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Just wanted to send a quick note to point out a few features in Lizzy you guys might not be aware of.
QuickNote1:
If you go to Settings -> Invoicing -> Defaults and look about midway down, you’ll see an option just below EPA that reads “Combine All Jobs on Workorders”. If you check this box, instead of Lizzy printing out a separate work order for your mechanics per job on the service ticket, it will print a single work order and list each job on it. Special care will need to be taken in order to track time logged on each job for billing purposes but it drastically cuts down in the number of forms needing to be printed for those that break things down a lot.
If you have any ideas of things we can do to improve this printout let us know and we’ll get them added.
QuickNote2:
Do you know that in Service, you should be printing a copy of the invoice itself to have customer sign instead of the work order? You get the same disclaimer there, but a more summarized view of what needs to be done instead of having the customer see the actual work order the mechanic is going to be working from. To print this form just create the RO and then click “View Current Invoice” on left. Choose the print icon farthest up at the top of the page. This will give you a copy with signature line and disclaimer for the customer to sign.
QuickNote3:
I’m sure most of you have already noticed that we’ve renamed the Calendar menu “Home”. The reasoning behind this is that you now have access to many different dash boards. The Calendar is there as well so you still have access to the same features as before, but the dashboards give you access to lots of summary information that you may be interested in throughout the day. See Settings -> Security -> Role Setup and then at the bottom choose Home in the list. Then choose the dashboard you’d like to give someone access to in order to add it to their view. Choose the dashboards appropriate for the specfic people so that they can see the things important to them.
If there are other things you’d like to see that we don’t already show on the dashboards, please let us know and we’ll get them added in for you.
Well, thats it for today, I’m going to start trying to do more of these to keep everyone aware of what is going on with Lizzy and new things you can take advantage of that you might not be aware of. Hope you enjoyed and we’ll talk again soon.
I would assume that if you’re reading this document then you started using Lizzy without using the entire system, or you are finishing up a conversion and are now wanting to get started using the checking account. In this document we’ll be going through how to get started using the checking account without having to go through too much work. Before we get started I want to take a minute to explain why its important to use everything from the start and not wait until later to get started.
Lizzy is a full double entry accounting system. This basically means that it is impossible to just go in and delete things and start over from scratch, because if you did, nothing would balance ever again. Imagine all those deposits you’ve been doing from un-deposited funds just disappearing. Lizzy would have to then go undo the original deposits, then would have to go undo the invoices, the inventory and so on. As a result, we have to walk through this fix logically and without deleting information. In fact, you already have quite a bit of data that is gone, so deleting more isn’t going to fix the problem. Kind of like our government thinking that if they spend more money they will somehow buy their way out of debt.
Step 1: Before we can start trying to fix our problem we need to create a new account to place all of our mistakes until your accountant has time to adjust things out. This will probably happen at the end of the year. To do this, go to: Accounting → Chart of Accounts → And at the top of the page enter the following: Select an Account type of “Equity”. Set the account number to 399.99.999 so that it sits at the very bottom of your equity section on your reports. Name the account: “Correcting Flush Account” so that your CPA will understand what it’s for and what to do with it just by looking at it.
Step 2: In this step we need to have your last month’s bank statement and access to on-line banking so that we can get an up to date list of checks that have cleared your account since your last statement.
Step 3: Now we’re going to go in and reconcile your checking account as of your last statement. Select Accounting → Checking → Reconcile. Before we start let me explain something that complicates this situation.
You need to be sure that at this point you go pay all of the payables that you’ve paid in Accounts Payable section because those hit the checking account and should have been recorded here already.
Other problems exist because as you’ve been paying your electric bill, credit cards, phone and other stuff, none of it has been recorded in the system. In order to get an accurate P&L and Balance Sheet we need to eventually get those entries made. There are a number of different ways to account for them, but I’m only going to cover one. This would be to manually create GL hits in Accounting → General Ledger and use your newly created account above as the offset. In this exercise we’re only trying to get your checkbook running, not to enter and balance every respective account.
In order to get our check book in sync, we need to reconcile everything that is in it that has already cleared your bank account. I would assume that since you have not been using the checking account in Lizzy that only deposits and AP payments are there, so this will make it easier to complete this section.
What we want to do in the reconcile section is select the “All” radio button at the top, select the checking account we’re wanting to work with and then select everything in the checkbook that is shown. Please make sure that you have gone to payables and un-deposited funds and processed all entries that have been processed. We cannot do these later because it will cause further problems that will then have to be corrected and in some cases could get quite complicated.
Step 4: Now that we have everything selected, enter the ending balance and the bank fees and date from your statement to the top right section of our reconcile form. What we’re after here is the “Amount Off By” that displays at the bottom of that section. What we are attempting to do is trick the system into giving us the correct balance at last statement so that we can pick up there and start using the account again.
Step 5: Now that we have our amount off by, we’re going to do one of two things. If the amount is less than zero we’re going to write a check for that amount. If it is greater than zero then we’re going to create a deposit for that amount. So look at your off by amount and determine which you will be doing. Write this amount down. Now click “Create New Entry” In left Checking menu, select deposit or check and enter the amount.
I would suggest that you make a note on the item to tell you it’s for Correcting misuse of the checking account so that you can start using it properly and so that you don’t forget what it was for later on. Now select our 399.99.999 account we created as the offset and save it.
Step 6: Go back to Reconcile and scroll to bottom and find the new entry we created and check it as well. Now if you scroll back to top you should see off by = 0.00. If it went the wrong way then just reverse what you did to either make a deposit or a check. If its off you might have to reinsert your bank fees line so be sure the numbers you entered earlier are still there.
Step 7: Now that we have our bank balance at last statement correct, our bank fees entered and a date for those fees, we’re going to click the “Finished” button and we’re done. Our checkbook is now ready for use.
Step 8: The first thing we want to do now is start entering all those checks that you’ve written since that last statement and usually a good place to find them would be on your on-line bank system or in your checkbook itself. We want to enter those checks into the system and select the proper account numbers for each item so that it shows on our balance and P&L statements properly. Remember: If you want accurate accounting you have to enter accurate information.
Lastly: Please visit http://www.nizex.com/Training.html and watch the videos in the Accounting Department for more information on using the different account processes including the checking account. Let us know if you need assistance with this process as its critical you perform it correctly to minimize problems later on.
Over the past few months I’ve gotten more involved in the actual conversion process between TBA and Lizzy due to the time it was taking to get dealers converted. Our original intent was to convert our dealers over from the old TBA system to Lizzy with the click of a button. However, we knew we didn’t want to bring across any junk from the old system because Lizzy is much more capable of organizing and presenting the data. We deal with these same issues when converting any system over to Lizzy and we’re very particular about what we bring across and what we don’t. We were more hopeful with TBA though because we knew it inside and out. We thought we could work through most issues and save a lot of time switching each of our dealers over. It turns out we were very wrong and in this blog entry I want to not only walk you through the process in detail, but also by using a real life example, demonstrate just how smoothly a conversion CAN go IF the proper personnel put forth the faith and effort required. Our real life example is Lifestyle Cycles out of Los Angeles, CA. We went on-site to personally supervise the conversion and because of their super pro-active participation and willingness to embrace the new processes and capabilities that Lizzy presents. If this is something you would like to see with YOUR conversion to Lizzy then please, read on.
The first step towards getting any dealer converted over to Lizzy is organizing the information they currently have in their old system and determining what we’re going to bring across and what we’re not. This takes a considerable amount of time because very few dealerships actually use 100% of any system they have. As a result they might have been ordering their parts from it, but maybe they were not receiving them. Or maybe they received but didn’t pay their bills through it. So far there has been a break down in almost every single dealership we’ve converted. This goes with TBA customers, Lightspeed customers and any other business system out there where we are gathering information from one system to move over to another.
The next issue that seems to always come up is the “I had no idea I had that.” syndrome. Dealers performing inventory and finding things they didn’t know they had, or things they thought they were out of and had more than enough. The list is long of these types of issues and a simple conversion from one system to another electronically doesn’t bring them to light. This demonstrates WHY it is SO important for a dealer to review their converted data IMMEDIATELY! If this is not done then a ton of time is wasted after the fact correcting the data while still trying to conduct day-to-day business.
I could probably go on for an hour with all the scenarios that seem to play out during these conversions but the point of this blog is to demonstrate just how smoothly a conversion from one business system to another CAN go IF the dealer’s personnel are willing to completely embrace the new processes and willing to put forth the effort required UP FRONT. The conversion itself went very quickly and the team at Lifestyle Cycles was awesome to work with. Read on so that you can judge for yourself the benefits.
The Setup:
The first and most important step to having a successful conversion is for the owner of the dealership to take a stake in what is happening. Junior at Lifestyle Cycles did just that. He stayed on top of every aspect of what was going on, stayed involved in what his employees were doing and got involved to answer his employees questions himself where he could and involved us in the process only when he wasn’t sure of how to respond. This attitude allowed him to learn the system very quickly and for his people to see the importance of what was going on. I can not stress enough just how big of a roll this played in the success of the conversion. Dealerships NOT taking this approach take forever to get converted and the end result is almost always less than great.
So from the very moment we decided to go out to California, Junior had his employees watching videos, learning the system and preparing their specific departments for the processes that were coming. He stayed in touch with us and made a list of things he saw as problems and areas we needed to address before we ever arrived onsite. He checked his parts imports to insure they came across OK and that his customers and vendors were loaded and accurate. We decided early on that no inventory was going to be brought across because he wanted Lizzy to be 100% accurate and plans had been made already to have people there with scanners to start doing inventory the day we arrived.
The point to this step is that someone at the dealership who has authority has to step up and take the lead. It is not a good thing to have 4 people in the dealership doing 4 different things with no one giving direction. These types of conversions will take forever and there is no unity in the final product. If you want a very quick successful conversion from any system to Lizzy, assign someone to be the leader and make sure that everyone gets their part done in a timely manner.
Getting Started:
Before you get started doing the conversion you should have already had your customers, part numbers, suppliers, employees and any other basic information entered into the system. This is critical to a successful conversion because it allows you to focus on entering the information necessary to run the business into the system instead of having to add a supplier every time you go to order a part.
We have also taken the time to document the specific order in which you want to enter your data and it is CRITICAL that you follow those guidelines. Plan your conversion processes around our suggestions and you’ll have a successful switch. If you don’t listen to us, well, then, prepare for the storm.
The Conversion:
The people at Lifestyle Cycles took the bull by the horns and each person embraced the change and got going. When we arrived on Saturday, everyone was prepared to work as long as they needed, and believe me, they did just that! We got started with entering their open purchase orders and they already had them printed out and ready to enter. They had them grouped together between ordered but not received and ones they had not ordered yet. This allowed them to enter them exactly as they were in the old system and got things going very quickly. Handling purchase orders in this way also insured that only accurate information was added and not old things that needed to be cleaned up. It also eliminated all the review time it would have taken to try to clean up the old system since we only brought good things across and could just ignore everything else.
After the first hour or so they were able to start entering their open service tickets and special orders. They assigned a couple people to do those jobs, and again, within only a few hours they had them all entered into the system. Once they had entered the things with open parts attached and allowed Lizzy to automatically attach them to the open PO’s they entered in the beginning, they were ready to actually get started using the system. Manually entering the information also serves as a very good initial training because instead of waiting on customers to come in to learn how to create a new invoice, they can do it on their own time and ask questions without having a customer looming over their heads.
We worked pretty late into Sunday morning and one thing that got a little frustrating that I wouldn’t suggest doing again, is that they had decided they were going to open to customers on Sunday. It was surprising how busy they were all day and it ate into some of the training we were planning to do. In the end it didn’t effect anything at all and things flowed pretty smoothly. We did decide by the end of the day though that a computer running Windows XP that only had 512mb of RAM wasn’t really a good thing, so we upgraded some of their hardware Sunday night and Monday morning. We also decided that outside of a computer that actually worked, the monitors were a pretty important aspect of being successful. They originally had tiny monitors on some of the computers and we upgraded them to larger 19″ flat screen models which made a world of difference.
In the end, these simple upgrades made the employees much happier with their day and the overall operation improved. It was very nice to see an owner willing to invest in his company to make it more successful and I’m more than positive that by the time we left his business was much more successful.
Inventory:
Junior had scheduled help with his inventory and hired a few guys to come in and scan items into hand held scanners that we then used to transfer into Lizzy. This allowed them to quickly scan entire shelves in only a few minutes and to my amazement they had successfully completed their inventory of over 6000 items in just 2 days. These people worked VERY hard to complete this difficult task! However, in just 4 days, Lifestyle Cycles went from using a system they were very displeased with to Lizzy who had all of their data perfectly stored and ready to go. It was impressive to watch.
Major Units
One thing Lifestyle Cycles does more than most any other dealership we have is sell Consignment units. I would guess about 60% of their business is dealing with Consignment units and this honestly makes things a bit easier to deal with from a data entry perspective because they didn’t have to create very many purchase orders to receive units against. However, at the end of the day, major units are one of those things you don’t have to have 100% done the first day in order to successfully use the system. As long as you know how to get them entered in order to sell one, its all that really has to happen. I’m not saying its cool to take 2 months entering them, but that a week or two is not going to kill anyone.
Just like everything else, the team at Lifestyle Cycles jumped on them and had them all entered into Lizzy within 2 days. In fact, they were actually selling bikes out of Lizzy on Sunday and had everything figured out by Tuesday when we left. Junior and his staff at Lifestyle Cycles were really on top of the entire thing; they wanted to learn the new system, they were asking questions about things that surprised us and overall just rocked it! I hope that we can take what we learned while working with these guys and apply it 1000 more times with the rest of you because it really does make a difference. As an example, on Sunday the first customer came in to by a consignment unit and instead of Junior asking me to help the employee, he jumped right in the middle and taught the employee himself and let me watch. This insured that he knew what needed to be done, showed the employee that it was important to do it right and to understand it and showed me that he’d been listening after all.
In Closing
In closing I can not stress how impressed I was that Junior, the owner of Lifestyle Cycles, dug in with the entire team and got his hands dirty. He helped enter data and wanted to make sure he fully understood everyone’s job so that he could make sure things were getting done correctly. It wasn’t at all that he micro-managed everything or that he even wanted to be involved in doing everyone else’s job, but that he wanted to understand what was involved in case problems came up. I would also argue that this is the single most important aspect to convincing the employees how important it is to do things right. After all, if the owner doesn’t do it right then why should they?
So, a special thanks to Junior and his team for giving us one of the most successful conversions I’ve ever been a part of.
Glenn
It’s been a few months since I actually did a post here so wanted to update everyone on our progress and things that are going on inside the Lizzy camp. We’ve been hard at work on a number of fronts, but I will try to just hit the high spots for now.
1) We had our first training class a few months ago and have already scheduled to have another in the next 2 weeks. We realize a lot of you have gotten busy, so we’ll probably be holding off on any further classes until the fall, but the response we’ve received from the classes so far have been a bit overwhelming. We are also looking into having more regional classes where we travel to a certain area and you guys don’t have to travel as far to participate.
2) The learning center has been updated with tons of new videos and more are on the way. The learning center is becoming more and more, the go to spot for all of our Lizzy customers to keep up with new features and to refresh on things they might have forgotten or never learned yet. We should be starting phase II on this part of our solution in the next month which will allow your employees to actually login, and we’ll be able to track which videos have been watched and which have not and provide feedback to the owners so they know the progress being made.
3) As of this Friday 4.8.2011, we will be rolling out a new Time Clock Module that will allow employees that don’t use the system, but do need to clock in and out for payroll, to be able to do just that. The module is free and there is no additional charges for the employees needing to use it. We’re also going to be working on a touch screen version of it that will allow the employees to choose their name from a list and login simply by entering their password. A future version will also support finger print devices for them to login.
4) We have released our new Rental system that includes a pretty advanced scheduling system to schedule and keep track of rentals. You can take certain units out of service when needed, sell them, convert new and used units into Rental Units and so forth. The final complete system should be going into beta next week and its looking really nice.
5) We have added a new system that will allow customers to schedule and reserve items from your own website that plugs into Lizzy’s database for your company. This is the first step in starting to develop our web store processes and getting that project off the ground once and for all. We’ve pretty much decided that we’re going to do it and have already started laying out plans to get it done.
6) The master price system has proven to be a bit more complex than we would have wished due to all the manufacturers getting a little crazy with the part numbers and processes related to supersessions and cross references. We think we’ve finally nailed down the processes that should work for everyone, and are starting beta with the system next week. Keep your fingers crossed on this one as it will be huge if we can pull it off.
7) I am going to be adding a blog entry in the next few days that documents a recent TBA to Lizzy conversion we did at Lifestyle Cycles in California. We went out there a few weeks ago to help them with the conversion and we were confident that they’d be happy when we left. However, the process and flow we encountered was far more successful than even we thought it would be, and I want to discuss the specifics about the trip so that you can all get a closer view as to what happened and how it went.
As usual, there are tons of things going on in the background and we’re very excited and happy to have the chance to be doing what we do everyday. I hope to announce something in the next month that is going to change everything with respect to a certain area of your business and if all goes well you should find out about it very soon.
Stay tuned for the latest and I promise I’ll try to write more…
Glenn
Just wanted to let those of you know that might be waiting on us to call you back that we’re experiencing some problems with the phone system at the moment. We’re working on getting the problem corrected and hopefully everything will get back to normal shortly.
Thank you for your patience.
Glenn