• NEW FEATURE: Inventory program 27 (Inventory Adjustment) has a new option called "Used Quantity". This new feature allows you to quickly relieve your inventory of item quantities. You may either specify a quantity to be removed from inventory or select 'Z' to zero the quantity on hand. This option is especially useful in a manufacturing environment where quantities of material must be quickly accounted for as they are being used. The new option is only available when the warehousing feature of Inventory is inactive. The new version of Inventory program 27 is 4.01, the SCFM file is now 4.02, and the ADMESSAG.DAT file is now 4.01.
  
  
• In Inventory program 10 (Discounts) there was a display problem causing some junk to appear on the screen when adding discounts. No program change but the new version of the ADINSCFM.DAT file is 4.02.
  
  
• In Inventory program 36 (Shrinkage/Spoilage) when using the Specific option with the warehousing feature turned off, the program was unnecessarily doing warehouse checks that were making the program both slow and potentially unstable. New version of Inventory program 36 is 4.03.
  
  
• If the Accounts Receivable Sales History Custom Sort Order was set to be a combination of fields that totaled less than 23 characters in length then the report would not print the expected data. In addition, in these circumstances the Custom Key could not be reorganized successfully in System Administrator program 8. New version of Accounts Receivable program 25 (Sales History) is 4.02, new version of program 54 (Custom Sort Orders) is 4.02.
  

• The Canadian government has issued new standards for the way printed checks are to be formatted. They now require that dates printed on checks conform to one of the following formats:

Although RTS-Advantage allows for many different date formats on reports, none of these three were among them. These three date formats have now been added as options and can be chosen for any printed date. To do this go to System Administrator program 11 (Modify Reports), load the report, edit the section containing the date and put your cursor on the date field. Then TAB and choose Specify. You will see a list of the 9 date formats available.

The new root version is 4c00 and the new version of System Administrator program 11 is 4.02. Please note that only Payroll, Accounts Payable and General Ledger are actually included in this patch since they are the only ones that print checks.

If you prefer to not download patches, registered users can order a replacemnt CD from their dealer that contains all current patches.

Click Here To Download This Patch

The New York state changes are minimal except for the Yonkers table. Previously, the Yonkers tables used the alternative method that was based on FWT; to be consistent, the Yonkers tables now use the New York version which means there is a Single and a Married table.

The OASDI change is in the ADPRTAX1.DAT file which is now at version 4.07. Note that the FICA HI table is updated to have the year 2006 in its description but no actual change was made to the table's calculation.

The New York tables are in the ADPRTAX2.DAT file which is now at version 4.06.

Click here to download the tax table patch.

That section of the website has links to instructions on how to use these tables.

Check back as the year winds down; as new tax tables are released by the states, they will be made available through this link.

Tray applications are those applications that are shown as a group of tiny icons in your taskbar, and typically include various hardware drivers, anti-virus programs, internet connections, etc. Of special interest to RTS-Advantage users are the two tray applications that we interact with; the Windows Printer Interface and the X-Charge credit card software. In our testing we found that neither of these applications was able to function normally when we had a full-screen RTS-Advantage running.

The solution, of course, is to not run RTS-Advantage or other DOS applications in full screen mode. For those of you who like full-screen mode because it is easier to read than a windowed RTS-Advantage screen, keep in mind that the windowed version can easily be resized to be practically as large as the full-screen version. Methods of setting the DOS window size depend in their particulars on your version of Windows and your video drivers, but in any case you should be able to right-click in the menu bar at the top of the DOS window and select Properties to set the size of the window (often simply by selecting a larger font size). If you have any trouble with changing the size of your RTS-Advantage window size your dealer should be able to assist you.

A: Because costs are not normally assigned for Inventory items until you update your invoice in Billing program 8, reports in Billing show no cost for these items. Think of it as being an unobtrusive way of saying that the cost has not yet been assigned.

So why is the field there at all? There are actually three circumstances in which you would see a cost on the report. Case one is if you sell a non-inventory item and assign a cost to it when adding it to the invoice. Case two is if you have turned on the ability to edit costs for inventory items in Billing and have manually entered a cost for an item. In either case, the cost you assigned will print on the report. The final case where the cost will print is under the Updated Print option: as Billing program 8 updates invoices, it writes the unit cost back to the item detail, which is then retained until you purge the invoices. This also means that invoices transferred to an archive company will have the unit cost in the file.

By the way, editing costs in Billing for inventory items is most definitely not recommended if you are trying to track costs properly. Keep in mind that your inventory receiving costs that filter through Purchase Orders, Accounts Payable and then to General Ledger should eventually be offset by the costs updated through Billing and then Accounts Receivable. By changing a cost on one side of that equation you create an imbalance that can only be corrected with manual entries in General Ledger to adjust the received costs.

One more tidbit about editing costs. If you edit a cost and then realize that you should not have, you can tell the system to use the Inventory costing by re-editing the Unit Cost field and setting it to 0.00. A cost of 0.00 is considered by the system as a flag telling it to use the normal inventory cost. On the other hand, keep in mind that this means you cannot edit an Inventory item to have a cost of 0.00--the system does not recognize that as anything other than the flag just discussed. The cheapest cost you can assign through the cost editing feature is 1 cent (or even less if your costing decimals are greater than 2).

A: Historically, the picking ticket printed through Order Entry program 3 did not include messages--the purpose of the picking ticket is to give your staff a report to use to pull items to fill orders and message lines were thought to only clutter the report. In version 3.3, we changed that slightly: now, any message lines that immediately follow an item that is printed on the picking ticket will print below that item. Therefore, message lines at the top of an order won't print and message lines below an item that isn't included on the ticket (for example, because it has been fully picked) won't print. If you do not want message lines to print at all, go to System Administrator program 11, Modify Reports, and set the section length to zero for section 20 of the picking ticket. NOTE: Message lines are only printed under the Order option; they are not included when printing the Item or Location option.