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    • Service businesses cut costs using EasyRoute Plus
     -- CompuNews reseller magazine, February 1995

    Until now, if a service business wanted to keep track of scheduled jobs, routes, invoices, bills, customer accounts, and manage marketing or labor analysis, it had to maintain a separate costly system for each task.

    To solve this problem, Genesis A New Era announced the release of version 6.0 of its service business oriented software called EasyRoute Plus, an exiting new customer account management program specifically designed for service businesses.

    EasyRoute Plus integrates dispatching, routing, invoicing, billing, customer accounting, marketing, and sales or labor analysis into one easy-to-use package.

    Unlike most software, it does not require any accounting or computer experience to operate, meaning that even a temp can immediately use the program. More than 90% of users surveyed said they'd never even opened the manual.

    What makes EasyRoute Plus even more appealing is its ability to act in a real-time environment, allowing users to access and change customer profiles and transactions for each work-site as the status in the field changes. This is important to service businesses because they need to see current information to be able to make important decisions.

    For example, when a customer calls in to order service, the job needs to be dispatched according to location and current workload. If the distance between stops can be minimized, more work can be accomplished.

    Another example is when a customer asks for information about their account. If the information is both accessible and up to date, it greatly simplifies the account manager's job.

    EasyRoute Plus can integrate many of the fragmented systems service businesses use to keep track of things. For example, it will print daily work reports or invoices for each scheduled appointment, worker, or job. It can print bills, invoices, or statements, and track accounts receivable and inventory.

    The program produces flexible accounting, gross payroll, sales, labor, and inventory reports, prints labels based on customer location or transaction history criteria (or the lack of specific transactions), and provides excellent telemarketing support. Users can create and store documents, proposals, personal letters, price lists, and forms using a simple built-in word processor, or direct the feature to run your favorite word processor or application using EasyRoute Plus as a shell.
     

    How the program works
     

    • In EasyRoute Plus, each customer's work-site is called a "Cust." Each Cust's screen contains places for you to type in the customer's name, address, bill name, bill address, map coordinates, and any comments you want. Each Cust has a scrollable window that stores transactions you add that relate to that work site. The functions that manage the transactions are operated from the Cust level, and are easily accessible and obvious.
     
    • Once created, a Cust is located using any data desired. Since the F4 key (that's how you access a Cust) is available on almost every screen in the program, it's a breeze to pop a customer's profile onto the screen, or to create a new customer profile.
     
    • Once customers have been created and transactions have been added, the following integrated management support programs can be used.
     
     
    • Calendar
     
    • Using Calendar, you can: determine the best date, time, and worker for an incoming sales estimate, appointment or service call, print work orders or route reports to give to workers or contractors; change appointment dates, times, and workers; and complete appointments.
     
     
    • Query Based Output
     
    • When a company can select which customers to solicit based on their past purchases and other factors, it can increase sales substantially. Research indicates that existing customers are nine times more likely to buy from you than anyone else you could possibly market to.
     
    • Using Query Based Output you could scan for customers in a certain city or territory who have not had a particular service (or product) recently, and are therefore likely to buy again. Or, you might use it to find all accounts that purchased a particular item or service so you can offer them related parts or services. The possibilities are endless.
     
    • There are four ways to output the information about customers who match a query; labels, reports, screen display (excellent for telemarketing), and export to disk.
     
     
    • Frequency Job Routing
     
    • The Frequency Job Routing program helps those businesses with repetitive or seasonal contract work that does not have exact scheduled dates yet to manage their work flow by blending this "fuzzy" work into the existing work load. Again, minimizing the distance between stops and increasing the amount of work that can be accomplished, adding to your bottom line.
     
     
    • Accounts Receivable
     
    • It's common knowledge that accurate timely billings increase cash flow, and EasyRoute Plus has an arsenal of tools that can help. There's and on-screen display of accounts receivable, an aging report, and aging-based billing texts that can print on bills. There's a program called Batch Billing that allows you to specify date ranges and simple yes/no settings, then prints a bill, invoice, or statement for each customer that matches your settings. You press one button, and Batch Billing makes billing a no-brainer because the program does all the work.
     
     
    • Activity Reports
     
    • Managers need access to customer and employee activity to help them measure the flow of business. The activity report can be broken out by area, salesperson, labor technician, service code, parts code, etc. The report can also calculate gross hourly wages (regular, overtime, and other) and sales or labor commissions for any range of dates.
     

    EasyRoute Plus sports context-sensitive help, and learns each user's preferences by continually adjusting its configuration files to match the user's preferences. It's one slick, powerful tool that no service business should be without.

    EasyRoute Plus is PC based, and comes with 90 days free support from the developer. It is available in both single and multi user models.

    For more information, or a free working trial copy, contact Genesis A New Era at (505) 466-1027. Their web site is at www.easyroute.net, where you can download the free copy of EasyRoute Plus. Address email to max@easyroute.net.

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    Please check out the other parts of this site, and feel free to download a free copy of  EasyRoute for a test drive.  EasyRoute Plus Home Page