Tips & Tricks: April 2007 Archives

One of the new features in FloristWare Version 2.0 is an employee timeclock that automatically keeps track of the hours that your employees work and, if you like, the wages that they earn.

To take advantage of this feature you will first have to enter FloristWare at the manager level and visit your settings. Once there you need to select "Features - Employee Punchclock" and turn it on. FloristWare will be running the timeclock from then on.

Some users have called us because they are not sure about the next step - they don't understand how they get users to punch in and out. The answer is simple - they don't have to do anything! It is all automatic. All the employees have to do is sign in when they arrive in the morning and sign out when they leave at night.

Here is some more detail. When an employee arrives they first thing they should do is "punch in". This just means that they have to go to a computer running FloristWare and sign in. If another user is signed on the new user would simply click the blue User button at the top right hand corner of the screen. FloristWare then starts their "shift".

Punching out involves the same process. The user simply needs to walk over to a station and, if they are already signed in, click the blue User button to sign out. If they are not currently signed in they would have to first sign in and sign out.

Some users have asked what happens if a user gets signed out by another user five minutes after they arrive - does this end their shift? The answer is no. FloristWare starts the shift when the user first signs in and ends it the last time they sign out.

For more information please visit the Support Library.

Earlier in the week a user in our home town had a very interesting problem. She was trying to take an order for delivery to another city about 40 minutes away.

The name of that city (or so we thought!) was St. Catherines. She knew that searching for "St." was trouble so she just searched for "Catherines".

Nothing turned up! This was perplexing because she knew the city existed - it's a pretty good size and she had visited there just a few months ago.

When this happens it almost certainly means that the name was entered incorrectly, so she checked it and was sure she had it right ("Catherines") but it just didn't work.

That's when she called for help. In a case like this the best approach is to assume that there is a spelling mistake - even if you are sure that you have the name right. What you need to do is enter only the first few letters of one of the words in the name.

So in this case we entered "Cather". Still no luck!

We then entered "Cath", and sure enough the city we were looking for turned up. The problems was that the proper spelling for the town is "Catharines" with two A's. Even though we had both been through this city and seen the name hundreds of times we never noticed the somewhat unique spelling.

If you ever find yourself in this situation you should assume that you may have the spelling wrong, and use only a small part of the name to do the search.

Have a great weekend!

Many of you use the "Defer Payment" feature quite often. It is a very handy tool and can make life much easier. The only trick is making sure that you get paid for all those sales!

That's the problem - it's easy to "forget" about a Deferred Payment sale and not collect payment. This is why FloristWare allows you to create a "Deferred Payment" report. It shows you all of the payments that were deferred, the date they were deferred, the customer's name and all of their phone numbers. The idea is that you take this list and start calling the customers who still owe you for deferred payment sales.

Running this report is easy - simply enter at the Manager level, go to the Reports section and choose "Deferred Payments Report". It is a good idea to print it out and keep it by the phone to work at whenever you have time - just keep calling the people that owe you money.

You should run this report at least once a month. Once every two weeks is better and every week is better still - especially if you do a lot of deferred payment sales. It is a fact that the longer you allow an invoice to sit unpaid the less chance you have of getting paid. Stay on top of these deferred payments!