This year marks the 20 year anniversary of Harmony’s first installations in Australia. Whitehill & Co and Vanbar Photographics first installed the Harmony Software package back in 1986 and have been using Harmony to assist them in running their businesses ever since. Over this time both companies have grown considerably and we are delighted that 20 years on, both Whitehill and Vanbar continue to use Harmony.
Future Business Systems would formally like to acknowledge and thank Bryan and Farida White from Whitehill as well as Peter Baranow from Vanbar Photographics for their business and continued support over the past 20 years.
We are pleased to announce that we now have over 550 individual stores running the Harmony WINPOS Point of Sale system Australia wide. In addition this year we have seen WINPOS used overseas for the first time in New Zealand.
The last 12 months has seen a number of great features added into the Harmony WINPOS Point of Sale system:
- Complete Clock Card / Timesheet and Rostering system. Staff rosters can be created providing staff with a central database for looking up work hours. Staff clock ons and offs at the shops can be compared with rosters and fed directly into the payroll / timesheet system simplifying payroll processing.
- Ability to view and receive supplier purchase orders at the store. Orders can be scan received and adjusted as necessary.
- Winpos can now facilitate Australian based companies with local stores as well as stores overseas.
- Winpos can now accommodate Multi Redeemable gift vouchers and gift cards. This allows your customers to purchase a gift voucher with a dollar value assigned to the card. They can continue to shop and draw down on the same physical voucher whilst there is still money on the card.
- Customise your own end of day WINPOS procedures menu. You can now tailor this menu to include or exclude any WINPOS end of day task to meet your specific POS requirements.
- Ability to upload WINPOS transaction data into the WINPOS console from a file. If your store is offline but you want to update Harmony with the store’s transactions, you now have the ability to easily export this data into a file for transferring onto any portable media at the store. eg. USB Hard Drive. The USB device can then be taken to Head Office and connected to the WINPOS console. The console now has an import facility to upload and import this data automatically into Harmony.
As we have so many customers using Harmony outside of Victoria, we appreciate that contacting FBS and our help desk on a regular basis can be a significant expense. As a result we have upgraded our phone system to allow for VOIP calls. This has enabled us to offer our Sydney, Brisbane and Perth customers a local phone number for contacting us.
The numbers are as follows:
For some time now, customers using the Retail Management module have been able to template their retail reports. Templating involves setting up a Harmony report to run the way you want to frequently see it, including all pre-defined sorting and filtering criteria so a snapshot of the report can be recorded. This allows the report to be easily re-run by simply selecting the report from the Template Maintenance Report menu.
We have taken this facility one step further allowing you now to schedule these templated reports to automatically run at any time during the day or night and have them saved or printed directly to a printer. We have also created a new Schedule Maintenance program that allows you to manage and monitor your scheduled reports.
Over the past 6 months, we have trialed and implemented a new help desk system improve the handling of your day to day Harmony support queries. There are three ways of lodging a query with the FBS Help Desk. These are fax, email and telephone. We have introduced a new “queuing” system which prioritises your queries based on the order in which the query was received and the impact to your business. We have also increased the number of full time Help Desk support staff in order to speed up the time taken to address your query.
We recommend emailing helpdesk@fbsaust.com.au as the most efficient way of lodging your Help Desk queries.
Want to email Invoices, Purchase Orders or Reports from Harmony? Well now you can. Harmony now has the ability to automatically convert your forms into PDF format and integrate seamlessly with your Email client. We can even customise your forms to grab the required email address from your Debtor and Creditors contacts. All you need is Harmony Desktop V1.6 installed on your PC and to purchase from FBS, Visual Software’s PCL to PDF software. This is PDF software developed specifically for the Unix Operating System and allows Harmony to integrate with it far more seamlessly and reliably than other Windows based products on the market.
Note: Currently Harmony users can only email one form at a time. This means that batch emailing of Debtor statements and Creditor Remittance advices is not possible.
In our last newsletter we advised how we have done a lot of development with both Star Track Express and Toll Ipec and how have integrated our own Harmony Distribution module with their internal computer systems. Over the past 12 months we have worked extensively with TNT Express in order to integrate with their computerized distribution system and we now have a number of customers utilizing this facility. TNT Express is one of the world’s leading providers of business-to-business express delivery services. We are pleased that we can now offer our clients an integrated distribution solution between Harmony and TNT.
Harmony has recently undergone a revamp in the areas of Style Development, Bill of Materials & Manufacturing. These new software features allow for tighter control and processing of imported manufacturing orders, as well as some improvements for local manufacturing. This allows for the streamlining of both local and overseas production through the Manufacturing system.
Various improvements to Style development and Bill of Materials software had to be made to accommodate the various requirements of imported products/garments.
The Style module now has a defined “product type”. This product type is used to specify some details with regard to whether the style is locally made, or imported, and can be used to clearly separate sub-types of these. Eg. FOB, FIS, CMT overseas imports, etc.
These product types also allow for additional costs to be associated with a particular style product. Eg. Overhead cost, Agent Commission, etc. These additional costs lead to a more detailed costing of the style, in order to aid in producing prices with correct selling margins.
Coming Soon:
New Multi Overseas Creditor Invoice program. This program will allow for multiple invoices to be entered and costs can be spread across multiple manufacturing orders. This will allow for the entry of overseas based shipping charges, such as Duty, Freight charges, Custom clearance, etc.
We are excited to announce the recent re-development and release of the Harmony Fixed Assets Module. Whilst this module has existed for some time, it has undergone a major overhaul and now includes a number of enhancements. The Fixed Assets Module is closely integrated with our Equipment, Creditor and General Ledger modules and has the following features:
- Assets can be identified by bar code or serial number, and can be linked to each other.
- Harmony can flag which assets are owned, and track asset transfers and disposals.
- Depreciation is also flexible; you can store multiple depreciation methods and apply up to two methods to each asset.
- Maintenance agreements and insurance policies are also stored.