Service-Based Companies

OmniAdministrator is itself a service based company and we understand how important customer information is in providing the best experience for the customer. We use our own system to service you and believe it is well suited to help manage and organize other service companies. Service companies come in many forms and have unique requirements. You may be selling time based services or service items. One key to a useful system is the product you are selling and we have two different inventory systems to help organize your services: Item inventory and calendar inventory. Furthermore, all orders allow for custom lines, which basically give you a way to bill your customers for nearly any service and make a description of it on the invoice. In addition, you may be selling both service and spare parts. Think of a auto repair shop, which sell spare parts and labor for the repair. They have to schedule labor by a calendar and invoice for both labor and spare parts used. It is normally difficult to find a system that allows you cover all these bases, but OmniAdministrator does.

Calendar Inventory for time scheduling services

There are actually four different types of inventory systems built into OmniAdministrator; but for most service companies only two, or maybe three, are applicable. The first system is the calendar inventory, then traditional inventory system ( the Item Inventory), and the unique item inventory. The calendar inventory is a bit difficult to explain without an example. So a good example of a Calendar inventory service is a hotel room. It is the same product every day (or every hour for other service products), but the date changes. So you need a way to see what time slots are available for each service products and sell these. Add to this the ability to upsell by putting different prices at high value time slots, just like hotel rooms are more expensive on holidays.

Sales effort

For businesses that sell expensive products and services keeping track of your sales contacts and sales opportunities, plus tracking communication history is very important in helping your sales team service your existing and new customers. Now, there are several off-the-shelf software packages that can do a great job for each person on your sales team. But you should think beyond, way beyond, just the performance of each individual sales person. OmniAdministrator's sales assisting features help you take a team approach to selling. The sales person is key, but in his or her absence other team members can help the customer when they know the order and communication history. Think of it as creating continuity in customer relationships irregardless of the absense of a certain sales/service person or even the retirement of a sales person. Since all the sales communication, sales leads and prospects have been recorded and stored on a web-based system you can easily get a new sales person to replace another. But it goes even further. Imagine making all emails, faxes, letters, order details, sales leads, and other notes from each contact available to the sales and service team with the click of a mouse button from anywhere and anytime. This means your traveling sales team can access and update information, plus send emails from an internet connected laptop or handheld PDA/smartphone. As soon as they generate an email, it will be automatically stored under the appropriate contact and immediately become part of the corporate records. After the email is sent from a PDA, the office sales team can see it and service the customer should he call there. Furthermore, when an email comes in the system looks for a match and automatically places it under the customer record. IT IS ALL ABOUT SHARING CRUCIAL INFORMATION EFFICIENTLY AND EASILY.

Customer Lifecycle Management

This is a very simple concept apply especially to business that rely on repeat sales to the same customers. You may sell the paper clips, fasteners, cups, or any other small items repeatedly to the same customers or you may sell one or two expensive items, such as copy machines, ovens, swimming pools, or similar that will require follow up service for years to come. In either case you have a long established customer connection that you need to on track to provide future revenue and profit. Our system allows you to keep track of all customer communication, order information, and other notes from the first time the potential customer contacts your company to the present. It then allows you to keep track of how the sales lead actually develops into an order or maybe many orders. As the relationship with a customer matures, he may need more services. Since OmniAdministrator stores as much historical information as is entered by the user, all initial customer contact and order information allows your service team to provide better customer service more efficiently; thereby saving you money. Furthermore, you know how important continuety of service is for the customer. You will naturally over time loose sales and service personnell, since OmniAdministrator help store all the sales, service, and order information nearly automatically any new team member in sales and service has a good chance of providing seamless service to the customer. First and foremost you provide the best possible service to the customer and your new team member is up to full speed faster saving you thousands of dollars in training and lost time. As you ponder this, you will realize how this actually improves sales and thereby improves your bottom line.

Order handling

Our order handling feature is a simple and easy way to keep every department; from procurement, re-manufacturing, and sales, to shipping informed about the progress of order. It will often depend on your company how many of the planning features you will be using to help spread order and manufacturing details throughout your organization but for resellers this is normally fair simple. Your spare part sales and shipping departmarts will benefit from an order handling system that helps keep everyone informed about the details including tracking information so you can answer customers questions in an instant. Especially for the spare parts sales it is important to know the order history of the customer, so they can insure that the customer is ordering the correct parts. We all recognize the situation where a customer calls about an unreceived order. In many companies the service or sales person calls shipping, who then spends time tracking the shipping documents. The calls are then reversed and the service or sales person gets back to the customer. This is all a lot of wasted time and resources. With OmniAdministrator the person getting the call can see the ship date right away, then using the tracking information find out what happened to the shipment, which hopefully is that "John Doe" signed for the package "yesterday" in the "morning". Basically, detailed information about orders and shipment helps save you time and resources while providing your customers with better service faster. In addition, instant cost/expense calculations can be very useful to begin gauging your sales force by the profit they generate instead of just sales volume. Learn more about profit based commisions.

Item Inventory handling with cost analysis for each item

There are actually four different types of inventory systems built into OmniAdministrator; but for most resellers only two are applicable.
The first system is the traditional inventory system, or the Item Inventory, which covers regular items. This inventory collects all the normal information, such as Type, Model, Description, Price (including upto 5 quantity discount levels), and so forth. However, what makes our inventory system better for resellers are these additional features:
• Direct link from procurement to sales inventory.
• Costing for materials and labor if you modify the product.
• Generates estimated gross profit for each item and order.
• Estimated overhead costing to estimate net profit.
• Costing linked to Procurement which updates the profit estimates in real time automatically.
• Uploaded pictures of the product.
• Uploaded specification sheets.
• Notes can be attached to each items about the manufacturing process, quality control procedures and more.
• Inventory items can be automatically linked to your e-store.

All these features provide you with a more usable management tool, since it helps you track your potential profits for various items and orders. We believe that many businesses will benefit from moving to profit-based commissions. This will normally lead your sales team to optimize profit first and then sales, which we can all agree that profit in the end is more important than revenue.

Unique Item Inventory for your used equipment

The second inventory that some resellers my benefit from having is Unique Item Inventory, or Auction Inventory. This is exactly what is it sound like: Singular items that is not repeated, which could be: used cars, used machinery, paintings, antiques, consignment, and similar products. One-time inventory items are handled very differently than any other inventory. First, the used piece of equipment is acquired through a purchase,as a trade-in, or on consignment. This piece of equipment has an initial value but will likely be restored and refurbished to increase its value. The costs incurred so it can be re-sold is added to the expenses for the inventory item which will then provide accurate costing information necessary to determine a profit generating price. When adding the actual Auction item to your inventory, OmniAdministrator allows for a date to be entered as the deadline for accepting bids (to increase the price) either online or by phone.

Procurement system integrated into sales inventory

The benefit of this will depend on the size of your company, but especially for reseller who may have multiple suppliers for every item they sell having the procurement system operational allows you to build a detailed database that others can use to help replenish inventory. In addtion, starting to build an extensive database of all your procurement needs will help you hand over this process to others, instead of being the stumbling block for growth. Actually, if you have this procurement database in place you will have these standard benefits:
• Monitor all purchases from multiple team members.
• Track receiving of purchases.
• Track payments of purchases.
• Insure new team members can easily take over duties.

Using OmniAdministrator gives you even more benefits for your purchase department

• More team members and/or managers can monitor purchases.
• All purchase orders can happen from any location and still function as one system.
• Financial integration of payments and payables.
• Keep track of price changes.
• Integrate price changes into sales inventory.
• Real-time adjustments to estimated profits on your sales inventory.
• Each item in your inventory can be linked to each procurement item needed to make this product/service.

OmniAdministrator's procurement system is uniquely designed to help small to mid-size companies handle costing and profit estimates for a large number of products. This is due to the innovative way we link sales inventory to the procurement, because most small to mid-size companies normally recalculate profitability when they think costs have increased. With OmniAdministrator this happens continually everytime the cost of parts and labor expenses change. This means you know when profit is squeezed on any of your products instantly and you save time having to redo your costing calculations periodically. This is revolutionary.

Multiple locations and independent sales agents

After reading above descriptions of each section of the company we would like to take a chance to tie it all together for these resellers that rely on multiple sales locations or even independent sales agent. First it is always a challenge to manage many location and even more difficult to manage many independent sales agents. But the web-based approach to integrating sales, service, order handling, shipping, and more into one web-based system actually allow you to achieve a level of integration that was not possible before. Any sales location or independent sales agent are really treated the same with an independent log-in to your system, but some sales location may have multiple log-ins, one for each person. With todays wireless communication technology a person can access the data and update the system through laptop computers, mobile phones, office computers, internet cafe's and any other browser based connection to the internet. In addition, to having easy access to information you can also monitor their activity. As we expand with multiple location and especially with independent agents we loose control over the work day. OmniAdministrator allows you to see how much a user is accessing the system, which is a map to how much they use it and now much they work. Since every action on getting or updating information on the system is an internet request you can see when and how often they take an action. Furthermore, the problem with independent location or sales agents are supervision and monitoring. First by keeping a detail record of all communication with each customer (yes, phone recording is available as well) you can go back and see how a certain customer is handled and offer advise on how to do this better. The same goes for service calls that are recorded, these can become great teaching tools to help improve the individual and/or team performance. Large businesses has been able to take advange of this for years, but it has been too expensive for smaller businesses until now. Lastly, setting up a Virtual phone system can have immeasurable benefits as well. Imagine you company feeling like one unit eventhough they are located in many places and even with a mobile work force. First the customer calls one number and can get transferred to anyone, including mobile phones. We prefer an operator answering the phone, who better understand the callers needs and simply forwards the call to the right person regardless where he or she is located (same office, another location, a home office, or mobile phone) without the customer feeling the usual disconnection between different locations. learn more about the virtual phone system in the next section.

Virtual phone system (VoIP based)

OmniAdministrator can offer you an integrated virtual phone system (some call it a virtual PBX). This will basically move your
current office phone system to being totally VoIP-based with many benefits. Naturally, after an initial minimum investment towards new VoIP enabled phones, you will probably save up to 80% on your current phone bill depending on which plan you currently have. However, there are many more reasons to move towards a virtual phone system:
• Transfer calls anywhere, including cell phones easily.
• Nearly unlimited incoming and outgoing lines on the same phone number.
• Professional phone system with automated attendant, if desired.
• Have calls ring multiple extensions at the same time. (Sales call may ring all sales assistants at the same time).
• Multiple locations and home offices integrated seamlessly.
• Computer softphone easily integrated for traveling personnel.
• Very low investment, just the cost of VoIP enabled phones. (about $40-$100 per phone).

Imagine upgrading your phone system for 20 people for about $1000 to $1500 and then save between 20-80% on your monthly
phone bill while getting the lastest technology at your fingertips.

OmniAdministrator is not a phone company, but we do offer an integrated phone system. To pass the real low costs on to you we can work with your preferred VoIP supplier. The rates from these VoIP wholesellers is often as low as 1.39 cents per minute in the continenal US. We setup the phone network and the phones over the internet for a low fee per phone while you watch it happening on your computer. Then we charge a simple per minute handling fee to cover our cost of keeping a server operational and for data transfer. Normally this is about 0.58 cents per minute. This means that your actual cost per minute is less than 2 cents, in most cases! What a bargain while having put forth a minimum investment for all the latest features.

Financial integration:

The financial integration is probably one of the greatest benefits of moving your company to OmniAdministrator. Many small to
mid-size equipment companies need different accounting setups. With OmniAdministrator you can choose to run your  purchases/payables and invoicing/recievable as either Accrued or Cashflow-based. Actually, purchases/payables can be setup as
Accrued while Invoicing/recievable can be Cashflow-based. This scenario is especially beneficial for companies who invoice on
odd payment schedules; such as 30% on order, 55% on delivery, and 15% on project completion.

Other very important benefits

• Managers, Executives, and Owners have instant and real-time access to financial data from anywhere and anytime.
• You can limit access for each user.
• Even with multiple locations your organization can act seamlessly together.
• You can setup individual profit centers or cells for managers getting information directly from the accounting system.
• You can divide the work into recievables, payables, and finances without giving access to all.
• You can scan all your documentation and attach this to each financial transaction.
• You can integrate your CPA more efficiently into your daily activities.

Basically, any company benefits by using the financial integrations, but it is especially advantageous when you have multiple financial partners (even silent partners), multiple locations, and traveling managers/executives/owners.