New enhancements to most widely used online business application make it easier to run a growing business
SAN MATEO, CA, October 14, 2002—NetLedger, Inc., today announced a new release of Oracle Small Business Suite, which significantly enhances the solution's functionality, ease of use, and reporting. These significant new features and enhancements were prioritised based on input from customers. Current users of Oracle Small Business Suite automatically receive this upgrade free of charge.
All aspects of Oracle Small Business Suite benefit from the new enhancements including: Sales Force Automation, Customer Relationship Management, Web Store, Order Management, Employee Center, and Accounting and Payroll. These new features and enhancements focus on usability, Customisation tools and reporting capabilities. With 5,500 companies using Oracle Small Business Suite, NetLedger is the leading provider of an integrated back office/front office online suite of applications. Important features in this new release include:
Functionality enhancements
This release includes major new functional enhancements that were prioritised based on customer requests. The top requested features in this release include direct deposit, electronic funds transfer, multiple ship capability, enhanced Web Site Customisation, and flexible reporting additions.
Advanced usability and workflow
New features include drop-down menus and streamlined data entry forms, which greatly enhance ease of use. Oracle Small Business Suite also includes pre-defined "centres" for each user type — a Support Center, Sales Center, Accounting Center, etc. These centres have portal user interfaces that reflect job functions and speed the workflow within and between centres. Unlike competing products, Oracle Small Business Suite has flexible roles and permissions that allow users to create centres that give their employees just the feature set they need to do their job. No time is wasted on wading through menus to find the information they need.
Flexible Customisation
Users now have the ability to customise terminology to match their company's needs; for example, they can change an "estimate" to a "quote." Additionally, users can create custom fields to track information that is specific to their business and can customise forms such as invoices and sales orders by adding custom fields, hiding existing fields and modifying the layout of the form. "After a year of being an Oracle Small Business Suite customer, I have been impressed by how responsive NetLedger is," said Robert Ferrand, owner of SaddleTech, a manufacturer of horse and saddle measurement instruments. "Whenever a part of the product could be enhanced, it happens. Thanks to improvements in the Oracle Small Business Suite, my business is being simplified, my marketing strategy is improving and — as a welcome surprise — I'm saddling more horses than ever before."
"Our customers told us they wanted better usability, reporting and advanced technology, and in this release they got that and much more," said Zach Nelson, president of NetLedger. "With this release of Oracle Small Business Suite, the best solution for running a small business just got a lot better."
In more detail, important enhancements made to Oracle Small Business Suite include:
In Sales Force Automation and Customer Relationship Management:
Marketing
Enhancements to the promotion code feature gives users the ability to track separate promotion codes for each individual transaction, and allows them to track ongoing marketing campaigns and to manage promotions after customers have been acquired.
Customer Center
New "Extranet" feature allows businesses to publish information and share documents with individual customers, or groups of customers.
Partner Center
New "Extranet" feature allows businesses to publish information and share documents with individual partners, or groups of partners. In conjunction with the existing customer registration and reporting capabilities, a business can more effectively manage their channel relationships and customer acquisition opportunities with their partners.
Vendor Center
New "Extranet" feature allows businesses to publish information and share documents with individual vendors, or groups of vendors. In Accounting:
Direct Deposit
New feature allows businesses to give employees the option of direct deposit for their paychecks.
Electronic Funds Transfer
Businesses can let their customers pay bills electronically.
Multiple Addresses
Businesses can store multiple "bill to" and "ship to" addresses for their customers, vendors and partners and select them when creating transactions.
Locations
Locations have been added to provide a third level, along with department and class, of classification for business information.
In Web Store:
Re-designed Checkout Flow
The checkout process in the Web Store has been enhanced to improve usability. Customers can now enter and/or select from multiple addresses stored in their customer profile.
Related Items / Cross-Sell
Businesses can now cross-market related products and display them on the appropriate pages in their store to increase sales.
Real Time UPS Integration
UPS integration allows users to automatically calculate exact UPS shipping charges when orders are entered or when customers buy from their Web store. In addition, users can easily add additional handling charges and even allow their customers to follow orders with UPS tracking numbers.
In Employee Management:
Intranet
This new feature allows any information (e.g. Departmental, Human Resource or other employee-related documents) to be published directly to users from within their user centre. Content tabs appear alongside the tabs containing Oracle Small Business Suite application functions ensuring that information is available to employees with a click of their mouse.
Personalised Content
This is an extension of the Intranet capabilities. Personalised Content allows businesses to define who can see information published to employees to allow the creation of secure intranet pages to which only specific employees have access.
Employee Directory
Businesses can now automatically publish contact information for all their employees, which is available in each user's centre.
Oracle Small Business Suite is one completely integrated application to help small businesses manage their entire company more efficiently, including accounting and finance, sales and service, Web presence, and employee management. Companies can save time and money by utilising one centralised and up-to-date database, ending the headache of using multiple incompatible applications. With anytime, anywhere Web access, the award-winning solution is the first and only multi-user, multi-location, complete small business management solution.
Pricing and Availability
Oracle Small Business Suite Version 8.0 is available late October at www.netledger.com. The Suite is priced at $1200/year for the first user, and $50/month for each additional user.
Follow NetSuite’s Cloud blog, NetSuite’s Facebook page and @NetSuiteAPAC Twitter handle for real-time updates.
For more information about NetSuite please visit www.netsuite.com.au.
NOTE: NetSuite and the NetSuite logo are service marks of NetSuite Inc. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.