MMS Tips & Techniques

This page is dedicated to helping existing Multilevel Management System (MMS) customers get the most out of their software. Sunshine POS provides this information free of charge via email to all customers as well as on this web page. Check back frequently for new tips and techniques. If you have a tip/technique you think would be beneficial to other users, let us know.

NOTE: The tips listed below are in order of most recently added. Oldest tips are moved to archive pages to reduce page loading time. Click on the Tip Number archive link to go to the archive pages.

#26 - Customer Shipment Tracking
If you ship a lot of packages to customers, you will occasionally have that customer call and ask where their shipment is (even if they ordered just yesterday). Through the integrated Shipping Tab on the invoice window, MMS makes it easy to keep track of all the shipments.

When you are creating an invoice or after you have retrieved an existing invoice, just click on the Shipping tab. Press the Add button to add a shipment tracking line. The Carrier will be set to the carrier on that invoice and the ship date will default to the current date. Enter the tracking number provided by the carrier. You can optionally enter the weight and freight cost of the shipment but these are for your reference only. When you need to determine the status of the shipment, retrieve the invoice and click on the shipping tab. If you are connected to the Internet and the carrier you used has a website interface for tracking shipments, you can press the Track button and a browser will open to the shipper's website and show you the tracking detail for that shipment. For this Internet tracking to function, you must have setup the interface between the carrier and MMS. UPS and FedEx were automatically setup with verison 5. For other carriers, you can setup this link under the Invoices|Carriers menu choice and entering a tracking link for the carrier.

Note that some carriers only store shipments under your on-line shipping account for a limited time (FedEx, for example, only stores 45 days of shipments). If you enter the tracking number in MMS, this allows you to locate a shipment way beyond this limited time period which may be critical in the case of a customer saying they never received the shipment 2-3 months after you shipped it. Because of this, every shipment has its tracking number recorded in MMS in our office.

#25 - Product Notes Printing on Invoice
Each product has a notes field on which detailed information about that product can be saved within MMS. For NSP products, this field is pre-populated with the NSP information about the product and, like all product notes, can be changed as needed by a user of MMS. Often you may want to give your customers a printout for one or more of these notes for items they are buying on an invoice. Rather than going to each product to print the notes, MMS version 5 allows for you to select which products notes to print for items you have added to an invoice.

To do this, simply add the items the customer is buying to the invoice. On the Line Items tab of the invoice, press the Print Product Notes button which is above the Invoice Print Format selection on the upper right side of the tab. A Product Notes Printing Selection window will open showing all items on that invoice. If you do not want the notes to print for a particular item, uncheck the box at the beginning of the line item. When ready, press the Print button and the standard print dialog box will open to finalize your print selection and send your product notes to the printer.

#24 - Volume Transfer Report
The volume transfer report makes it very easy to identify, modify, and create a report containing all the customers you need to transfer volume to. This report can be faxed or called into NSP or any other multi-level company as needed. To open this report, select Customers|Reports|Volume Transfer Report. Select the vendor, volume month and year. If faxing and you wish to have an “Attention” text put at the top of the report, enter it into the Attention field. Place your vendor account number into the Account # field. If you wish to only transfer volume to those customers with at least a certain amount of volume (QV), enter that amount in the Minimum Transfer field. If you only want to transfer to certain distributor types, select that type in the Distributor Type field. Retail customers will be automatically excluded unless you check the Include Retail Customers checkbox.

Once the above information is entered, press the Retrieve List button. All customers matching the criteria will be displayed and only those customers with the Minimum Transfer will be highlighted, those without enough will be displayed but not selected and only those customers who are selected will be placed onto the report. If you wish to add any customers who did not appear on the report, enter their code in the upper right of the window and press the Add Customer button after selecting the customer. If you wish to add an entire downline of a customer, press the Add Downline button after selecting the customer.

Finally, you can manually adjust the amount of volume (QV or PV) you will be transferring. Just change the amounts in those columns add needed. Remember to highlight the customer if it is not highlighted already or it will not appear on the report. When everything is ready, press the Create Report button. If the report is not accurate, press the Change Criteria button and not the Close button or you will have to start over again. A warning is given whenever closing the window to make sure you don’t lose all of your work.

#23 - Daily Customer Reports
The Multilevel Management System has a few reports that you may wish to run at the end of each day. These are the Invoice Summary and Receipts by Payment Type reports. Both of these reports can be found under the Customers|Daily Reports menu choice with MMS version 4.

The Invoice Summary report is used to get a summary of invoices written for a specified time period. Rather than printing a second copy of each invoice which can be storage and paper waste issue, many users run this report at the end of the day to list out the invoices in a concise format. You can select to run it for paid invoices, unpaid invoices, all invoices, show invoice information, show totals only, show individual products, and include non-inventory sales. The invoice date range selection defaults to the current day but can be changed to allow you to run it for any date range you specify. This report is also good for looking past purchases of a specific customer. So, when a person comes in and asks for more of what they bought 3 months ago, enter their code, change the date range, and quickly view a list of past purchases for them to determine the item. With MMS version 4, the report has been enhanced by the addition of the product purchase list where you can have the report only return those invoices that included the product(s) specified in this list.

The Receipt by Payment Type report is a listing of payments entered into MMS for the specified date range grouped by the payment type (cash, check, credit card). The detail format shows each payment while the summary format shows daily totals. You can run the report for only a specified payment type as well as only for a certain employee.

These two reports give you similar, but not necessarily, identical information. If all invoices are paid the same day they are written, the totals will match. However, if an invoice is written but not paid or a payment is received for an invoice written on a previous day, they will have different totals since an invoice is not a payment and a payment is not an invoice.

#22 - Inventory Reports
In this tip, we’ll discuss the Product Sales Ranking Report, Inventory Sales Report, and Inventory Sales/Order Report. All of these reports can be found under the Products|Reports menu choice. With all reports in MMS, just press the View button on the toolbar when you are ready to create your report after you have entered your report criteria. If the report isn’t exactly the way you want it, don’t close the report window but instead press the Search button on the toolbar and you will be returned to the criteria window where you can make the necessary changes without reentering all of the information.

The Product Sales Ranking Report is designed to show you which products you are selling the most of. The products can be ranked by dollars sold or quantity sold. You can select a specific vendor, category, a certain sales date range, and the maximum number of products you want to appear on the report. Version 4 allows you to select any number of vendors by checking the Vendor Select List box and then placing checkmarks by those vendors you wish to include on the report.

The Inventory Sales Report is a detailed report of what items you have sold and at what pricing. Beyond selecting a sales date range, vendor, and category, you can specify whether to include non-inventory sale items, show the name of each customer who purchased the items, show the product detail information, and more. Report sorting allows you to sort by vendor, category, day sold, or even the hour sold for better employee staffing decisions. With version 4, the multiple vendor selection capability has been added in too. If you only want a specific set of products on the report, use the Product Purchase List to add only those products you desire.

The Inventory/Sales Order Report shows you the breakdown of purchases and sales for individual items. This is helpful when you need to know what has happened to specific items has it lists out the reorder number, invoice number, quantity sold, and quantity ordered. The quantity sold column comes from invoices written and you can select whether or not to include drop shipped items on the report. The quantity ordered columns comes from reorders placed and received in MMS. You can select multiple vendors and specific set of products as well with this report in MMS Version 4 giving you complete flexibility in your reporting needs.

#21 - Partial Drop Shipments
MMS Version 4 allows you to individually select some items of an invoice to be drop shipped (not affect inventory) while other items on the same invoice are processed normally. Therefore, when you are out of stock on some items, you only need to do one invoice and have the out of stock items shipped directly to your customer.

To drop ship an entire invoice to a customer, check the Drop Ship Items box on the Process Items tab of the Invoicing window before adding any items. If you forget to check this box and check it after adding items, MMS will ask you if you want to change the drop ship status for items already on the invoice. If you answer YES, all items already invoiced will be set to drop ship as well as any items added after that point. If you answer NO, the drop ship status of items already on the invoice will not change and only items added after taht will be set to drop ship. This process is easiest if you enter all of the non-drop ship items first, check the Drop Ship Items box, answer NO to update existing items, and then add the drop ship items.

If at any point you want to change the drop ship status of an item already on the invoice, just check the Drop Ship box for that individual line item. Depending on your screen resolution, you may have to the right in the invoice line items area to see the Drop Ship column and this checkbox.

#20 - Credit Card Deposits
Reconciliation of credit card charges can be very complicated especially since generally the discount fee is taken out of the gross amount before it is deposited into your bank account. With the Multilevel Management System, you can have the program determine what the net deposit amount will be after the discount fee making the reconciliation much easier and quicker.

The first thing to do is train MMS as to the amount of the discount rate for the different types of credit cards you accept. This is done through the Customers|Payment Setup|Electronic Payment Setup menu choice. From the search window, enter the name of the credit card or just press the List button and double click on the card you wish to setup. From the Electronic Payment Setup View window, enter the amount of your discount rate for this card. If you are charged a transaction fee that is deducted before the amount is deposited (not at the end of the month), enter it in the Fixed Trans Fee. Repeat this for each card you accept. If you have a card that is not charged the discount rate until the end of the month (Discover is often setup this way), leave the discount rate at 0.00%.

After you have done this, all future payments you enter of that credit card type will have the transaction fee calculated (discount rate + transaction fee, if any) and place it in the Trans Fee field on the Payment Information window. Immediately you know how much this charge card transaction will be costing you.

The final step is to reconcile the charge card deposits with the deposits made into your bank account. We recommend doing this daily by accessing your bank account on the Internet to see what deposits were made rather than waiting until youreceive the statement at the end of the month when the reconciliation can be overwhelming with a month’s worth of transactions. Within MMS, open the deposit administration window through the Customers|Reports|Deposit Slip/Report menu choice. Unselect the cash and check payment types in the lower right corner of the screen if only doing your credit card deposits. Then, select the payment transactions that add up to the amount deposited into your bank account. The total NET amount column should equal what was deposited with the exception of some pennies due to rounding differences. When you have those transactions highlighted, you know where that deposit came from, the gross and net amounts, and can enter the deposit into your register in your accounting software. You may wish to split the deposit by the gross amount and credit card fees in your accounting software so that you can produce a report at any time on the amount of gross sales and the credit card fees paid. Be sure to press the Set Selected Payments as Deposited button on the deposit window to clear those items off of the deposit list. Some days you may have a multiple deposits especially if you accept more than one type of credit card as they do not all clear on the same day so you can repeat the above process for each deposit made.

#19 - Quote Only Invoices
You may have had a customer just asking what it would cost for a certain set of products. Rather than creating an actual invoice which validates adequate quantity on hand for each product added, changes the product’s last sold date, and adjusts the customer’s balance, you can now create a Quote Invoice which does none of this. You can then keep this quote on file within MMS should they return at a later date to purchase the items and you will know exactly what prices were quoted to the customer.

To create a quote invoice, press the Invoicing button on the toolbar to create an invoice as you normally do and just check the Quote Only box on the Invoice Heading tab. Proceed to create the invoice as you would normally. If your customer decides to purchase the items at some point, just retrieve the quote invoice and uncheck the Quote Only box. You can make changes to the invoice if your customer decides to add or remove items from their order just like any other invoice. When you convert the quote invoice to a regular invoice, the inventory, customer balance, and other information will be updated just like it was always a regular invoice. It or any regular invoice can be converted back to a quote invoice at any point as long as the invoice has not had a payment applied to it by changing the Quote Only checkbox.

On the Invoice Search criteria window, you will see a new search selection of Invoice, Quotes, and Both. This search defaults to Invoice but if you want to search for quotes or quotes and invoices at the same time, select your choice before pressing the List button on the toolbar. When searching for only quotes, certain options will be hidden that are only relative to invoice searches.

#18 - Customer Product Returns
Customers will return products from time to time and MMS handles this very easily. There are two situations you have to deal with in the product return and each requires the invoicing to be handled slightly differently.

The first situation is where the product is resalable condition and will be placed back onto the shelf. In this case, you simply add the product to the invoice and change the quantity to the negative amount by placing a hyphen/dash in front of the quantity value (i.e. -1). When the invoice is saved, this item's quantity-on-hand is updated to include the returned product. The second case is a return where you cannot resell the product for whatever reason but will be giving the customer a refund of part or the entire purchase price. For these cases, add a non-inventory line item to the invoice with a negative amount you will be refunding to the customer. If this was a taxable item, be sure to select the correct tax rate on the non-inventory popup entry window so the customer will be credited the sales tax refund as well. This method gives the customer credit for the return but does not change the inventory of the item.

If the customer is purchasing any additional items at the same time as the return, you can add those items to this same invoice. When you are done, if the invoice has a positive balance, you can pay the invoice as you would any other invoice. If the invoice has a negative balance, you will need to refund the customer the amount due to them. To do this, you press the Payments button to pay the invoice and simply enter a negative payment amount. This negative amount will be applied to this credit invoice. Be sure to select the correct Payment Method (cash, credit card) to indicate how you are giving them their refund. There is no need to first convert the credit invoice to an unused payment and then create a refund. The only time you need to convert the credit invoice to an unused payment is when there are regular (debit) invoices that you wish to pay by using all or some of the customer's credit invoice.

#17 - Vendor Price Changing
Some users of MMS sell products of certain vendors at a discount or premium over a certain price level. For example, some may charge retail minus 15% or distributor cost plus 10%. Others may simply have a cost type plus $0.50 or some other value. MMS allows you to select a particular vendor and adjust all of the prices of a certain cost type by a certain percentage or amount with a push of a button. There is no need to retrieve each product and manually calculate and change a certain price or prices.

To do this, retrieve the vendor through the Products|Vendors menu choice. Select the Product Price Set tab on the bottom. Select the Cost Type you wish to adjust (Retail, Cost, etc.). If you wish to INCREASE that cost type by a percentage, enter the percentage (10%) in the Percent Change field. If you wish to DECREASE that cost type by a percentage, enter the percentage as a NEGATIVE value (-15%). If you wish to adjust each product's price by a certain amount, enter that amount (positive or negative) in the Amount Change field. When you are ready to make the update, press the Update button. It is not recommended that you adjust the "Cost" cost type as this value is used in reorder creation and your reorder total will not match the total given to you by the vendor if this is changed.

Should at any point you wish to change the prices back to the original price, the easiest way is to run the most recent NSP price update disk. Also, this feature allows you to purchase the price update disk, update all of your prices to NSP's new prices and then easily apply your own markup or discount to the latest NSP prices.

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