Reporting Software – Accurate and Timely Access for Management Reporting

Powerful and Flexible Reporting: 230+ practical, powerful reports

Jim2^® comes with many types of reports commonly run by management and staff every day. Reports are 'context sensitive' – meaning you only see relevant reports relating to the section of Jim2^® you are currently in, eg. If you are in a quote – you will only see the quote report menu.

 

Here are some examples of Management Reports found in Jim2^®:

• Stock reports such as Stock Valuation, Stock Profit and Stock Back Order.
• Top "X" reports such as Top 20 Customers by value or profit or Top 20 Sales items by Quantity or Value
• Management reports for business analysis such as P&L and Balance Sheet and Cashflow
• Accounts based reports such as Statements, Aged Receivable and GST reports etc.
  
• Object and function reports such as Invoices, Quotes, List Reports, delivery dockets etc
• Support Documents such as price stickers, address labels for envelopes, courier-friendly box labels for shipments

Jim2^® Built-in Report Designer

One of the most important functions available in any business software is the reporting function. Businesses use reports in a variety of ways, and reports should be able to produce useful and relevant information in an easy to read format. Jim2^® gives you the option of using the report formats we have already designed, customising those formats to better suit your business, or creating your own reports using the Jim2^® Report Designer function.

 

Jim2^® Report Designer is an entire application in itself – however it is tied into Jim2^® functionally. The reports available within each Jim2^® Object or function were created, and can be created using Report Designer. The 'portal' to access the Report Designer is Report Explorer – a 'holding area' in effect, where reports are maintained.

 

Reports themselves are a combination of information and calculations, made available in specific and useful formats:

• Object and function reports such as Invoices, Quotes, List Reports, Delivery Dockets etc
• Management Reports such as Export Sessions, Stock Profit Reports, GST (accrual)
• Support Documents

Report Designer allows you to produce these types of reports from within Jim2^® by combining (programming):

• RAP (Report Application Pascal)
• Specific objects or components to execute events, using your data
• Scripts used to generate data pipelines for use in your reports

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Built-in Scripting Engine

• Jim2^® fully supports XML recordsets, the core technology used in B2B and B2C applications
• Jim2^® makes extensive use of Microsoft's ActiveX scripting technology. This provides Jim2^® with unparalleled power to be tailored to specific company and/or industry requirements, and provides the 'glue' to easily tie Jim2^® into existing legacy applications or new technologies as they become available. Scripts or 'complete Jim2^® Report datasets' (jrpt files) can easily be imported into Jim2^® and instantly become seamlessly integrated into Jim2^® generally, or at a specific object level.
• Scripts can be written in VBScript (Visual Basic), JScript (Java) or DelphiScript (Pascal).
• Jim2^® provides an integrated, fully featured syntax highlighting for the language used.
• Forms related to scripts can be visually designed in Jim2^® using standard RAD methodology and component/control event code automatically hooked in.
• The Stock Profit reports within Jim2^® are good examples of complex functions that are entirely scripted. These reports include a powerful selection criteria form (script form) and create several SQL queries to order the relevant data and grouping. They even provide cost estimates for stock sold in advance!
• Seamless interaction with products like Microsoft Word, Excel, Access and Outlook.
• Scripts also allow Jim2^® to easily interact with other software.

Definable Options & Setups

The Jim2^® Business Engine is supplied as a general business and financial management tool for the sales and/or service sector. As such, it is supplied with a set of typical Option Defaults or management-oriented Options pre-set. Jim2^® is designed, however, to work behind the scenes – taking care of detail for you. To maximise your software investment, you should 'tailor' Jim2^® to follow your work rules and management practices. By setting up specific defaults to suit your management needs, Jim2^® will automatically implement these defaults and criteria for users to follow. Options are available to tailor your database are:

• Company structure
• Jobs
• Quotes
• Purchases
• Stock
• CardFiles
• Accounting
• Email
• Retail

The Setup screens allow you to tailor the Jim2^® Business Engine to suit your specific workflow needs. Setups 'personalise' Jim2^® to reflect your work practices, and 'define' issues as below. Setups in the most part, form the dropdown lists available within Object forms – although you have set general and Object defaults via Options, the alternate choices available are made via the Setup Screens:

• Naming Budgets
• Price Levels
• Job Priority
• Job Type
• Labour Type
• Invoice descriptions
• Naming Branch Sub Branch & GL Department
• Stock Locations
• Stock Bins
• Payment Types
• Tax Codes
• Stock GL Groups
• Ship Via
• Payment Terms
• Stock Attributes

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High level, definable Security

• Security Level or access is identified by Security Groups – each employee (user) belongs to one Security Group and only has the access rights to certain areas and functions within Jim2^® that have been set up for that Security Group.
• Security Groups are identified with a Report Level. When reports are devised, they are identified by ascending Report Levels – the higher the number, the more sensitive company information it contains.
• Security Groups are also identified by their Status Level to limit status (Strict Workflow movements)
• Security Groups are also given a Price Break Movement ranking to limit volume break discounting

True multi-user capability

In developing Jim2^® we have focused heavily on two prime objectives:

• The need to make Jim2^® practical to use so that it requires minimal effort to maintain, is easily deployed and will genuinely assist you in the day-to-day work of running a business.
• The need for the software technology itself to be stable and 'bullet proof' in terms of reliability and functionality.

Unique 'object locking' technology

Jim2^® is a truly scalable multi-user application. Because records are being accessed and edited across many users, the need to keep data secure in edit is particularly important. From the ground up, Jim2^® is designed to be used in real business applications. In business or accounting software where all users are accessing one data source (database), the risk of corrupting files and losing system performance is very real. To counter this, other software places limits on user access that can detract from usability.

Jim2^® has been developed with new and unique software technology that gets around these limits.

SQL/MSDE transaction based processing

Technically Jim2^® is a proper 32 Bit, multi-tiered, 'thinnish' client application. What this means to you is that if a 'client' machine is being used to edit or add data, and the client machine crashes or hangs for any reason, the database remains unaffected.

 

Internally, Jim2^® treats everything as an 'object' (a job is an object, and an invoice is an object, etc.). When you start to process an invoice, all the relevant objects are locked – a database transaction is started, all the related data is updated or modified, the transaction is completed, and then all the locked objects are freed.

 

If you are in the middle of an invoice, it either all happened, or it did not happen – there is no halfway, no partial data corruptions. All transactions are handled in SQL server, and controlled at an object level by Jim2^® Server.
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Live Management Information

• Live drill-down workflow overviews using Lists show exactly what’s going on, for whom, being done by whom and when it's due
• Comprehensive drill-down Sales Register shows all completed invoices for any given period and their value
• Detailed Stock Profit, Stock re-ordering (min qty on hand) and Stock Valuation reporting
• Detailed productivity reporting for any given period
• Live Profit and Loss by Branch, Sub-Branch and GL Department
• Comparison reporting against Budgets by Branch, Sub-Branch and GL Department

Live Profit and Loss by Branch, Sub-branch and GL Department

• Standard Monthly views.
• YTD Comparison – will give you a running total of how you have been going from the start of the financial year.
• Previous Year Comparison – You can compare how you went this time last year with how you are going right now.
• Budget Comparison – This will compare how you are going now to a designated budget.
• Budget Only – Through this you can look at budget/projected P&L.
• Display – Specify what time period you want the P&L sorted by.
• Group By – If you have set up Branches or Sub Branches, you will have the option to group your P&L by them.
• Offset – You can offset your comparisons by year from 9 to -9.
• GL Levels – Set how many levels down that you want the P&L to look at.
• Include 13th Period – choose to include 13th period in your GL or not
• Show Account Numbers/Show Zero Balances/Show Cents
• By right clicking on the figures you can choose to Hide the Change Columns, do a drill down via Account Inquiry or General Ledger to see what transactions make up these figures.
• You can also choose to Export Data to an Excel, HTML, XML or Text file.

Budgets by Branch, Sub-branch, GL Dept

• Name Budget/s to suit your own requirements
• Fin. Year – Choose which year you are applying this budget to.
• Branches – You can set a budget for a specific Branch, Company or GL Dept.
• Account – Choose whether the budget is for a specific account or for an account range
• Calculations – You can choose whether you want Jim2^® to do your calculations for you (AutoAdd) or to key them manually (None)
• AutoAdd – lets you choose whether to increment/decrement, in percentages
• Use ‘Based On’ to choose what you are calculating budget from. You can choose to calculate from this year/last year performance or budgets. If you use the increment method you will only be able to select dollars, as you can only increment in amounts, not percentages

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