Real-Time Accounting (RTA) from UBCC delivers a solid multi-company solution. This GUI or text application runs in over 700 environments, from DOS, Unix and Linux to all flavors of Windows. It employs C-ISAM files with dynamic and lightning fast access. RTA also supports up to 10,000 simultaneous users.
The General Ledger (GL) offers financial and statistical accounts with up to nine digits. It supports up to five years of budgets, as well as prorating annual budget amounts and increasing last year’s budget by a percentage. Other options are available or in development, including importing budgets from spreadsheets. One exceptional feature is that RTA tracks budgets, transactions and accounts with separate debit and credit amounts, not a single net balance. A good set of financial statements is available, including 12-month or five-year side-by-side comparative statements. RTA also imports bank statements for fast reconciliation. Through this module, you can also write and hold future period checks, saving time later.
Accounts Receivable (AR) delivers typical capabilities, including repetitive billing, user-defined fields, extensive customer history, and product and sales codes. Summary and detailed reporting of sales, cost of sales, gross margin and more is available by period, product line, territory, location, customer or any combination. eStatements allow you to e-mail HTML (or text) format statements (including color and graphics). E-mailed invoices will be added in 2004. AR supports electronic funds transfer payments. Accounts Payable (AP) mirrors AR, supporting electronic funds transfers, good vendor payment selection options, and MICR checks with logos and digital signatures. Both of the AR and AP projected cash reports are based on invoice due dates. A cash requirements report that also takes into account purchase orders is in the works.
Inventory delivers good features, including multiple locations, active and reserve bins, consignment inventory, unit conversion tables, and much more. All standard valuation methods are supported. You cannot link files to items. For each vendor, the module tracks pricing structure (prices can be imported from vendors), minimum order, lead times, etc. You can reserve stock for customers and track it to completion. This real-time perpetual inventory system supports minimum/ maximum and reorder points, monitors overstocks, displays warnings for stock depletion, produces bar codes, and imports scanned data from hand-held devices. Good pricing options are available, including pricing policies for user-defined families of products. Extensive history and statistics allow you to cross-tabulate information by month, product, sales rep and more.
Order Entry (OE) delivers solid capabilities, including support for point of sale and cash drawers. During entry, a sales rep can check availability (on-hand, on-order), take advantage of extensive lookup options, substitute products, enter unlimited items per order, and more. Inventory not yet on the shelves can also be sold. OE checks customer credit automatically. A warning can be overridden with a password override. You can set minimum margins for items as desired. Five levels of sales taxes per state are supported. E-mailed orders, acknowledgments and other documents are in testing. Commissions calculate on net sale or gross margin, and can be paid on booked orders or paid invoices. RTA supports commissions by line item, and up to nine sales reps can split a commission. Purchase Orders parallels OE, delivering similar depth of capabilities.
RTA offers an extensive group of reports with strong filter options. A built-in free-form report generator (not WYSIWYG) provides access to over 6,000 data fields and supports math and Boolean logic. You can also export data to Excel. Reports can be stacked to print, and reports with filters can be saved. Scheduling reports to print on a date/time and frequency is in development. Output options include a *.PDF File Cabinet, an electronic file cabinet that sports automatic document naming (date, company, program). eReports, the ability to e-mail reports, is in testing.
RTA offers built-in ASP portal capability for access by customers, vendors and employees. No alert function is available, except for an inventory reorder alert that displays a message window.
Menu navigation belies RTA’s long history: drop-down menus, list menus in GUI and text format and more. It does not currently offer a tree-style menu. A long-term timesaver is mnemonic codes that jump over menus to a task. The GUI interface is not exactly Windows standard, but the look and feel is there, from tabbed screens to mouse access.
(The company indi-cated that addition of GUI screens will be completed in 2004.) RTA supports both GUI and text interfaces on a user-by-user basis, allowing each to use their past experience to reduce the learning curve. In fact, virtually everything about the interface is under user control via extensive preferences. Data-entry screens support up to 26 keys for each data group (including user-defined fields), and keys can be changed on-demand.
Help is good but not universal for all screens and fields. Manuals (printed and *.PDF) deliver a methodical and consistent mix of guide and reference information, but some lack tables of contents and indexes, and some screen shots are fuzzy. For companies that want a capable system and don’t want to be tied to a single environment, RTA is a choice to consider.
2004 Overall Rating:
Thanks for reading CPA Practice Advisor!
Subscribe Already registered? Log In
Need more information? Read the FAQs
![ut_austin_house_for_rent_1_.5713d02d8e979[1]](https://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/34677/use_for_rent_1_.5713d02d8e979_1_.5d5453fd9945a.png)
