Open the Customer Miscellaneous Functions window by selecting the Customers|Misc. Functions menu choice. On the Purchase Dates tab, select the vendor and enter the purchase date you wish to set for the selected customers. You can select the customer you wish to update by locating them in the list and clicking on them. Press the update button and their purchase date is updated. You can enter their code in the search box to jump to them in the list automatically. If you wish to update more than one customer at a time, use the Ctrl and Shift keys to select more than one customer in the list. When you have your group of customers highlighted, press the update button.

#7 - Reordering Items on Special
Nature's Sunshine Products (NSP) offers specials from time to time. These specials are often of the buy four, get one free type, or something similar. You can handle these specials when doing reorders so that the reorder is correct when transferred to the NSP website or faxed in. This works for non-NSP companies as well when they offer their own specials as MMS has the flexibility to handle all different combinations of quantity and price specials.

To enter a special item on the reorder, make sure the product is on the reorder. If it was added to the reorder automatically because MMS has determined the product needed to be ordered, it will already be there. If not, just press the Add Item button and manually add the item to the reorder you are creating. Once it is on the reorder, change the Special # of the item from its original product number. In the Spec. Qty field, enter the quantity of the special you are ordering. In other words, if you are ordering two of a buy four, get one free, enter two into this column. In the True Qty field, enter the actual number of items you will be receiving when the reorder is received. If you are ordering two of the buy four, get one free example, the True Qty would be ten. When you receive the items, the quantity on hand will be incremented by this true quantity. Next, enter the cost of one of the specials in the Cost column. You will need to calculate this cost (i.e. four times cost of one item) or have the vendor (NSP) give you the cost. Similarly, enter the volume of one of the specials in the Volume column. The extended cost and volume is calculated as the Spec. Qty times these costs. That is all you need to do to have your reorder accurately reflect the specials and their cost as well as correctly update the quantity on hand when you receive the reorder.

#6 - Deposit Slip Creation
MMS can automatically prepare a deposit slip for you when you are ready to deposit the payments your company has received. This process is very simple. Every time you receive and enter a payment into MMS, that payment is marked as not deposited. When you are ready to make a deposit, all you need to do is open the deposit slip report under the Customer|Reports|Deposit Slip/Report menu choice. This report will show all items that have not yet been marked as deposited. Using this feature of MMS eliminates the need to transcribe every check onto your deposit slip and provides a quick glance as to the amount of money you have waiting to be deposited.

First thing you will need to do is set your bank account number that will appear at the top of the deposit slip. This is done under the configuration window opened through the File|Configuration menu choice. On the Company Settings tab, enter your Banking Name (the name used on your account) and your Bank Acct. #. Both of these items will print at the top of the deposit slip.

If you've never been to the deposit slip report screen before, all payments you have entered into the system will be there and you will need to mark these as deposited. This should be done at the same time you are making an actual deposit so you start with no outstanding deposits in the system and nothing needing to be deposited. All items will automatically be selected when the report opens and all you need to do is press the Set Selected Payments as Deposited button. The system will set all items as deposited.

From this point forward, as you enter payments into the system, they will be added to the deposit slip report. When you are ready to make a deposit, open the deposit slip report. If you are only depositing a certain type of payment(s), you can unselect all of the other types by clicking on the payment Payment Types you wish to not include. If a customer asked you to hold a check or you have some other reason why you do not want to deposit one or more particular items, you can individually select those items in the payment list. Only those items highlighted will appear on the deposit slip. When you have your deposit ready, press the Print/Preview Deposit Slip button, enter the date of the deposit, and print the deposit slip. Then, press the Set Selected Payments as Deposited button and those selected items will be marked as deposited and removed from the deposit slip report.

If you have an item you would like to add to the deposit slip that will NOT be entered into MMS as a payment (i.e. your NSP bonus check), enter the information in the Non-Saved Item area and press the Add Non-Saved Item button and it will be placed into the deposit slip. Once you close this window, this non-saved item will be forgotten.

#5 - Automatic Cost Type Selection
MMS has a powerful feature that automatically selects the correct price type when adding a product to an invoice for a specific customer and vendor. This feature is called the Automatic Cost Type Formula (ACTF) and eliminates the need to have to remember the product pricing at time of invoicing when you sell products at different cost types. However, you must "train" MMS so it knows how to price correctly in order to take advantage of this. Whenever MMS determines that the cost type for the product is different than the currently selected cost type on the invoice window, you will be notified and asked to confirm the cost type change. You may turn off this notification through the Configuration window/Invoice Defaults Tab/Prompt on Auto-Cost Type Change field once you are familiar with the ACTF and your customers are setup correctly.

Every time you add a product to an invoice, MMS follows this ACTF to determine the cost type that the product should be sold at on this invoice. Using the steps below, you can learn how MMS works with the ACTF and you can then set it up to meet your business needs:

The key to using the ACTF is to setup the vendor correctly and, for almost all of your customers, use the Vendor Default settings for their Cost Types both at the customer and customer/vendor fields. The reason for this is that if you later decide to change the vendor cost type for a certain distributor type, you only have to change it at the Vendor's Dist/Cost Types assignment. If you set every distributor of that type to a specific cost type, you would have to go to each customer and manually change him or her. An example of when you would not want to set a customer to vendor default would be when selling to family members at cost. Changing their Cost Type to cost would give them this pricing while selling to all of your regular customer at distributor cost or whatever other cost type you choose and set on the vendor record.

#4 - Working with MMS Search-List-View Windows
Did you know that when you are viewing a customer record you could search for another customer without closing the Customer Administration window? The same is true for the vendor, product, reorder, and invoice windows. I learned that some customers will close the window and then reopen it to view a different record. The Search-List-View (SLV) windows that are used on all of the common windows of the Multilevel Management System (MMS) are SLV windows and have many easy to use features to save you time and avoid extra steps such as this.

SLV windows have a search window, a list window, and a view window all in one master administration window. Generally, the window opens onto the search window. This window is where you enter the information in the search fields that you wish to search on. The more fields you enter information in, the less records that will match your search. For example, if you are searching for all customers in "Arizona", you may have 100 there. However, if you also enter a city of "Phoenix", your search then may only locate 60 records. But, if you enter a city of "P", your search may find more because you are including all cities in Arizona that start with "P" (Phoenix, Prescott, Pinetop, etc.). You can enter just the first few characters of most search fields if they are not a number or a date field and the search will locate all records starting with those characters for that field. After you have entered your search criteria, you can press the Enter key on your keyboard or press the List button on the toolbar to execute your search.

When you execute your search, MMS locates your matching records. If there are no matches, you are given a message and left on the search window. If there is one and only one match, you are taken directly to the view window. If there is more than one match, the list window is displayed. From the list window, you can do a few different things:

Once on the view window, you can manipulate the record and its details on the view window. Additionally, you can

Another small tip is when you are on the customer view, payment entry, or invoice view window and you open any of these windows, the customer you are viewing/invoicing is automatically retrieved for you on the window you just opened. So, if you just get done adding a new customer and need to create an invoice for him/her, just press the Invoicing button on the toolbar, answer yes to save changes if prompted, and the Invoice view window will open with that customer already selected saving you the step of having to reenter the customer code again if you had first closed the customer window and then opened the invoicing window.

#3 - Exporting Customers & Mass Mailings
On a previous tip, you learned how to create custom mailing lists. What if you want to do more with a mailing list than just print labels? For example, you may want to produce a letter that contains the customer's name and address on it or print names and addresses directly onto the envelopes rather than actually using labels. With Microsoft Word and MMS, you can create a specialized Word document and have it merged with your exported MMS data. While the many features available within Word are out of the scope of what can be discussed here, this will give you a good starting point. The Word help file/manual should be used should you have any questions or are looking for information on how to perform more advanced merge features as Sunshine Support Services cannot provide Word technical support. The information provided here was taken from Microsoft Word Version 2000, other version may have different options. To start your export and mailings, follow these steps: