888-595-3818
www.elliott.com
Targeting companies with $5 to $100 million in revenues, Elliott 7.2 from NETcellent Systems Inc. fits many industries. Its core strengths are distribution and light manufacturing. Built from licensed Macola Software, NETcellent expanded its capabilities significantly, building a hybrid GUI/text solution that is keyboard-fast and feature-rich. Elliott utilizes the Pervasive database.
The General Ledger (GL) offers 15-character accounts that allows up to eight characters each for the main account and two subaccounts (segments). Statistical accounts are not supported. Up to 99 budget revisions can be tracked. Budgets can be imported from a spreadsheet. Other budget options include progressive growth, same amount for all periods, and other common timesavers. Multi-entity consolidation supports percent merger and mapping non-identical charts. Bank Book offers an exceptional report called Cash Projection. In addition to customer invoices, it takes into account unpaid vendor invoices and purchase orders to generate true cash expectations/requirements.
Accounts Receivable (AR) offers typical features, plus individual/shared invoice formats and recurring invoices (monthly, every N days). AR also tracks customer and sales rep statistics, including period and prior year sales, cost of goods sold, returns, average days to pay, and commissions. Accounts Payable (AP) mirrors AR. In addition, it tracks invoices by job and profit center. Vendors can be filtered several ways when selecting invoices to pay. You can defer an invoice if desired. AP supports MICR and electronic funds transfer through partner applications.
Inventory stands out because of its extensive capabilities, far more than can be covered here. In addition to typical capabilities, Elliott supports matrices for categories and subcategories to track such things as size and color, bar codes (on reports, labels), and data import from hand-held devices (sales orders, shipping confirmations, physical counts and more). Multiple pricing options are available, including retail price and cost-based prices, date-released future prices and promotion pricing. Availability quantities include on-hand, on-order, allocated to customers (or work orders, and more. Forecasting methods allow you to compute future inventory balances or to employ exponential smoothing to calculate reorder levels based on sales usage statistics, safety stock, lead time, etc.
Customer Order Processing (COP) is robust. In addition to typical capabilities, it reserves inventory without creating an order and e-mails acknowledgments to customers. You can also e-mail shipping notifications, but the process is easier with the Starship Manifest module because it automatically passes the tracking number to Elliott (which includes it and a carrier link in the e-mail). Exceptional features include automatic (or on-demand) viewing of accessory items linked to one just ordered (e.g., batteries and bags for a camcorder), and the ability to view future inventory by date when making a promise to a customer. COP supports 17 commission codes and 10 levels of break points, effective dates for commissions, rate per line item and more. Finally, you can view virtually any customer, inventory, sales history or other information needed while entering an order.
Purchase Orders supports regular, blanket and drop-ship purchase orders. Drop-ship sales orders automatically generate the purchase order in a two-step requisition/purchase order process. Receipts update inventory in real-time or in batches.
Reporting options include Crystal Reports and a WYSIWYG laser form designer. Output options include e-mail, ‘defer’ and ‘spool to disk.’ E-mailed reports are text file attachments. Defer allows you to stack reports to print; save reports with filters for reuse later; and schedule the date, time and frequency for printing. Spool to disk is a special paperless office implementation that automatically names files (not in *.PDF format).
Web-based tools include eStore and eOrder, online solutions for customer and business partners to place orders and check their status. ActiveX components are available for custom web applications.
Running throughout Elliott are features collectively called Relationship Management. These include eContact Manager, Notes, Tickler (to-do), Link (link anything to a record and assign a hot key), Attribute (user-defined fields) and Event Handling. The last capability supports business alerts for internal and external parties. For example, you can notify customers via e-mail when an out-of-stock item is now available; inform buyers when items fall below minimum levels; and display a reminder of a free gift for the first 100 customers. Notification options include e-mail, displayed message and adding a tickler to a person’s to-do list.
Menu navigation utilizes drop-down menus. Data screens are GUI but employ a text metaphor for maximum keyboard speed. The numeric keypad, Escape key, function keys, Enter/Tab/Arrow keys are all available. Clicking the right mouse button brings up a con-text-sensitive menu for fields.
Help is good but available only for conventional windows. For add-in functionality, you must use *.PDF manuals (installed with your software). Help layout needs some work; the monospaced Courier font and little formatting makes scanning hard. Printed and *.PDF manuals are available. While offering fair content, their screens and sample reports are too small. Overall, Elliott is a dark horse contender with surprising robustness.
2004 Overall Rating: 5
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