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ONTARIO’S HARMONIZED SALES TAX
HOW WILL IT AFFECT YOUR MINOTAUR SYSTEM? |
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You may have heard about the government’s plan to harmonize the Province’s sales
tax with the GST. The harmonization will take effect on July 1, 2010.
We have looked into the government’s proposal and we believe that Minotaur’s current
HST capabilities will work with these changes. Minotaur currently has several customers
in Provinces with harmonized sales tax (HST). These customers have been using
the HST feature without any issues for several years. There may be some fine tuning
required for some of the reports but we believe that these will only be minor changes.
We will continue to stay on top of the proposed changes and will notify you once we get
all the details. In the meantime, your Minotaur account manager will be more then happy to address and
questions or concerns you may have. |
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| Using Excel to Manipulate your Minotaur Data |
Minotaur will be offering a 4 hour course which will take an in depth look at data manipulation in Excel, the
various tips and tricks for using Minotaur and Excel, formatting reports and the use of formulae in Excel. It will
also offer an overview of importing your data back into Minotaur. The course will be held on Tuesday May 26
from 9am to 1pm and is open to all Minotaur Users. The cost of the course is $100 per person. To register
please contact Michelle Stamper at 905-458-7575 Ext. 110 or email michelle@minotaursoftware.com.
Unable to attend in person? We are pleased to offer our out of province customers the option to take any of
our training courses remotely. Minotaur customer Tileco Inc., located in Hawaii, has taken several training
courses remotely. Melissa Singson of Tileco has found it to be “a cost effective way for those looking to take
a course”.
In order to be able to take the course remotely you will need access to 2 computers, both with internet access.
The first will be used to see the instructor’s screen and the second for the hands on portion which will
allow you to do the activities in our demo system.
Remote connections are limited so if you are interested in taking this course remotely make sure to register
early to ensure a spot. |
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| INSIDE THIS ISSUE |
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| Facility Scheduling Feature |
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| Several years ago Minotaur developed a mechanism for scheduling loading dock facilities. That mechanism allows
you to create facilities in your system and schedule events to occur on those facilities. In particular, you can
schedule the times at which trucks will show up to pick up sales orders or deliver purchase orders. |
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The system can be configured to automatically access the dock scheduling mechanism whenever a sales order
or purchase order is entered or edited. Alternatively,
users can manually access the dock
scheduler without needing to access orders.
The facility scheduler allows the user to view
the schedule in several different ways. To get
an overall idea of how active their facilities
are, the user can view the monthly scheduler
which will show them each day of the week
and the percentage of facilities that have
been scheduled for each day. |
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If the user wants to see all the facilities
scheduled for a particular day, they can use
the Daily Scheduler which will display the usage of facilities for each hour in the day in 15 minute increments.
Finally, if the user wants to see yet more detail, they can use
the Hourly Scheduler which will display the order reference
number associated with each 15 minute period in the selected
day for each facility.When a user is prepared to schedule an event, they can access the Event Scheduler. This screen will allow them to specify a sales order or purchase order to schedule for a specific facility. |
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| When a user is prepared to schedule an event, they can access
the Event Scheduler. This screen will allow them to specify
a sales order or purchase order to schedule for a specific
facility. If they access the Facility Scheduler from a Sales Order
or Purchase Order, the system will default to the order from
which they accessed the scheduler. It is also possible to schedule
the facility for an event that is not driven
from a sales order or a purchase order. |
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| They can then specify the date and time for
which the facility will be scheduled. They can
also add comments. Again, if the Facility
Scheduler is invoked from an order, the comment
will default to show the sales order
number, the trading partner, the due date of the order and the ship via for the order. A second comment provides
space to identify further details such as truck numbers or contact information. The system automatically stores
the code of the user that scheduled the event.
If the event the user schedules conflicts with other events in the system, the user will be warned of the conflict
and the identity of the user with whom they are conflicting so that they can resolve the conflict.
If you would like more information or are interested in receiving a quote for this feature please contact your Minotaur
Account representative. |
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| THE POWER OF CUSTOMER ATTRIBUTES |
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| Need to store additional information about your customers for analysis or tracking? Minotaur’s new Customer Attributes feature
gives you absolute flexibility for storing information such as dates, numeric values, dollar values and more.
The new Customer Attributes feature is similar to our Item attributes which was developed some time ago allowing you to add
what amounts to additional fields to the item master screen without having the program modified. The advantage of attributes
is that you can define them and name them as you like.
The Customer Attributes feature works the same way as the Item attributes, it consists of a new program which is added to
the customer menu to update customer attribute definitions. In this screen you would define the attributes you wish to use
and the nature of the attribute. The screen would look somewhat as follows.
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| Where the code is a 6 character code identifying the attribute, the name is the name that appears on any look up list. Here
you would enter something like Customer Start Date. Type defines the nature of the attribute DTC indicates that the possible
value is a date. The length indicates the length of possible values. Present indicates that this attribute be added to any customer
during an add or edit while default defines the value to be assigned if the system adds the attribute. Other possible
values of type are; |
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ANY – Any text INT – An integer
DLR – Dollar amount NUM – A number
YN – Yes or No (Y or N ) |
INT – An integer
NUM – A number
UP - Text forced to upper case |
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For example you could create an attribute called CREDIT as type NUM and enter the customer’s credit card information.
The customer attribute provides a lot of flexibility.
Attributes can be used to control actions within the program and they can also be used on the customer selector screen in the
field relation. For example field CDATE relation GT value Jan 01, 2009 would filter all customers with attribute CDATE greater
then Jan 01, 2009.
There is also an update customer attributes screen which can be used to select an attribute and a range of customers and
enter the values of that attribute.
This means that you do not have to edit individual customers to change or assign the attribute.
If you would like more information or would like us to prepare a formal quote for adding this new feature to your system,
please contact you Minotaur account representative. |
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YOU ASKED FOR IT. YOU GOT IT.
MINOTAUR’S NEW REPORT REFRESH BUTTON |
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At Minotaur we are always trying to find new ways improve are users experience with their Minotaur system. That’s why
your suggestions are important to us. One of our customers recently suggested
that we provide a mechanism to easily refresh reports without having to rerun the
report and re-enter all the inputs.
Minotaur is pleased to announce the addition of a Refresh button to several reports.
Once a report is generated, if left open, you can now press the Refresh
button and the system will re-generate the report using the exact same inputs as
were used when it was run originally. For example, if you ran the Customer Unpaid
List (CRU) report and left it open then later pressed the refresh button, any
new transactions, such as payments or new invoices would be included.
We are currently in the process of adding the Refresh button to several reports. If
you have any suggestions of reports you would like to have the Refresh button
added to please let us know. |
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| Win a $50 gift card of your choice |
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Minotaur Word Search
Find all the words listed on the right and you could win a $50 gift card to any one of the above stores. Circle all the words in the word search and fax your entries back to Minotaur by May 29, 2009 and your name will be entered in our draw.
Good Luck! |
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Fax your entries to 905-458-5585 or email to michelle@minotaursoftware.com by May 29, 2009.
Name: _____________________ Company: ___________________ |
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| Want to go paperless? |
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| If you would prefer to receive this newsletter by email, or if there are others in your office who would like to receive an emailed copy of
this newsletter, please let us know. |
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| Congratulations to our Winner |
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Congratulations to Jocelyn Castonguay of Dryvit Systems Canada for winning
last month’s ‘Spring is in the Air’ contest.
Dryvit is a manufacturer of exterior insulation and finishing systems. Jocelyn
has been with Dryvit for 12 years and enjoys scuba diving in her spare time.
Jocelyn has won free attendance to one of our monthly training sessions. |
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Due to the number of spammers trying to register on the Minotaur Forums site, we have decided to close down the registration process.
For any customers who have not yet registered, please contact Vince Cappello at extension 112 and he will be happy to assist you in setting up a new account over the phone. |
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| The information in this newsletter is provided to customers to use at their own risk. It is not intended as a substitute for professional advice. |
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