BusinessWare Technologies recently completed a major upgrade to its AvailSuite line of field service software, with comprehensive tax reporting, improved user interface, and QuickBooks synchronization. The company also split the standard version of AvailSuite, with its lineup now made up of Standard and Personal. The standard version is suitable for companies with 5-50 employees due to its network capabilities. Organize customer information, manage products and/or services, schedule and dispatch staff, help keep expenses under control, handle billing, sync data with QuickBooks, and much more. The Personal version is available for micro or sole proprietorships. It has most of the features of the standard version, but with a limited number of employees. Standard pricing is $299 for a single user license (with unlimited number of technicians); The price for Personal is $69.99.

Standard and Personal versions are based on the same code base, allowing instant upgrade or quick migration between them. This supports business growth and allows you to maintain the same program and avoid staff retraining.

Help and support options

A new software product requires some time to learn even how to get started with it. AvailSuite’s Quick Start Wizard provides excellent assistance during the process of setting up company information, adding employees and customers, creating orders and invoices, entering payments, and running reports. You can choose the “Show me” tutorial movie or the “Do it for me” option. The Quick Start Wizard can be accessed at any time by clicking the “Quick Start” button on the main menu. This built-in help function and traditional Help (press the F1 button to access) are very useful. Free unlimited email support is provided for the personal and standard versions.

User-friendly functionality

The main menu provides seven general work areas: Sales, Production, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Inventory, Reports, and Calendar.

AvailSuite offers several customization features that allow users to configure navigation pane and page layouts. You can hide groups from the main menu or replace them with a small icon and see only those that are used frequently. All pages can be customized in the same way: you can add or hide columns, change their places, sort them, group data, etc. For example, the Customers view could have 1 or 21 columns.

Dirty. This is the client management module where you can click on a client and immediately view or add new orders, tasks, invoices, payments, service history and next task date, default discount, billing address, notes, etc. in a single window. The system provides excellent assistance with a workflow, for example if you add an order you will be asked about creating a task for this order and then you can schedule your appointments. The Recurring Task Wizard will help you schedule recurring appointments. You can set a very flexible recurrence pattern, such as “every third Friday of every month” or “every other week on Monday and Thursday”.

If you want to work with your customer base, you can view your recurring appointments for the next 7 or 10 days and send service reminders to your customers via email. See the unique jobs done in the last month to make the list of clients you want to call and schedule the next appointment.

All orders have a status, so they can be viewed as Draft Orders, Orders Complete, Orders Negotiated, Orders Cancelled, and Orders Backordered. You can also quickly get some statistical data on orders sorted by customers or by month.

Here you can also create invoices. As the system maintains information on all of your customers, when you create a new invoice, their billing information is automatically included and you can specify the tasks they need to pay for from the dropdown list. Invoices can be personalized. To include your company logo and configure the text that will be printed on the invoices, you must complete the company configuration form and then all this information will automatically appear on your documents. All documents can be printed or emailed to clients as PDF files directly from the system.

Production. This is a module to manage employees and all the expenses you made to provide your services. You can enter/view all information about an employee, such as name, address, photo, working days and hours, hourly rate and/or monthly salary; add a new task or time card, all in one window.
Employees can submit time spent reports using the time card functionality. This is a very useful feature for keeping track of working time so that you can always be sure that each employee’s time claim was correct.
Employees can have various levels of access. If you want your technician to view the tasks and submit their timecards, you must specify your username and password in the “System Access” tab of the employee card.

Receivable and payable. AvailSuite’s accounting features are very basic, so for more complicated accounting you need to have additional software such as QuickBooks. In the accounts receivable module you can analyze the debts of your customers, as well as all the invoices and payments sorted by customer and by month. On the Bill Payments screen, you’ll see payments to your vendors and employees and invoices from your vendors grouped by status such as Draft, Negotiated, Completed, Cancelled, and On Hold.

Inventory. AvailSuite Standard now offers support for multiple warehouse locations, with the ability to track vendors, purchase orders, and all the products you have, their location, warranty information, available quantities, price, and more. With the Vendors module, you can quickly review your purchase history, credit limit and discount offered, and everything about vendors: their contact information, grace period, terms, and price list.

This feature is more than just tracking your inventory. AvailSuite notifies you of in-stock item shortages when you save an order. You can also view a list of products, the quantity of which is less than a given threshold value. You can create and print purchase orders, track their status and payments, view purchase orders grouped by vendor or by month.

Reports. This is one of the things you need business management software for. AvailSuite provides over 40 reports on all aspects of the business, allowing owners to have key information at their fingertips. Users have one-click access to profit and loss reporting, profit and loss comparisons, payable seniority, purchase orders, or any item they need. A menu groups all available reports by various categories, such as sales reports, accounts receivable reports, accounts payable reports, inventory reports. All reports can be exported to PDF, XML, XML, Word and Excel for further modification.

Calendar. This is one of the outstanding features of AvailSuite, very flexible and easy to use. It allows you to schedule appointments directly on the Calendar screen and coordinate the workload of technicians, so you can see all the tasks of all your technicians on one screen or view only personal schedules. After there is an appointment on your calendar, you can set an alert to remind you when the appointment is coming up.

AvailSuite Calendar has full point-and-click and drag-and-drop capabilities for easy scheduling. You can move tasks from one day to another with a single mouse movement or reassign them from one person to another. Changing the size of the taskbar will change the duration of the task. Double-clicking on the task bar opens a screen with the full details of the task. On the same screen you can see all unassigned tasks.
Once the scheduling is done, you can print the daily job lists for the employees and get started.

Expansibility

Small businesses must strive to become big, so an easy upgrade path is needed. You have it. Starting with one license if AvailSuite Standard, you can purchase additional ones and AvailSute will work in multi-user mode. Adding new users is just a matter of purchasing the appropriate number of user licenses.

If you pass AvailSuite Personal, moving to another product requires little effort. So whether you’re staying small or not, AvailSuite Personal is the best way to get started. No other business management software is a better fit for micro-businesses and start-ups.

data migration

New users can import existing data (customers, vendors, services, and inventory) from their legacy software using Microsoft Excel files. A wizard makes the tedious setup process palatable. If your software cannot save data to Excel files, please try sending an inquiry about the migration process to BusinessWare Tech support team. They are currently running a promotional campaign and offering free data migration.

customization inquiries

One of the most common mistakes is that customizing the software and adding new features would be very expensive, so it is useless to ask about it. Have you ever thought that on the other side there is a software product manager who is thinking about the same new features but doesn’t add them to the software development plan because “no one asked for them”? So please ask all you want. That manager is waiting for feedback from him and will appreciate it.

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