Now there is a tool for you from IT Architechture. This utility automatically keeps track of your invoices, flagging those that have already been emailed. Any newly generated invoices will be sent by email to customers with a few simple key strokes. The tool is very easy to install and run, yet it will save time and money.

Anne Baker, Fermod’s Financial Controller says ”We are very pleased with this utility, now we do not need to print invoices – although for those customers who still want to receive hard copies, the utility allows us to print them in one batch. The utility distinguishes the two groups (Hard Copy v Email) automatically. We reckon that we have recovered our investment in this utility in matter of few weeks”

For more information on Fermod, follow www.Fermod.com

Directly manage the Opera output settings:

• E-Mail Address in the Sales Processing screen
• Invoices Flag in the Terms screen

Create your own Email Template

Outlook – One E-Mail per Sales Account with multiple attachments

Invoice and Credit Notes counts added to Subject Line

Easy Setup – UDS, Toolkit and User Count free

Sophos Endpoint Protection 10 brings competitive advantages no other vendor can deliver – including web protection integrated into the anti-virus client and patch assessment.

As smartphone and tablet use is soaring, Sophos has introduced Mobile Security to help protect these devices and the data on them.

In a recent test conducted by Tolly, (a testing and certification vendor), Sophos beat Symantec, Trend and McAfee when it comes to protecting virtualized environments.

• Landed Costs
• Retrospective Aged Debtors and Creditor Reporting
• Stock take improvements
• Repeat Invoices in the Scheduler

Landed Costs

Landed Costs are the additional costs incurred in getting goods you have purchased overseas from your supplier to your premises, such as freight, import duty, warehousing etc. It is important to keep track of landed costs in order to know the true profitability when selling your stock.

Opera 3 (1.30) will include landed costs functionality. This will allow you to automatically calculate and record the expected landed costs at the time of performing various stock-related postings, such as when receiving stock via a purchase order.

These landed costs can be posted to the Nominal Ledger to ensure more accurate Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet reporting, and will also be included within various Stock-related processes, such as the Stock Valuation Report, to provide a more accurate picture of the true value of your stock.

Retrospective Debtors and Creditors Reporting

At present, the Debtors and Creditors reports within Opera 3 allow you to view the outstanding debt “as at today”. New Retrospective Debtors and Creditors reporting will be introduced into Opera 3 to allow you to show the outstanding debt “as at a specific date in the past”.

Stocktake Discovery

New options available during the creation of a Stock take will let you include traceable items that don’t yet have batch or serial numbers, and choose whether or not to include zero quantity batches. In addition, the new Discovered Items feature will allow you to add to the ongoing Stocktake any unexpected batch or serial numbers found during the count.
To speed up data entry it will be possible to rapidly mark all known serial numbers for a particular item as found or not.

Repeat Invoices in the Scheduler

The Scheduler currently allows a number of tasks in Opera 3 to be scheduled to run automatically. In Opera 3 (1.30), Scheduler functionality will be extended to include running repeat invoices. This will allow a batch of repeat invoices to be scheduled to run unattended at a time that suits you.
For more information on Opera 3, please follow: http://www.it-arc.co.uk/pegasus-opera-3/

Now with the latest release of Opera 3 (1.20), businesses can achieve more with new applications, greater functionality and over 60 enhancements added to CRM. This reinforces the business proposition, ‘Opera 3. One System. One Solution.’ and makes Opera 3 more competitive.

New Opera 3 functionality

1. Effective Stock Management

Nearly half of the Pegasus customer base operates in either Manufacturing or the Wholesale & Retail industry sectors. Now there is more reason to upgrade to Opera 3; to benefit from improved stock management with the new Stocktake application. It is ideal for counting inventory in warehouses, stock and supply rooms, manufacturing and distribution centres, and retail businesses.

2. CRM – a fresh new business opportunity

With over 60 enhancements in Opera 3 CRM, including the new Summary Scheduler in Helpdesk Management designed to improve call scheduling and Batch Generation of Planned Maintenance calls, the uplifted application gives a fresh route for attracting new business.

3. Document Management Desktop – now for everyone across the organisation

The new Document Management Desktop application, makes Document Management available to anyone in the business. The Desktop version offers simple capture and retrieval functionality of Document Management for non Opera 3/Opera II users, at a fraction of the price. The first user is free of charge with the Document Management application.

Summer offer: Opera 3 Pegasus Dashboards

Business intelligence is becoming one of the key issues for users. In order to help customers achieve more from their software, Pegasus Software is running a summer promotion in July and August whereby a single user Pegasus Dashboards and standard charts will be supplied free of charge when purchasing Opera 3. The offer is available to new business customers when purchasing Opera 3 as an integrated solution or as individual applications. It is also available to Opera II customers who are not yet using Pegasus Dashboards when they upgrade to Opera 3.

The just-released G7 series of servers includes new processors from Intel and AMD, which help the servers deliver a big performance boost over its predecessors. The servers also include larger memory footprints of up to 2TB, and improved I/O technology for faster execution of data-intensive tasks.

The seven blade servers and three rack servers include Intel’s latest Xeon 5600 and 7500 series processors and AMD’s Opteron 6100 microprocessors.

The company is trying to improve server system architecture and scale up computing capabilities to effectively handle demanding workloads and exponential data growth.

The larger memory footprint could help servers accommodate more virtual machines in virtualized environments. The servers include management software to better manage virtualized environments.

The servers also include power management features that provide server administrators with stronger control over power drawn by servers.

• Open Period Accounting facility that gives users the option to post Nominal Ledger transactions to any period.
• VAT 100 Online Filing is now catered for within the Online Filing Manager.
• New Scheduler application has been developed using the .NET framework which allows users to run some Opera 3 tasks at a convenient time for minimum disruption to the business.
• Improved user interface to help users navigate around Opera 3 quickly and easily.
• Reporting improvements to allow users to run multiple reports at the same time for easy comparison of information. Many reports within Opera 3 can be output to MS Excel
• Restructured Help facility enables users to easily find the information they need to use their Opera 3 solution.
• Opera 3 Info Centre is a new website which launches when an Opera 3 user logs in.
• New GDI Chart Controls have been implemented and are available in all views allowing for an impressive display of data.
• Mouse Wheel Navigation provides a quicker way for users to locate the required record
• Security Management uplift provides greater security with the option to set an expiry date by which the user must change their password.

To learn more about Opera 3 click here to download the PDF brochure

Leica Camera Financial Controller Denis Gaillez explains,
“Opera is very flexible. Our knowledge of the product goes back to 1995 when we started a project to acquire our own computer system following news of Leica Camera Group’s imminent independence from the Leica parent company. We needed an Accounting system. Until then we had used the software and data processes of the Leica Group. We were looking for one complete package, which would meet our needs. We discovered Opera, opted for it, and are very pleased.”

IT Architechture, with their considerable expertise in individual software projects advised and helped Leica Camera with this project.

IT Architechture Director, Amir Farhan, says;
“Opera may have replaced a much bigger system at Leica but it handles a larger workload and Opera’s flexibility makes it ideal. It allows Leica to analyze sales over a period of time in various regions. Reports can indicate sales of individual items, or groups in a region, or sales made by an individual salesman. That’s not all, we have also developed a service package to help Leica track repairs and maintenance work.”

IT Architechture proposed and implemented a bespoke database solution to track every stage of the service and repair process. The Service Manager System produces full documentation such as barcode labels, warranty cards, estimates, pro-forma’s, despatch notes and invoices.

Marketing to end-users has been improved by mailing options with selections based on category, product, location, purchase/warranty dates and originating dealer.

Sales invoice data is then uploaded into Pegasus Opera with our own Import Manager Module. IT Architechture have recently automated consignment documentation for the batched returns of items to the manufacturers.

This system has now been in place for over 4 years, underlining IT Architechture’s commitment to meeting and supporting our client business needs.

Leica Camera is now in the process of upgrading the Opera system to the more powerful Opera II product.

The Leica Camera Group develops, manufactures and distributes high-quality products for photography and sport optics. Its product range encompasses rangefinder, single lens reflex and compact camera; interchangeable camera lenses, slide projectors and binoculars. The world standard 35mm format, used most commonly in photography today, had its origin in the so-called “Ur-Leica” of 1914.

One key factor in their success has been their effective use of IT to deliver highly efficient operational benefits and efficient back office processing. To ensure that they were using the very best in computing they engaged IT Architechture Ltd to help and guide them.

Over a number of years IT Architechture Ltd has provided Linton Fuel Oils with products and services that has maintained and enhanced Linton’s business operations through low personnel overheads.

A crucial component in Linton Fuel Oil’s effective operation is their sales order and customer Advanced Computer Centreounts data. If they ever lost that data, their whole business might be at risk. Paul Brown, General Manager at Linton Fuel Oils, said – “As part of our drive to new levels of quality management and particularly our recently achieved ISO 9001 statue, we realised that we needed a solid business continuity plan. When we considered the impact of losing our Windows based business servers, we knew that we had to protect them in a much more reliable fashion than entrusting their integrity to a small computer tape”. Paul turned to IT Architechture Ltd and asked them to make some suggestions as to how Linton could better protect their business critical data.

IT Architechture carried out an extensive search and after trying a couple of different internet based solutions that take advantage of the ADSL service, the solution from ImperaData was chosen. Their solution proved to be extremely reliable and efficient. The key advantage of the ImperaData service was its ability to back up incremental file changes on a continuous basis. The overhead on the servers was minimal.

Currently Linton have chosen the ImperaData In-Concert service to give them full server recoverability back to any point in time over the last 30 days. With In-Concert they are protecting all their Accounting data and their email services which play a crucial role in their business.

Unlike traditional backup methods that take copies of file changes once every twenty-four hours, ImperaData’s In-Concert service eliminates the burden of handling tapes and schedules. Based on technology from LiveVault Corporation, ImperaData’s In-Concert continuous backup and storage service provides around the clock protection of customer data by replicating file changes as they happen. These changes are transmitted securely over spare capacity on existing Internet connections to ImperaData’s secure storage facilities where multiple copies are kept. Files can be retrieved at any time from any point in time over the previous thirty days using a secure web based administration tool.

The Challenge

Princess Alice Hospice’s offices are spread over three sites. The main site is situated in Esher; another office is based approximately two miles down the road and a third at Kingston hospital. In addition to the offices, it has a number of charity shops, which are situated all around the south east of England. The Hospice required a fast and reliable means of communication between staff across the sites.

In a growing organisation such as The Princess Alice Hospice it is imperative that communication and data is maintained and provided to and by staff efficiently with the current and most accurate information. In addition to this, it was necessary to allow individual connectivity for roaming users. The advantage of this is that each site can be accessed by IT administrators on a site-by-site basis for general maintenance on local machines.

The Solution

IT Architechture Ltd, with many years experience in setting up wide area networks, advised the Princess Alice Hospice on this project and decided on the intY Exoserver box. The intY exoserver introduced a complete Virtual Private Network (VPN) solution. VPN technology allows communication between sites using the internet as the carrier, rather than expensive leased lines. In essence, VPN allows organisations to use the internet as though it were a Wide Area Network connecting sites together. The intY Exoserver provides all this connectivity with the added assurance of high security, firewall technology and data encryption to prevent internet hackers from gaining access.

The Benefits

The original expectations of the IntY Exoserver and the full potential was finally realised by IT administrators when they discovered that although this solution provided the VPN connection and security as the main focus for their requirements, the additional functionality that it provided meant that using a connection manager, internal users can be controlled in terms of Internet connection and the URL’s that they can visit. The control could be time dependent and limited to lunch periods or during break times.

To learn more about VPN Networking, please contact ITA.