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Business Builder - More Features




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Accounts and Bookkeeping
Business Builder's integrated Accounting Software provides additional facilities to the standard Invoicing and payment collection facilities. The Debt Ledger, for example, is a powerful feature, allowing you to quickly identify late payments, and send statements and payment chasers to customers with unpaid Invoices.

Bank Statement
The Bank Statement facility shows all Input and Output financial amounts over any given period, showing who the payment is from or to, the date, the amount, and the balance as at that date.

Full reconciliation facilities are available in "Reconciliation Mode", enabling you to easily match your incomings and outgoings with your bank statement and highlight any discrepancies.


Cash Flow Analysis
The Cash Flow Analyser will break down your cash flow into weeks or months, showing in graphical form the amounts coming in, the amount of expenditure, and the profit or loss per period. This enables you to easily identify those periods when cash flow is a possible problem, and to instigate preventative measures before they have a permanent negative effect on your business.

Cash Flow Forecasting
By analysing repeat Orders and regular Expense information, Business Builder can show you actual amounts of expected Income and Expenditure. Combined with the ability to be able to set up "what-if" scenarios, the Cash Flow Forecaster can highlight cashflow shortages well before they become an issue.

Categories Manager
The Categories Manager enables any number of Category Groups to be added to Business Builder, and any number of Categories can be added to each Group. Categories can then be assigned to individual Contacts enabling you to describe your contacts, for example "Female decision maker in the North of England".

Chart Of Accounts
Business Builder's Chart Of Accounts facility enables you to view your accounts in a standard way, allowing your accountant to quickly see the accounts from the perspective that they are used to. Business Builder allows you to define any number of layouts for different Charts of Accounts allowing you to easily view your business's financial data in different ways.

The Chart Of Accounts is presented in a tree-structure, enabling you to drill down into a particular area of interest. You are able to drill into the Nominal Account to view the individual transactions that make up the totals that you are seeing in the Chart Of Accounts, and can drill into each individual transaction, whether it be a payment, and invoice, or even a Journal Entry.


Contact Management
Business Builder is a Contact focused management tool, and the Contact database is central to its operation. Personal Details, Business Details, Multiple Contact Addresses and Email Addresses provide the core details for maintaining and building your essential Prospect and Client database.

Credit Limits
You can specify a default Credit Limit in Business Builder that will apply to all Clients as well as different Credit Limits for different Clients.

It is possible to prevent Orders from being created for any Clients who are over their Credit Limit, and further Orders will only be able to be raised once their account has been paid.


Debt Ledger
The Debt Ledger provides total Debt Management control and payment chasing facilities. You can view aged debts by period, and those payments that need chasing are identified, allowing Payment Chasers/Statements to be created at a click of a button. These can then be mailed or emailed to clients.

The Debt Ledger also includes the ability to add interest to late payments according to the Statutory Right to Interest rules. And with the ability to be able to specify different payment chasers for different ages of debt, you can automatically send stronger worded chasers the older a debt becomes.


Diary and Task Management
The integrated Diary enables you to schedule Tasks that need to be completed, together with required completion dates, as well as keeping track of meetings with specific prospects or clients, or general events.

Diary Entries can be viewed by Day, by Week, or by Month.

Users can keep diary entries private, or make them available for other users to see, enabling them to know when their colleagues are unavailable, out of the office, on holiday, or just at lunch!


Document Manager
The Document Manager is an integral part of Business Builder and is an incredibly powerful management tool.

As you use software more and more in every day business, so you end up with more and more information on your computer. Previously when a small business grew and the amount of paperwork increased, the business would need to ensure a comprehensive filing system so that the correct documents could be located quickly and easily when required. These days it is important to have the same type of filing system available on your computer.

Many businesses do not have a comprehensive system installed, but store letters for clients in separate folders on the hard drive, emails within their email program, voice mail messages on their telephone messaging system, and faxes in separate folders.

Business Builder's Document Manager enables you to store all these different types of document in one place and to be able to see, at a glance, all documents relating to a particular client.


Duplication Guards
Business Builder has two separate Duplication Guards that keep an eye on the Contact and Business Details as you enter new data. If they identify any information that is being entered as possibly already existing in the system, then they will show you the data that already exists, and whether the new information should be entered, or whether an existing record should be used.

Each Duplication Guard can be set up to determine how strict it is in identifying duplicate data, including the use of "Sounds Like" algorithms. IntelliMatch means it is even possible to ensure that data such as "Hertfordshire University" will be found as a duplicate against "The University of Hertfordshire".


Invoice Manager
Invoices can be created automatically from the Order Manager, or can be created manually. Automated Invoice numbering maintains consecutive Invoice Numbers.

Multi-currency allows invoices to be created in any Currency.

Invoices can be printed and mailed, or in a similar fashion to the Order Manager, can be emailed directly. Again, a personalised email with the Invoice attached in up to nine different formats can be created and sent with just two button clicks. The Invoice Manager also allows you to quickly identify any Invoices that remain unpaid for a client. The Transaction Manager handles receiving multiple payments against an Invoice, as well as any Credits or Refunds. See below.


Journal Entries
Business Builder provides three different Journal Entry screens, allowing you to add different journal entries quickly and easily. The 'standard' screen allows you to specify a Journal Entry of as many transactions against as many Nominal Accounts as you like. This allows any additional accounting information to be added to your books in a standard structured way.

In addition to this, a Bank Transfer journal entry screen, and a Payroll journal entry screen are provided to allow this information to be added more easily and quickly than via the standard screen. For example, if you transfer money from one business bank account to another, you simply need to select the relevant bank accounts from the drop-down lists, the date the transaction was made, and how much it was for.


Management Accounts
The Accounts Software includes a financial summariser, which automatically produces summarised management accounts.

This information provides you with a total overview of where your money is coming from, where you are spending money, who owes money, etc.

The Management Accounts can be produced in HTML format, enabling you to send your full accounts to your accountant, which they can then view using any standard web browser. You can see an example of the Management Accounts produced here.


Multiple Users
Any number of Users can be assigned to be able to access Business Builder, together with a Password to provide system security and prevent unauthorised access to the data within the system. Where desired a machine can be setup to automatically log into Business Builder, preventing the need to log in manually.



Nominal Ledger
Business Builder's Nominal Ledger provides the core functionality that an accountant would expect to see in a accounting package. For small business users, this is something that they will not want or need to have to deal with in any great detail. Once your nominal accounts are in place (you may need to seek some advice on the best way in which to set up your nominal accounts, based on the way your business operates and the information that you want to get from your accounts) Business Builder keeps this information in the background so you needn't worry about it!

The Nominal Legder information is available to allow your accountant to see how your business is fairing.


Order Manager
The Order Manager enables you to quickly access existing Quotes, Estimates, and Orders for any given Contact, or to create new documents. Combined with the Products and Services utility, Orders can quickly be created, with multiple items per Order, item quantities, VAT/Tax Rates, and Discount amounts or percentages.

As an Order is created, and items are added, so the Stock Control system updates the amount of stock left available for the particular item.

Documents created with the Order Manager can be printed and mailed, or emailed directly in up to nine different formats, including Word and JPEG. Combined with the Email Templates facility, emailing a completed personalised email, with the relevant Order document attached can be completed in two button clicks, with no typing.

Order Document layouts can be defined using the in-built Report Manager, enabling any layout, including pictures and business logos. For confirmed Orders, Invoices can be raised at the click of a button.


Payment Terms
Default Payment Terms can be specified, such as 7 days, 30 days etc. as well as different Payment Terms for individual Clients.

Personalising
Users can specify their own settings within Business Builder, so that it operates in the way in which they want it to.

For Business Builder Enterprise, these settings will be available to the user, whichever machine they are using to access Business Builder. This enables each user to work as efficiently as possible and change the layout of screens to suit them, independantly of the physical computer that they use.


Products and Services
The Products and Services utility enables you to keep a database of the Products and/or Services that you provide, together with prices and, where relevent, stock levels. This enables Orders to be quickly and easily generated just by dropping the relevant Products or Services onto an Order without any typing.

Purchase Ledger
The Purchase Ledger enables you to keep track of all your business expenses. By using the Nominal Ledger, you can track expenses by Nominal Code, as well as analyse costs across departments. Where Departmental budgets are in place, this enables you to identify those departments that are overspending, or are liable to overspend, and take the necessary action.

All payments made can have detailed information stored relating to how the payments were made (i.e. cash, cheque, Direct Debit etc.) in the same way as all incoming transactions.

The Purchase Ledger can be viewed by week, or month, or over any specified period of time, and includes a separation of Gross and Nett amounts spent.

In addition to this, Regular Expenses can be set up within the Purchase Ledger which can then automatically be added when they become due, or can quickly be added into the Purchase Ledger just by clicking and dragging the relevant items into the Ledger.


Repeat Business Analysis
The Sales Ledger includes the facility to not only show Sales by month or year, but also includes a breakdown of those sales that are new business, and those that are the result of repeat business.

This enables you to see overall trends in your sales patterns, and how your business is growing - are you always getting new sales and no repeat business? Have your new sales dropped and are you relying more on repeat business only? You can easily view this information from the Sales Ledger.

Repeat Business Analysis is also available through the Management Accounts produced by Business Builder.


Repeat Orders
The Order Manager includes a Repeat Order facility. This allows any Order that is created to be set up as a Repeat Order, together with a Repeat Schedule. This can be used, for example, where you are charging clients an annual fee, such as for a support contract.

The Repeat Order Manager identifies Repeat Orders that are becoming due, are now due, or are overdue, and allows renewal notices to be sent to clients where required. Repeat Invoices can be generated at the click of a button.


Sales Ledger
The Sales Ledger provides an overview of actual Sales made. This information can be viewed for any month or year. Intelligent data retrieval ensures that only the data that you want to view is retrieved, maximising the efficiency and speed.

An on-screen summary shows the total sales made, together with the total amounts of money actually received.


Security
Business Builder provides users with administrator rights the ability to be able to grant or deny access to different areas of Business Builder, including the access to modules, or parts of modules. This facility not only allows the administrator to prevent a user from viewing or changing data which they shouldn't, it also means that a user will only be presented with those parts of Business Builder that are relevant to them. This make training learning the system much simpler, since the learning can be focused on only those parts of the system that they use.

Low level database access security settings allow administrators to define at the database level those tables that a user can Insert, Modify and/or Delete data from.


Target Group Manager
The Target Group Manager enables you to group your prospects and client using simple or complex criteria, based on the Categories to which they belong.

With Target Groups specified, you can ensure that any marketing information, newsletters, or any other communications are sent to the right people at the right time.


Templates
Templates can be defined in Business Builder, which combined with their in-built mail-merge capabilities mean that it is possible to generate personalised letters, newsletters or other communications without the need to type any information more than once.

Email Templates can also be specified, which are used as the basis of email messages. Again, these have in-built mail-merge facilities enabling personalised emails to be sent to multiple contacts (such as a Target Group), but the message only needs to be typed once.


Transaction Manager
The Transaction Manager enables you to keep track of all payments that are received, and to which Invoice they relate.

For each payment received, detailed information can be stored such as how it was received (Cheque, Standing Order etc). In-built Credit Card validation checks that the Credit Card Number entered is valid, helping to prevent typing errors resulting in incorrect Card numbers from being entered. Validation routines for any Credit Card can be added to Business Builder.


VAT Return Calculator
The VAT Return Calculator makes the submission of your VAT Return a two minute job! The calculator will operate on either Monies Invoiced or on Income Received, depending on your turnover.

Information is displayed on screen within the relevant boxes of your VAT Return, making it a simple matter to fill in the necessary details.

Information relating to previously submitted VAT Returns can be saved for future reference.



To find out more and to try the software yourself, why not download our demo now and find out why Business Builder is THE affordable Integrated Business Management Software Solution for the small business.

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Contact Management
Prospect/Client Database
CRM
Maintain Client Relationships
Order Manager
Process and Track Client Orders
Invoicing
Raise Invoices/Chase Debts
Accounts
Profit/Loss, VAT Returns and more...
Document Manager
Centralised document storage
Reporting
Report Manager

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