Classic Chronicle - March 2008
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Hi Everyone,
Well it’s almost the time of the year when the chocoholics among us can relax and the Easter bilby’s and bunnies come into their own and our kids get sticky! We also thought it would be good to update you with a quick review of our personnel. Jayasankar has joined Nadya in the programming team and together they bring over 18 years development expertise in Delphi. Ian continues to assist Greg in support, testing and admin while Ashley and Donna round-up the sales and admin team. It is now 7 years since Greg joined Classic to manage support, and 11 years since Ralph and Dave took over the reins at Classic.
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On behalf of all of us here at Classic I would like to wish you and your families a Very Happy Easter
If you know some one who wants to receive a copy of the Chronicle please forward this email to them and get them to make use of the following link - subscribe. Or alternatively if you no longer wish to receive the chronicle please make use of the following link - unsubscribe.
Many of our customers have now made the transition to 7.5 and so obtain the following benefits:
Export of Transactions to Excel
Some more fantastic new features in General Ledger Account Maintenance – The Detailed Transactions lookup now allows sorting and grouping and direct export to Excel. Simply click on the column headings for sorting, drag the column heading up into the grouping area to group or right click to get even more options including export to Excel.
New Lookup
Check out the New Lookup features. Wherever you see the red arrow lookup, we are using a new component which has allowed us to offer you greater capability in the lookup.
New Report Designer
Every report in every module has been re-written using a New Report Designer. The reports have been redesigned as much as possible to make them easier to read and easier to export to Excel. Even the Edit Reports and posting Reports! The new Report writer facility has been used to rebuild the reports and enables us to provide you with superior designs of the reports and superior handling capabilities in the presentation, delivery options and ability to save in different formats. Here is a quick review of some features that stand out in my mind:
Vendor Balances AS ON Date Report
Enables you to obtain Vendor Balances at a given date, to assist balancing back to the Creditors Control account in the General Ledger
Reconciliation Statement AS ON Report
Enables you to obtain Bank Account Balances at a given date, to assist balancing back to the Bank Control account in the General Ledger
Cash Flow Report
A report which helps in the preparation of the Cash Flow Report to the ASX. This report analyses all transactions which hit the Bank Accounts during the period nominated and then sorts them by the expense account (or Tenement/Job) to which the expense/income was posted. The report is available in summary showing the total for each account or detailed showing the individual transactions.
The net difference of Income & Expenditure should equal the movement in the General Ledger for that Bank account and date range selected. (Provided no GL adjustments have been posted)
Direct Email
A New button (F2 – Email) has been included everywhere you can print, so that you can directly email a pdf copy of the report. Many of us have been using Cute-pdf to create a pdf copy of reports and then attaching them to emails and sending them to people in remote locations. Now you can do this directly from the report request screen.
Classic Version 7.50 is available to all our Windows clients wishing to upgrade. Don’t Forget that the upgrade is free to all those who have a current ASMA contract! So call Classic NOW!
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To arrange an upgrade to Version 7.50
Contact Classic on (08) 9345 0522 or email classic@classicinfo.com.au
Heres how:
Just place a shortcut to the ClassicW\ADTSY.exe into the folder called C:\Documents and Settings\Your Name\Start Menu\Programs\Startup NB. The only error to avoid is to ensure that you do not drag that program into this folder as this action will move the program from its current location.
If you are not experienced in this area, you can do this in two stages.
1. Right-click on ClassicW\ADTSY.exe and select Send To and then Desktop (create shortcut)
2. Move or copy that shortcut from the desktop into the Startup folder. Shortcuts usually have a curly
arrow pointing as part of the icon
Are you having problems entering dates in transactions?
Is this date in the first few days of the month? What is going on?
Again, this relates to the default settings Microsoft has set for each new user. Unfortunately they set the default short date setting to be d/MM/yyyy.
To change this setting go to:
Start ą Settings ą Control Panel ą Regional and Language Options
For English (Australia) choose Customise and then the date tab. Change the short date setting to be dd/MM/yyyy.
You will need to exit and re-enter Classic for the change to take effect in Classic and you may also need to restart your machine so that Windows uses the new short date setting everywhere for this user.
We have a stack of enhancements available (at a small cost). These enhancements are not necessarily useful to all our customers but could be just what you are looking for to save time and money. With this in mind I would like to give you a brief overview of some of these enhancements:
Export Consolidation - has been developed to export a spreadsheet showing the accounts as rows and the source companies as columns. The cells contain the dollar value contributed by each company.
At last, the report which helps with the preparation of the Cash Flow Report to the ASX. This report analyses all transactions which hit the Bank Accounts during the period nominated and then sorts them by the expense account (or Tenement/Job) to which the expense/income was posted. The report is available in summary showing the total for each account or detailed showing the individual transactions.
This report shows the balance due to vendors as on a target historical GL Date to enable reconciliation to the balance of the Creditors Control Accounts in the GL as on that date.
The system identifies transactions which have GL dates between the target date and today’s date. The program then takes the Balance due for a vendor as on today’s date and use the transactions to back-calculate and report the amount due to the vendors as on the target date. The report is available in Summary, Condensed and Detailed.
This enhancement allows any line on a posted Purchase Order to be edited prior to a receival. New lines can be added and existing lines edited or deleted.
Now that you have changed over to electronic commerce for your payments, are your staff tired of standing at the fax machine entering fax numbers and feeding in the Payment Advices every time you do a payment run? Do your Purchasing staff have to spend their time faxing Purchase Orders and stand at the fax machine entering fax numbers and feeding in the Expediting Reports every time they need to follow up on non-supplied orders?
Would you like your Classic Software to send Payment Advices from Accounts Payable, Purchase Orders and the Expediting Report directly via your email software? This is now being used by many of our customers. If you haven’t looked at it, yet please call.
Two reports have been developed for those customers who use our Tenement/Costing module for true Job Costing. The Job Status Report and Recommended Invoice reports allow greater cost control on Jobs and provide the basis for progressive billing on Jobs.
This set of Eight Reports has been taken up by many users. These reports provide a full financial statement for a Tenement or Project including This month, YTD, this year and whole of life with comparisons to budget or forecast and whole of life estimate. They are great for Tenements, Exploration, Development and Capex projects which cross fiscal year boundaries. Please contact Classic if you want more detail on what this set of reports can give you.
This New Set of Eight Reports is particularly useful for monitoring CAPEX projects and AFEs. The reports include commitments by extracting information about Purchase Orders which have not yet been received and also provides the facility to forecast the final outturn for the project. Please contact Classic if you want more detail on what this set of reports can give you.
This New set of Eight Reports provides the ability for you choose a range of Tenement/Jobs and select only those for which the Variance from Budget or Forecast falls outside the entered level. The level can be set on the basis of Whole of Job, Phase by Phase, Requirement by Requirement and can be set for each Tenement/Job or set for the aggregation of the range of Tenement/Jobs chosen. Fantastic for those of our Customers who are using the Tenement/Costing module to do their full reporting for operations and for closely monitoring CAPEX projects and AFEs.
As the Years pass us by, society seems to be always coming up with new ways of measuring productivity, costs, happiness and pretty much everything else. Classic may not be able to help you measure your happiness but your staff should be happier when they see some of the new reporting tools that Classic been developing. Firstly there is the Data Query Module, which has been exciting for those that have used it for some time now.
This Module allows the user to custom design reports based on any fields within Classic. That’s right ANY fields! No more having to extract data from reports to create other reports. These reports are fully exportable into excel or they can be simple printed or reviewed from within Data Query.
Clients who have purchased the module have commented on its ease of use, as well as substantial time and cost savings. (e.g. You require a list of all employees’ names and addresses to be stored in MS Excel. This simple query, which would normally take some time to complete, was finished in less than 1 minute and was also saved for future use.)
Mr Jim Hinshaw, Administration Manager from Mineral Deposits Ltd, has this to say about Classic’s Data Query module:
“Absolutely fantastic! I am now able to write queries and print reports on an ad-hoc basis in the format that I want, and then save them to an Excel spreadsheet. The information available to me appears to be endless. This module has paid for itself many times over by virtue of the time saved in extracting the data that I require, as well as the ability to save the queries for future use.”
DATA QUERY MODULE OVERVIEW
The Data Query module allows you to develop models or queries which interrogate the selected databases and return the information selected. You can then further refine the information using the tools available and output it to MS-Excel or directly to a printer.
A model or query is built in one of two ways:
The first is by selecting menu options and datafields from the various menus and providing answers to prompts. This is using the Data Query module "interactively" because you and the module work together to produce the results you want. You tell it what you want and it asks you to fill in the blanks with information it doesn't know. This
is the simplest way to use the module because you don't need to know much about programming.
The other way is to create the query or model is through direct keyboard entry of the SQL statement. This method of creating the query or model provides the most flexibility, but in order to use it, you need to learn to "speak" the SQL language.
You can save queries or models you have developed so that they can be run at a later date against updated databases.
When you select the Data Query module in the Designer mode, you will be presented with the following screen.
Workspace Menu Databases Query
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The menu
The workspace
The Database Tables
The Query Pages(Columns, SQL, Results)
Data is chosen by selecting the tick box alongside the field name in the workspace. As data is ticked, a column is created in the query model. The field name is used as the default column heading. These can be changed if required by overtyping the default shown in the heading row.
Functions are provided in the column definition area to allow you to decide how you want the data presented in the results. These are accessed by right clicking on the cell and include:
Show - Yes/No
Sort - No Sort, Ascending, Descending
Function - No Function, Average, Maximum, Minimum, Sum
Group - Yes/No
Heading - Overtype
Input - No prompt, Single Value, Range of Values
Where an input prompt is specified, the user will be prompted for the single value or range of values. The prompt will use the Heading for the column as the prompt, so it is worth ensuring that the heading is meaningful and not just the default field name.
Purchase Orders – Hold Batch Facility
In Purchase Orders - Receiving & Invoicing option the new facility allows you to transfer transactions into the Hold batch while awaiting authorization. This facility appears as a Hold button on the header screen for each transaction and on the menu screen as per the examples below.
Choosing the Transfer to Hold-Batch facility from the menu will bring up a screen showing all the transactions currently in the “live” batch and allows the transactions to be selected to be transferred to the hold batch.
When the F6-Process button is pressed, all the transactions marked as Hold will be transferred into the Hold batch.
In a similar way, transferring a transaction from the Hold Batch into a live batch for posting is a matter of selection from the transactions in the Hold Batch and then pressing the F6-Process button.
The Hold Batch is, in fact the Batch with the number 00000. To enable follow up of transactions that have been sent for authorization and as yet haven’t been unheld and posted, we have provided the ability to produce an edit report from the 00000 batch.
To find out more about the PO Hold Batch - Facility
Please Contact Classic on
(08) 9345 0522 or classic@classicinfo.com.au
Some newer Classic users include: 
Australian Energy Company Ltd
Mercator Gold Australia Pty Ltd
Orion Satellite Systems Pty Ltd
Some of the companies listed above have links that will take you to their website…
