• Install the Topaz drivers that came with your signature tablet.
• If Java is not installed on the host computer, download it from Java.com.
• Install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package from Microsoft.
• Install the Lizzy™ specific Java modules, you can download the installer here.

Once you have installed the software, Lizzy™ will display a live signature window in the browser when ever a signature capture is required, it will also display a signature box on the tablet display. The captured signature will be saved and linked to the invoice or work order for which it was captured.

-Noel

But I digress…

When you are told to adjust Equity, you are being told to do that for 1 reason, and 1 reason only.  To enter/adjust your starting figures into Lizzy.  We understand that the vast majority of our clients are coming from another system to Lizzy.  Lizzy understands this as well, and as part of her functionality, has 2 items to note for inventory.  Both are in Settings > General > Company Info.  The first is “Date We Started Using Lizzy”.  This is your ‘Go Live’ date, and the date Lizzy uses for her internal adjustments.  The other is the “Initial Inventory is Complete” check box.  While this check box is unchecked, any inventory adjustments you make Lizzy assumes to be part of the inventory loading process, and adjust for the day prior to your “Go Live” date.  Once your final inventory adjustments are done, you check the Complete check box, and then Lizzy makes inventory adjustments for the day you do them.

However, this causes an oddity to your Profit / Loss Statement, and that is that Inventory Shrinkage all of a sudden has hundreds of thousands of dollars ( or more ) as balances, which of course is wrong.  Those figures need to be adjusted.  And at the same time, so do all of your other figures from your Balance Sheet, and Profit / Loss system up through your Live date.  How do these beginning numbers get into the system?  Through GL Adjustments offsetting ‘Equity’.  I’ll now pause for the exclamatory screams from all of the CPAs.

But wait, and think for just a moment.  What is Owner’s Equity/Retained Earnings account for?  It is fluctuation of all of your Business Activity for a given year.  Well, what are you doing?  You are making the biggest fluctuation you ever make by changing your business system to Lizzy.  So, in a way, it makes sense to adjust your OE/RE account as we enter our values.

But the other aspect is that because you are using a business system, you have to make adjustments separately to get values into the system.  Lizzy prevents you from adjusting her protected accounts ( Inventory, Receivables, Payables, Checking, etc ) directly from the General Ledger, as by doing so would create an imbalance between the GL and each specific subledger.  As an example, Lizzy tracks Inventory by each and every part that you tell her about.  So, if your GL says you have $100000 in item inventory, Lizzy doesn’t see $100000 as a single value, she see’s it as thousands of parts with varying values that sum up to $100000.  But, if you make a GL Adjustment to Inventory, how is Lizzy supposed to account for it.  She still see’s the same thousands of parts the sum up to $100000.  The same holds true for all of her protected accounts.  That’s why she won’t let you adjust these accounts in the GL.  You need to tell her specifically what parts are no longer there, otherwise she has to assume they are still there and have value, because, to her, she can prove they are still there being counted.

So, to enter the initial values on these accounts, you need to do so separately from the GL Adjustment form.  So, for your Accounts Payables, you go enter Expense POs offsetting OE/RE.  For checking, you enter a beginning balance, offsetting OE/RE.  Same with receivables, you enter each customers balance, offsetting OE/RE.  Inventory, because inventory adjustments are a regular part of business activity, offset Inventory Shrinkage.  So you’ll need to adjust Inventory Shrinkage into OE/RE.

However, once all of your protected accounts are entered this way, you have all of your other assets, liabilities, and equity balances you need to enter, plus the income, costs, and expense accounts since the beginning of your fiscal year.  I always suggest when doing so you do each section separately, to make it simpler to track any mistakes that could be made.  So you’d enter all your Other Current Assets as a GL Adjustment, offsetting OE/RE.  Then your fixed assets, and so on and so forth.  Naturally, you would date everything for the day before your Go Live date.  When you get to your P&L items, I always suggest breaking those down by month ( so if you started Lizzy on May 15th, as an example, I would enter my P&L items by month.  So I would enter Jan Income, offsetting OE/RE.  Then Jan Costs, then Jan Expenses.  These I would date for the last day of the month ( Jan 31, Feb 28/29, Mar 31, etc ).  By doing these this way, I can run P&Ls for the month for these months, and use them for comparisons for next year and future years.  Then, when I got to May, I would do the same thing for May 1-14, and date it the 14th.

Once you’ve done all that, and if you did it correctly, your Trial Balance/Balance Sheet from your old system should match Lizzy as of the day before your Go Live Date.  INCLUDING your OE/RE account.

Now – there will be occasions where this doesn’t balance.  This is because those protected accounts don’t match up.  Meaning your Trial Balance in your old system will be $110K, but Lizzy says $100K ( because those are the parts you told her about ).  Now at this point, either there are $10K worth of parts missing that didn’t get entered, or your old system’s Balance Sheet was wrong ( which I find more and more to be the case, simply because of how your old system tracked parts, or allowed you to make adjustments to these accounts that weren’t really right ).  To fix the protected accounts, you basically make a non-protected account similar  to the other accounts for conversion adjustments.  So, for our example, I would create an Inventory account named “Lizzy Conversion Adjustments” and put my missing 10K in there, offsetting it to OE/RE ( which should also be short 10K ).  Point being, if your Balance Sheet/Trial Balance balances in your old system, you should eventually be able to get it to balance in Lizzy for your Go Live date, based on these adjustments.

And that is what we mean by adjusting your OE/RE accounts.

( For the record – at no other time, and for no other reason – do we recommend making manual adjustments to OE/RE. )

First – why Accrual Basis?

Well – lets define for us cash-basis vs. accrual-basis accounting.  Cash basis is where income is not counted until cash (or a check) is actually received, and expenses are not counted until they are actually paid.  Accrual basis is where transactions are counted when the order is made, the item is delivered, or the services occur, regardless of when the money for them (receivables) is actually received or paid.

GAAP ( Generally Accepted Accounting Principles ) state that you MUST use an accrual basis accounting method if a) your business has sales of more than $5 million per year, or b) your business stocks an inventory of items that you will sell to the public and your gross receipts are over $1 million per year.  As most of our dealerships have no problem meeting this second criteria, we use accrual basis.

However, it has been brought up, why do we not have transactions take place when you complete a repair order, or when you complete a job on an invoice?  Good questions.  In simplistic terms, to make things cleaner, Lizzy only considers it a transaction when you cashier the invoice.  Lizzy handles it this way because we, the user, are human beings, and we make mistakes, and un-complete jobs to make changes or add parts, and frequently do so multiple times.  We also edit complete invoices that haven’t been cashiered, also adding parts or miscellaneous items to them.  To refrain from seeing hundreds of GL transactions for an invoice, because we’ve completed a job, then uncompleted it, made changes, completed it, uncompleted it, made more changes, etc… Lizzy keeps all this at bay by considering it a transaction at the time of cashiering – even if you don’t pay right now ( by putting it on account receivables ).

With this minor exception – Lizzy handles all other accounting processes via the accrual basis method.

If you want to see “Cash basis”, there are several articles you can find via Google that will explain how you can look at your accrual system as if it were cash basis ( involving removing receivables from income, and payables from expenses ).

The first step in getting Mikogo setup is to install the software, using one of the links below.

• Windows Version
• Mac Version
• Linux Version

Mikogo provides a straight forward explanation of how to install their software, so there is no point in rehashing it here.

Once the software is installed, it’s time to start a session. First thing is for all parties to start Mikogo, if you are on Windows just double click the Mikogo icon in the system tray, Mac users will need to click on the icon in there Applications folder, and Linux users will double click on the icon in the Mikogo folder that was created when you unpacked the tar file. Now, whoever is going to host the web conference will need to click the button that looks like a red power button and click Start Session, this will start a new session and provide a session ID. The host/presenter should now provide the session ID to everyone who is going to join the web conference. Next, the people who are going to join the web conference will click the button with two people in it, it is the first icon to the right of the power icon. Once the join session button has been click the attendees can simple enter the session ID, choose a name, and click the Join Session button.

Now that you know how to start a web conference, there are a few useful features that everyone should be aware of:

• The presenter can change who is presenting their screen by choosing another user from the Presenters drop list.
• The presenter can give control of their screen to another user by choosing another user from the Control droplist.
• The presenter can click the invite button, the round button with a person and a plus sign at the bottom of the Participant List, to send an email invite or copy the meeting info to the clipboard.
• Even after changing who is presenting or who is in control, the original presenter maintains full control over the whole session and can take back control at anytime.
• The presenter can pause the web conference by clicking the pause button, which prevents participants from seeing thing on the presenters screen until the presenter continues the web conference by clicking the play button.
• Participants in the web conference can click any where on the presenters screen to draw attention to an area of the screen, this will make a short lived arrow on everyone’s screen in the same spot. The arrow is color coded to the participant and has the participants name attached.

Once the web conference is done, the presenter can close the conference by closing the Mikogo window. The Mikogo icon should stay in the system tray and a new session can be started at anytime by double clicking that icon.

Firefox actually makes this very difficult to figure out but its actually quite easy to fix.

• 1) First go to the Lizzy login screen and type the first few letters of your login and see the drop list that displays.
• 2) Use your arrow keys to scroll down to the one you wish to delete.
• 3) Press the shift key and then the delete key on your keyboard and presto, its gone.

In both Chrome and Safari you can delete these from the preferences/options screen. Safari is listed in the AutoFill section and Chrome in the Person section of its config page. Not sure why Firefox needed to hide it but now you know.