I’ve had quite a few people asking what some of the key differences are between Lizzy™ and the older TBA business system and I wanted to take a few minutes to list as many as I could think of.

• Bin Locations – While TBA would allow you to enter more than one bin location into a field for tracking, it didn’t actually track the inventory amounts at each location. In comparison, Lizzy™ will allow you to create your bin locations and then track actual inventory values at each location.
• Special Orders – When selling an item on an invoice, TBA placed any special orders on the purchase order immediately. The problem with this process however, was that some dealerships would place orders for parts that hadn’t actually been paid for yet. Lizzy™ won’t actually place the parts on the orders until after the customer pays. This works for both Internet, Catalog and General invoices. Service Tickets still work the same way as TBA in that it immediately places the order.
• Inventory Adjustments – If you sold a part in TBA that you couldn’t find on the shelf, there were a few steps involved in correcting the problem and continuing the sell.  With Lizzy™, we’ve introduced a new verification system that actually allows the sales person to correct inventory discrepancies on the fly with no effort.   Those items are then tagged for the inventory department to research and verify.  If they find the parts and enter them into stock, Lizzy™ will actually pull them off the order and place the newly entered parts onto the in stock pull form to have them added to the customers bin.  She’ll also email the customer to let them know their parts are ready for pickup.
• General Flow – No one could ever say that TBA didn’t give you the world when it came to tracking and maintaining data.  The problem we faced was that it tracked so much stuff that learning to properly use the system took weeks of training.  When designing Lizzy™ we understood two important things.  The first was that we needed to be able to track even more information than TBA.  If we’re going to present our customers with the next evolutionary step towards running their business, it couldn’t just be by doing things differently. The second thing we understood was that the program needed to better manage the needed data and only prompt users for it when needed.  So with Lizzy™ we’ve introduced a new wizard system that learns as it goes and changes future questions based on previous answers.  The flow of creating an invoice is not just to create an invoice, but to prompt for specific information along the way and only the needed questions for that type of invoice.  This enables us to collect much more data but to present it in a way that is easy to learn and impossible to enter incorrectly.
• All or Nothing - Of all the things we’ve accomplished with Lizzy™ this is probably one of the most important.  We’ve completely rewritten the way things are done at the database level so as to make sure that 100% of your General Ledger, Invoicing, Inventory Control processes are all done or NONE are done.  The system actually checks to make sure all GL Entries are successfully written to the database before it considers anything finished.  If anything at all messes up along the way, 100% of the transactions will be reversed and placed in its original configuration.
• Security – Lizzy™ encrypts 100% of the network traffic between her and your computer systems.  This allows you to access your data from any where at any time  and on any network, and be comfortable knowing your information is secure.
• Platform Neutral – Lizzy™ has no software to install and will run on any operating system and most all hardware, including your cell phone.
• Warranty Claims – With TBA you were limited to doing warranty claims per invoice.  This caused problems with some vendors that needed a separate warranty per job.  With Lizzy™ you will be able to create warranty claims that link to the individual jobs on the service ticket instead of the invoice itself.  This allows you to have any number of warranties linked to a single ticket.
• F & I (Financing) – Don’t waste time trying to get an interface to work for F & I.  Lizzy™ has a built in F&I module that is actually part of the invoicing process.  The questions you answer during the creation of the quote or invoice become part of the final F&I deal as it progresses.  The coolest part of all is the information is actually part of the invoice, not some separate module somewhere.  This completely eliminates transferring information back and forth and removes the possibility of something getting messed up in the process.  The parts department is actually adding parts to the deal itself which works just like any other invoice that they’ve added a thousand other parts to.
• Major Units - TBA tracked units based on their type and where they entered the system.  Lizzy™ tracks all units in a single location no matter what their type.  She tags each to know what they are such as New, Used, Consignment or Service and then stores them all in one spot.  This enables you to seamlessly track the entire lifespan of a unit with no effort.  You can click on any unit and see when you sold it, when it got serviced, when it was traded in, who bought it later and how many times they’ve had it serviced.  You can even see how many miles were on the bike at each service.
• Service Tickets –  With Lizzy™ you actually attach one or more units to the service ticket, create jobs for each one and then start work.  Yes, I did say add more than one unit to a service ticket!  The coolest part of all is how the jobs are attached to units, labor and items attached to Jobs and then how the entire thing links together  to print out a nice uniform service ticket for the customer with all parts and labor attached to their respective jobs/units.  You can even schedule the jobs to be worked on by mechanics and have them log their time directly to the system as they work.

I plan to come back here from time to time and update this entry.  I know I haven’t touched the surface with all the differences between the two systems but hope this will give you a good starting point to consider.

Thanks for reading,

Last Updated 12.31.2009