| ★ APPLICATIONS ★ BUREAUTIQUE ★ SMALL TRADER'S PACK V2.3/INVOICER ★ |
Small Trader's Pack (Amstrad Action) | Small Trader's Pack (CPC Computing) |
THE latest version of the Small Trader's Pack from SD Microsystems is a suite of utility and accounts programs. It is designed for businesses with a relatively small number of customers and stock items, and pretty unsophisticated demands. At the heart of the package are sales ledger, purchase ledger, mailing list, and stock control modules. Of necessity none is very complex, but all do a solid job probably adequate for the targeted users. There is, however, one important proviso: Sometimes you find that no matter how good a program is, you simply cannot work within its data limitations. This is really a matter for individual companies to decide. For example Small Trader tends to stick to a limit of 100 for number of accounts, number of customer addresses and so on, which may not be sufficient. This is not a flaw in the software - it is aimed at small businesses after all - but remember that you have to be small enough. Make the sale The sales ledger is essentially a record of what items or services have been sold to which customers, and whether they have paid. The program can list or print the history of sales made, a statement of sales for any one customer, a financial summary of incomings and sales for any month - or for the whole of the file - and a summary of the money owing, again by account or in total. It can also automatically calculate VAT paid on eligible items. There is provision for cash sales to customers. who do not have an account number. Up to 10 definable categories may be assigned to each sale, such as mail order or credit card sales, and these can be analysed to show trends in your business. The purchase ledger has an almost identical range of features, designed to record things that you have bought from other people. The mailing list keeps track of customers' names and addresses, and allows you to produce labels for mailing statements and so on. Stock control, taken care of by another module, keeps track of the items you have for sale, who supplied them, and how much they cost and sell for. The total cost and sales value of any or all items in stock can be quickly calculated. Minimum stock quantities can also be defined, so you get a warning when you need to reorder, and the re-orders required can be listed by supplier or in total. Send the invoice It is possible to buy the Small Invoicer separately, but is very much cheaper as a joint purchase with the Trader's Pack. It duplicates some of the functions, most notably the sales ledger, disc utilities and mini-calculator. Its primary use is - no surprises here -the preparation of invoices and statements (a statement lists all purchases and payments attributed to any one customer account). Credit notes can also be produced very simply. Invoices are laid out attractively, and the program includes useful features such as automatic multiplication and totalling of the items listed. My main quibble is that the allowance of five lines for customer addresses is not enough. The invoicer can be used in a laborious no-frills way if the required information is entered from scratch each time, and this is in fact necessary for cash customers. However, the clever bit is that the program can use files made with the sales ledger to update customer records automatically, or to look up the appropriate account names when given the account number, and so on. This is a nice feature, but if anything it highlights the deficiency of the integration in the other modules. One of the major advantages of most, more ambitious, accounts and stock control suites such as those available under CP/M, would be the automatic updating of all records. Even so, I was quite impressed with the range of features and the very competitive pricing. Once I became used to the program's quirks it was all very easy to operate, but unfortunately there were plenty of quirks there to get used to. Not without warts The program at first refused to load on my, admittedly ancient, CPC464 because of the use of some commands from the revised 664/6128 version of Basic. Having to edit the listing before you can run the software will not go down well with busy traders. A major strength claimed for the pack is its menu-driven simplicity, and the fact that a busy user does not have to keep referring to a huge manual. Unfortunately the documentation does not give as much support as I would like. For instance, at one stage you are prompted for a product description. The documentation reveals that this can be up to 12 characters long, but in practice the program lets you type for several lines and then rejects them with no message explaining why. It would have been simple to write the program in such a way that it allowed you to edit a 12-character field. At other times irritating computer jargon is used rather than plain English, such as ENTER FOOTER$(2). There are other examples I could quote, but you get the point. More thought and a bit more work would solve all of these problems and produce an excellent product. Among the utilities are a phone book that can hold name, number and a line of notes, a simple calculator, and an imperial/metric conversion utility, which is a nice touch. Small Trader's Pack is written in Basic. The days when programs could be sold on the strength of being written in machine code are fortunately over, largely because most of them now are. I'm certainly not an anti-Basic snob, after all it is probably better that an expert in accounting learns the rudiments of programming than that an expert programmer learns only the rudiments of accounting. Small Trader's Pack provides a lot of features for your money, but they are all very simple and aimed at undemanding users. More advanced stock and accounts packages are available under CP/M. They cost more, and often need two disc drives, but buying a utility that does not do what you want is false economy. CPC COMPUTING |
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