user entered a valid date -- but you can do much, much more than that. You can define a field in a user-defined screen which is validated by a user-defined form which extracts the information in that field, parses it and executes an unlimited number of steps based on what data exists in the field. We've used this technology to automate membership renewals where the operator simply scans in a bar code printed on the member's renewal form and the system finds the member's record, records the accounts receivable transaction for the membership fees, updates the subscription expiry date for the publication, modifies (or confirms) the class of membership chosen for the next year, and prints a receipt and/or a membership card, all automatically, and all in less than a second.
You can search the database for any combination of your own data elements, our pre-defined data elements, or any of the inventory, accounting or event registration transactions that exist in the system. More than that, you can search the database for people that don't have a particular sales order or event registration or don't have some other characteristic.
You can create your own reports which can not only generate information on a piece of paper, but can perform unlimited numbers of calculations on your data, create new data elements and change or delete existing data elements in the database, create accounting transactions, create and send images of the report by fax, create and send e-mail messages and much, much more.
Society Manager is unparalleled in capturing information on relationships between individuals vis-a-vis other individuals or organizations. Some users (churches, clubs with family class memberships) will need to maintain information on personal relationships such as familial relations - person X is related in some fashion to person Y or person X was sponsored by person Y. Others will need to track commercial relations - a corporation has a head office at one location, factories at several others, sales offices at still others. The same corporation does business through various manufacturers representatives, stocking distributors, wholesalers and retailers. All of these organizations have key personnel at each of these locations, and you need to track who the personnel are, how they relate to these organizations and produce a directory listing all of this information (complete with table of contents and index, of course).
Society Manager does all this simply and easily by allowing you to define data elements called pointers that create relationships between records. You can follow pointers in the records with a click of a button. The report definition language included in Society Manager knows all about pointers, so you can create reports that reproduce all of these relationships for directories and related materials.
This may be heresy in some circles, but Society Manager are deliberately designed to make maximum use of the keyboard. A mouse is an ideal instrument for graphics programs, and has some facility in a word processing environment, but it really gets in the way in an information management, transaction processing system. Since most data entry in a database program is done via the keyboard, we designed the program so that your hands can always stay at the keyboard. You can use the mouse to do anything you can do from the keyboard (except type in names and addresses, of course) but we deliberately didn't use the cute icons that so many programs use. Instead, we use buttons which have a label, a pop-up description and most important, a keyboard accelerator. This eliminates removing your hand from the keyboard to reach for the mouse and returning your hand to the keyboard over and over again, which saves a rather remarkable amount of time.
More heresy. Virtually all accounting systems have a separate vendor file. We don't. What we do have is a master list of all the organizations and individuals with which your organization does business, in any capacity. Each individual or organization in the master list has an accounts receivable ledger, an inventory sales order ledger, an events registration ledger, and an accounts payable ledger. In the real world, you issue cheques to customers (for cancellation, returned item or overpayment refunds) frequently enough that generating a cheque for a customer is one of the major headaches with computerized accounting systems. With Society Manager it's a snap. All you have to do is to issue a credit note, and indicate that the credit note credits the accounts payable control account, and it's done! The refund cheque will be printed in the next cheque run.
This same functionality means that there are no duplicate records where an individual or organization is both a customer and a supplier, and also that you have the same infinitely definable data management and query capabilities for your suppliers as you do for your customers.
You can restrict access to all master list, accounts receivable, accounts payable, general ledger and administrative functions to selected users on a function-by-function basis. You define which users have access to what functions. In the case mentioned above, only users with accounts payable access rights can create the credit note that generates the refund cheque. This approach maximizes efficiency but maintains security.
We allow you to restrict access to any set of individual and organization (i.e. master list) records to selected users (with up to 100 different levels of access).
Some organizations sell time. Society Manager allows you to create personal service inventory items that track not only the amount of time sold, but the specific individual who provided the service. The time is recorded in the sales order (which is recorded in the customer's master list record) and in the time management table of the master list record of the individual who provided the service. Pointers both ways allow you to view the other record at the click of a single button.
Staff time is a resource we all know is essential to our success, but how many of us know how much time is devoted to different activities? With Society Manager you can record the amount of time individual staff members expend on the projects you have defined, and then generate summary and detail reports arranged by project.
To be successful, you need to know how successful each of your projects are. Society Manager allows you to define an unlimited number of projects. Each transaction, event registration and sales order can be tagged with a project identification. Once you've done that, you can generate an income statement for any project you've defined.
In fact, if you enable fund accounting when Society Manager is installed, transactions are balanced by project. This means that you can not only generate income statements by project but also generate balance sheets by project as well.
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