Newsletter - March 2015

Editorial

There is a thought of Autumn in the air and certainly the leaves are starting to fall, unlike the temperature.  We have had Willy Hebandjoko leave us after being our salesman for around two years.  He is off to explore different opportunities, perhaps more in line with his degrees; we wish him well.

In consequence, we have an opening for a trainee salesperson who is computer literate and loves engineering software solutions.  Both Autodesk and Adobe offer excellent online training courses and real qualifications as well!  If you are interested in building a career in this niche, please email Judith your application and CV.

MaxPal Update

MaxPal (called "Pastelizer" until Pastel felt threatened by our promoting their product) is an underused little program that does a big job: Connecting Maximizer CRM (Customer Relationship Management) (desktop version) to Sage Pastel Accounting.  This allows changes in Maximizer to be transferred to Pastel. It can also do regular annual or monthly billing, for example for membership.  This month we updated it to work with the latest versions of Maximizer and Pastel. MaxPal 13.14.0 runs with Maximizer 13 (and earlier versions like 12 and 11) and Sage Pastel 14.0.4 and 14.0.5.

PC Tip: Jedi Mouse Tricks

From Andy Lanning (Subscribe to Computer Super Secrets), continued from last month:

3. The mouse wheel is a clickable button, sometimes referred to as the "Middle Click". In most programs, when you click the wheel it becomes a page scroller and the mouse cursor changes to a black arrow. Then just move your mouse around and the page will obediently follow. To stop the page from moving, just move the mouse wheel, or middle-click again.

4. The middle-click does another cool thing... in a web browser, hover your mouse over a link and middle-click. This automatically opens the link in a new tab. (Much faster than right-clicking the link and choosing "Open in a new tab.")

QuickBooks - Quick Payroll packaged with Pro and Premium

This month, QuickBooks Pro 2015 and Premium 2015 have the Payroll bundled with them.  This is a great opportunity to put your workers onto a fully fledged payroll system and start the new tax year with everything in place.  It is SO much easier to generate your eFiling returns using the Quick Payroll, plus all your IRP5s are generated for your employees and submitted to SARS.  Then, when employees create their tax returns on eFiling, SARS includes these IRP5 forms automatically.

Who wants to take this opportunity to cut down their work and automate everything?  If it's you - please contact Judith for quotes.

Green Tip

Do you know what you are eating?  Do you ever read the labels on pre-packaged food?  If not, please start!  Many pre-packed foods contain high amounts of sugar and salt, never mind unpronounceable chemicals and preservatives.  You may well have seen the debates about how these foods are contributing to obesity and ill-health worldwide.  So check and put your health first!

Autodesk

Just a reminder about the AutoCAD LT and AutoCAD product choices.  For a long time, we have been able to purchase the Design suites on the Desktop Subscription model for either 3 months or a year at a time.  Now these options are available for the two entry level products.  This makes it far easier for start-up businesses to access the software they require, as well as offering a project-bound solution.  When a company is faced with the need to employ extra staff on a contract basis, there is no longer a requirement that they buy the permanent licences.  Rather lease the software for the duration of the project instead.

There are two advantages to this solution:

  1. The cost of the software may be included in the project expenses
  2. The cost of the software is immediately tax deductible, as it is a direct operational expense.

Basically this takes away the need to depreciate software over a three year period and leaves the company with a stronger cash position.  We would like this offering to expand across the entire product range so that we can assist all our SMME customers proactively in meeting the demands of their customers effectively.

Please contact Judith for quotes.

Autodesk Subscription Overview

This month we will look at the Desktop subscription offerings and what they mean for the subscriber.

Desktop Subscription

This is the solution to managing projects which require software for 3 months to a year or where contractors or interns are used for short periods. They come in three flavours:  Annual, Half-yearly and Quarterly.  They are available for AutoCAD, AutoCAD LT (also for Mac in both cases) and all the Design Suites.  They come with either Basic or Advanced Support.  The latter support option gives direct support as opposed to the 24 hours response for Basic.  This means that problems are solved faster, as you have telephone access to the support desk.

Desktop Subscriptions are very flexible: You can have them for the life of the project and you do not need to renew them until you require another subscription for a new project.

If you have this kind of requirement, please contact Judith for quotes.

For more information go to https://360.autodesk.com/landing and https://www.autodesk.com/subscription/overview.

Excel Tip #132 - The View tab (IV): Window Group, Part 2

Last time, we started viewing, on the "View" tab, the large group "Window".  In this exciting episode, we continue with View Side by Side:

The Window group has these buttons that we have not yet considered:

Next time, we will talk about the Macros group and button.

Computius Say:

The SMS read, "Dear XXX Client, please note that we will be having a price increase on 1 April 2015. To opt out reply stop."

So Computius replied "stop" to opt out of the price increase...

Remember:  We can make your business run better by:

All the Best from the team!
Judith and Rick

Members, Communication in Action cc trading as Software Africa
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