Whether you're entering the data yourself or have a few people in your office who handle your data entry, it's important to know your options for capturing the information that is important to your agency.

What you enter is often determined by what, when, and how you receive the orders, invoices, and/or commissions from your manufacturers. 
What data do you receive?

• Commission reports
• Orders - individual order forms or order reports
• Shipping reports - individual shipment notices or shipping reports

What's included?

• From: bare minimum - total sales & commission by customer
• To: a lot of detail - PO#, Order#, Invoice#, Dates, Line Item Details, Sales, Discounts, Customer, End User

When do you receive the data?

• daily
• weekly
• monthly

How do you receive the data?

• paper copies by mail or fax
• digital copies individually or via a report 
  • variety of report formats (.csv, .xlsx, .pdf, etc)

The answer to these questions, along with what you want to capture, will determine the data entry option you choose.  

The Discount Field in Order Entry has two options:

1. Discount by %
2. Discount by $

​If you would like to capture additional information on an invoice, so you have it there for future reference or to send to a partner when you are capturing Orders, a good place to put it as a Line Item on the Invoice.  Line Item Descriptions have always been customized for such things as private label goods or product variations that are available from the vendor, but there is nothing to say we can't make available any kind of detail about the order that could be helpful.

The checkbox originally called "Paid" has been renamed "Issued" in an effort to reduce confusion with the Payment Entry screen, to which Issued is unrelated.

Invoice Entry 

Functionality has been added to the Invoices in MRSware to designate them as Issued or Not-Issued.  The intended use of this checkbox is to indicate the state of an invoice for those Users who may do any of the following:

1. enter an order before an invoice is shipped,
2. enter an invoice before a manufacturer sends the agency a copy,
3. generate their own invoices to customers, or
4. have other special-case invoices that need to be logically separated from other, paid invoices.

This checkbox is simply an indicator for the User, so that they can differentiate a group of invoices from the others.  Such as, "the Invoices with the Issued box not checked are ones that are waiting for confirmation from the vendor; when I get confirmation, I check the Issued box".

The Generic CSV Invoice Import Wizard saves time and entry errors by allowing you to take a spreadsheet, convert it to a free-form Comma Separated Values (CSV) file and translate the data into MRSware invoices. 

Invoice Import Wizard User Manual


Because MRSware is not a static entity, parts of the User Manual may be out of date.  Check back periodically to view the new additions and changes to the User Manual.

Conflicts may occur during the invoice import process.  The Conflict Resolution User Manual shows you how to resolve these conflicts.

Conflict Resolution Manual

Because MRSware is not a static entity, parts of the User Manual may be out of date.  Check back periodically to view the new additions and changes to the User Manual.

​The "Bulk" → "Update Customer" feature can be used to apply an account number to all of the selected invoices, for a customer, in the Invoice Entry screen. 

​To add an account number to many invoices at the same time:

1. In the Invoice Entry screen, pull up the invoices that are missing the account number for one customer. 
2. If you have multiple customers who need account numbers added, sort on the Customer Name column to group invoices together for the same customer. 
3. Multi-select the invoices you want to assign the account number to. 
4. Right-click one of the selected invoices and choose "Bulk" → "Update Customer". 
5. Enter the Customer Name and click the box with the three dots at the right end of the Account field and the Edit Customer dialog will open showing the account numbers for each manufacturer the customer is buying from.  
6. Enter the Account number in the "Account" field in the Bulk Assign Customer dialog and click "Save".

If the customer is a new customer for the manufacturer you can enter the name of the manufacturer and the account number in the "Edit Customer" dialog, click "Add" and then enter the information in the Bulk Assign Customer dialog.


Once the Save button is pressed, the entered account number will be applied to all of the selected invoices, and the screen will refresh.  Pull back up the list of invoices to confirm the account number was applied as desired.

​Following are the instructions on how to enter an invoice with sales and commission totals:

1. Go to Invoice Entry in MRSware.

There are 2 ways to do this:

a - Go to the Shortcuts panel and scroll to and click on "Invoice Entry" (screenshot to the left)

b - Go to the Shortcuts tool bar and click on the "Invoice Entry" icon (screenshot to the right)

​When you receive your commission reports from your manufacturers, do you reconcile the payments?  There are times when you are not paid the amount you thought you were going to be paid; Payments tracks this difference and helps your agency keep up with what is due, what's been paid, and forecast revenues to come.
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There are a few situations when a different amount is shown on the commission report than is shown in MRSware.  In these situations you can enter a partial payment, you can adjusted the commission amount, or both.

This article walks through several example that would typically be encountered when doing commission reconciliation.  While all of the examples are fun, and very detailed, you may want to skip ahead to the one that applies to what you are working on:

Scenario 1: change the commission due to match what you are being paid
Scenario 2: enter a partial payment of the commissions due
Scenario 2A: enter a second partial payment that matches what was due
Scenario 2B: enter a second partial payment and make the commission due match the totals paid
​Scenario 3: enter a partial payment when there are multiple line items
    Option 1 - spread the payment across all line items
    Option 2 - apply the payment to a single line item
​

​If you see  an error message that says "please select a customer", this means that the name typed into the Customer field didn't Auto-Complete.  You can tell that is the case right away by the red or green underline that appears under the name. 
 
A red line means that there is not a customer with this name in the system.  In this case, you would first check the spelling -- if the name is spelled wrong, then it won't match.  Try reducing the number of letters you type to just the first part of the name, if you are not sure how the whole is spelled.  Of course, the red line could also mean that the customer just hasn't been entered into the system yet.  In this case, you would click the button to the right of the Customer name field and select "New Company...", which will give you the entry form to create the company in the system.
 
The Green underline means that there are multiple possible matches to what you typed.  This is very common with customers that have branch locations -- each branch entry usually starts with the same name and then ends with the location.  If you see the green underline, right-click on it and select the correct customer from the drop-down list.  If there are more than a dozen or so possible matches, then you will see the "Open Contact Selector" choice in the menu, which will open all the results in an easier to browse dialog.  The next time you go to enter a branch location where you have multiple matches and the green underline, enter the part of the name that is different than the other branches.  For example, for "ABC Distribution Oakland" and "ABC Distribution Sacramento", enter "ABC Oak" to get the exact match for the Oakland branch.
 
Besides right-clicking on the underlined names, another way to do the same thing is to use the button on the right-side of the Customer name field.  In addition to the "New Company..." selection to create a new entry, there is the "Find" option which will open up the Contact Selector dialog and allow for searching and browsing existing entries.

​On the Advanced Invoice Search screen, Users have the ability to search for all of the invoices that were imported as part of a particular invoice import file.  This allows the User to easily pull up every invoice imported as part of a file, even when those invoices could have come from different months.


Go to the "Search" menu, select "Invoices".  On the bottom-right, in the "Import Batch" area, enter the file name used for the import into the "File Name" field.  All invoices that were imported from a file with a matching name will be pulled up in the Invoice Entry listing.

​Want to get a list of Customers that have purchased this year but didn't purchase anything last year?  We will call these "New" Customers, and can pretty easily get this right in the Customer Listing.  Here is how:


In Customer Listing:

1. Make sure your YTD 2011 column is changed to reflect the entire year by changing the sales summary dates from the "Customers" menu.
2. Click on the 2011 column header to sort bottom-up by dollar amount (everyone with $0 in 2011 is now at the top of the list.
3. You should now see all the new customers listed at the top of the list ($0 last year, more than $0 this year). You can further make it look pretty by using the filter function:
   • Right-click on a blank ($0) box in the 2011 column and select "Filter" -> "By Selection" to show just $0 in 2011.
   • Right-click on a blank ($0) box in the 2012 column and select "Filter" -> "Excluding Selection" to show everyone that has more than $0 in the current year.

 
There is you nice, clean New Customers list. You can also use the "File" -> "Save As" menu to save this list out to a spreadsheet if you like.  Since you created this list in Customer Listing, it has the sales dollars, assigned sales rep, as well as the contact information like email address and business address -- so many possible marketing, thank you letter, etc. uses are possible.
 
 
Note, of course, that this is only taking into account last year vs this year; some of these "New" Customers could in fact be "Returning" Customers, having purchased goods years prior to last year.  To get a longer picture of the purchase history, further adjust the Sales Summary Dates right here in Customer Listing to look at a longer time range.

Sales and commission tracking is one of the major reasons rep firms use MRSware.   The tracking process entails entering invoice data into Invoice Entry, reconciling commissions in Payment Entry, reviewing data via Report Explorer or Data Analysis.

Throughout MRSware you have the ability to type a company or contact name into a variety of Contact fields: Company cards, Contact cards, Contact selectors in Journals, Projects, Appointments, Tasks, Opportunities, Campaigns, Invoices, E-mail To fields, as well as the Contact Selector fields you use to link companies and contacts to Journals, Appointments, Projects, etc., and Search fields  All these fields not only offer Auto Complete options, but also offer a text control with context sensitive hints. 
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What this means is that if you type in part of a name and click on the Tab or Enter key, the system will finish filling out the name for you (Auto Complete).  However, when there is more than one match or if there is no match in the system for the name you typed in, then you will see a squiggly colored line under the name (Text control with context sensitive hints).
Below are examples of text control with context sensitive hints and how to use these hints.

In order to make the most of the little amount of time you have with a customer, I'm sure you review his/her activities and sales prior to your meeting.  MRSware has 2 reports that provide that information. 

In this post we will go over how to open a Customer Snapshot.

​In the system there are 3 commission columns/calculations that are done automatically: a) Total Commission, b) Agency Split, and c) Sales Rep Split.  These three commission calculations are shown on various reports and in data analysis.
 
a) Total Commission is the amount of commissions paid to the agency by the manufacturer.
 
b) Agency Split is the amount credited within the agency to itself, or the "House", when the sales rep is paid some portion (the split) of the commissions paid to the agency by the manufacturer.
 
c) Sales Rep Split is the amount that the sales rep is paid, his portion of the commissions paid by the manufacturer.
 
These split cases are only used when you pay the sales rep a split of the commissions.  For example, a salaried sales rep may not be paid any split of the commissions, and so his split rate would be set to 0 (0%).
 
There are 3 places that the split rate can be set: d) Sales Rep Management, e) Customer Listing, and f) Invoice Entry.  Those three places are listed in order that they take effect, for example a setting in Invoice Entry overrides any setting in Customer Listing or Sales Rep Managmenet; a setting in Customer Listing overrides a Sales Rep Management entry; and a Sales Rep Management entry is the default for all cases where it is not overidden in one of these other places.