Load Your Company Data

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At this point, you should have your hardware and software squared away, become familiar with Windows, reviewed the Lynx Help System, and gotten a feel for how the Lynx software works.

Now it's time to start loading your "real" data into the system.

The first step is to load the information about your company. This includes your employees, your company-wide preferences, your equipment and tanks, taxes, the products you sell and their prices, and your routes.

 

Do the following tasks in this sequence . . .

1. Enter your company data (left-click here for help on this).

• Key in your company name and address. This will show on your reports, invoices, statements, and elsewhere so be sure you enter it the the way you want it displayed.    

2. Load your company logo (left-click here for help on this).

• Load a copy of your company logo. This must be a bitmap file (with a file extension of .bmp) and roughly 315 X 315 pixels in size. Once loaded, your logo will show on the left side of the Lynx Main Menu.

3. Enter your employees (left-click here for help on this).

• Key in the pertinent information about each of your employees as well as any comments you want to record about each.

 

4. Set up your preferences 

Preferences are selections and decisions you make that tell the system how you want to do things.  There are five different categories of Preferences.  Many of these will not be needed or applicable until you've used the system for awhile.  Nevertheless, you should review them now to get a "feel" for the flexibility they give you.  

1. Company Preferences . . . Company preferences have to do with miscellaneous company-wide defaults and choices you want the system to use. Left click here for details.
2. Account Preferences . . . Account preferences deal with how you want to handle each of your customers. For instance, are they active, are they Balance Forward or Open Item, do you charge them finance charges, are they on a budget plan, etc. Left-click here for details.
3. Routing Preferences . . . Routing preferences allow you to make choices about delivery related functions. For instance, what format do you want to use for your delivery tickets, do you want to show delivery history on them, what default return percent do you want to use, etc. Left-click here for details.
4. Vendor Preferences . . . Vendor preferences are only applicable if you are using the Accounts Payable module (otherwise they don't apply). Examples are what default you want to use to find vendors, what style check to use, etc. Left-click here for details.
5. Invoicing Preferences . . . Invoicing preferences are probably the most important choices you will make because they affect many aspects of your day-to-day operations. For example, the default General Ledger accounts you want to use, the format for various invoices, the way you want to enter invoices, the level of detail to include on your statements, etc. Left-click here for details.

 

5. Enter your equipment (left-click here for help on this).

• Key in the pertinent information about the equipment you own such as bobtails, service vehicles, boom trucks, etc.

6. Enter your company owned tanks (left-click here for help on this).

• If you're doing an electronic conversion from your old system to Lynx, you won't have to key in much (if any) tank information. If you're not, you will need to key in the information about each company owned tank and assign it to Account 0 (zero) which is the Yard Account. Later, as a second step, each tank will be assigned from the Yard Account to the individual customer account (left-click here for help on this).

Note: Customer owned tanks are not entered in this way.  Instead, they're entered as a part of setting up the customers account.  Go to Add a Customer Owned Tank to an Account for help on this.

When you're manually entering your customer and company owned tank information, there are two ways to do it.

1. Enter ALL of your company owned tanks to the Yard Account 0 and then as you enter each customer later, assign the appropriate tank(s) to the account.

2. Enter the company owned tank(s) for a single account to the Yard Account 0 and then immediately enter the customer and assign the tank(s) to that account.

Either approach is okay and depends on the organization of your source data and what works best for you.

 

 

7. Enter your tax structure (left-click here for help on this).

• Key in the various individual taxes that apply to your company as well as your Tax Groups. Set up one Tax Group for each unique combination of individual taxes. This might be as simple as a single Tax Group if you have a single tax that applies to all of your customers. On the other hand, if you have customers in multiple combinations of taxing jurisdictions, then you would have several Tax Groups (in other words, you would have as many Tax Groups as there are different combinations of individual taxes). By the way, all individual taxes MUST be assigned to a Tax Group (left-click here for help on this). Tax Groups take a little time to set up initially, but there's a big payoff later in time saved.

After you've set up all of your individual taxes and assigned them to their corresponding Tax Groups, make sure you do the following . . . this is necessary to make sure that your tax reports are accurate and that the reports properly identify which taxing districts the product was sold in (whether tax was charged or not).

1. For ALL of your products, select ALL of the taxes that each product will ever be subject to.

2. For ALL of your customers, select the Tax Group the customer is subject to.

3. Then un-check the individual taxes that do not apply (for both Products and Customers).

4. Do not just leave taxes "_blank" for either products or customers. Your Detail Tax Report needs to have this information to properly catagorize taxed and un-taxed transactions.

 

8. Enter your products (left-click here for help on this).

• Set up each of the various products you sell, including such things as product ID, description, applicable General Ledger account numbers, and the product groups they're each a part of.

9. Enter your prices (left-click here for help on this).

• Set up the individual prices for each of your products.  You can (and probably will) have multiple prices for the same product.

10. Set up your routes (left-click here for help on this).

• If you have your routes set up, enter them into the new system at this time. Identify each route by number and name, assign sequence numbers to each stop and decide on your default "null" route (this is set up under Company Preferences). If you don't have the routes set up yet, they can be entered later.

If you're a start-up company, put all of your new customers in the same route. Then, when you get up to 50-100 customers, you can begin setting up individual routes. By then, you'll have the necessary experience to determine where your customers are located and what makes the most sense in terms of laying out your routes.