Window Cleaning Software review:
AvailSuite Standard and AvailSuite Personal

Business management software can be a great tool for your window cleaning business, allowing you to keep track of all your data, and easily produce reports for effective control and planning.

It is very important that you pick the right software for your company because it will become the engine of your business. Please find below the review of AvailSuite, service management software for window cleaners.

BusinessWare Technologies has recently completed a significant upgrade to its AvailSuite line of field service software, with comprehensive tax reports, improved user interface, and QuickBooks synchronization.

The company also splitted the standard version of AvailSuite, with its lineup now comprised of Standard and Personal:

•  The Standard version is appropriate for companies from 5 to 50 employees because of its networking capabilities. It organizes customer information, manages products and/or services, schedules and dispatches staff, helps to keep expenses under control, handles invoicing, synchronizes data with QuickBooks, and much more.

•  The Personal version suits micro businesses or one-person companies. It has most features of the Standard version, just for a smaller number of employees.

Pricing for Standard is $299   for a single-user license (with non-limited number of technicians); pricing for Personal is $69.99.

Standard and Personal version are built on the same code base, allowing for instant upgrading or quick migration between them. This supports business growth and allows staying with the same program and avoiding retraining of staff.

Help & Support Options

A new software product requires some time to get familiar and to start working with it. AvailSuite quick start wizard provides excellent assistance during the process of setting up company information, adding employees and customers, creating orders and invoices, entering payments, and running reports. You can choose the “Show me” tutorial movie or the “Do it for me” option. The quick start wizard can be accessed at any time by clicking on the “Quick Start” button on the main menu. This built-in assistance feature and the traditional Help (press F1 button to access) will make starting working with the system very easy. Free unlimited email support is provided for both Personal and Standard versions.

Ease of Use Functionality

The main menu provides seven general areas of work: Sales, Production, Receivables, Payables, Inventory, Reports, and Calendar.

AvailSuite offers several customization features that enable the users to set up layouts of navigation panel and pages. You can hide groups from the main menu or replace them with a small icon and view only those that you use frequently. All pages can be changed according to your needs and ease of use – you can add or hide columns, change their location, sort them out, group the data etc. Just to give you a quick example, the Customers view can include between 1 and 21 columns.

•  Sales

This is the Customer Management module where you can click on each single client and immediately view or add new orders, tasks, invoices, payments, service history and future task dates, default discount, billing address, notes and every thing else you think it is appropriate on a single window. The system provides excellent assistance with the workflow too; when adding an order, for instance, the system will ask you to create a task for it so that you will be able schedule your appointments around it. The Periodic Task Wizard will assist you with scheduling periodic appointments. You will be able to set very flexible patterns for all your tasks; for instance ‘ Visit client X in building A every other Thursday' or Windows on the 2 nd floor of building B every Monday and Thursday of the 2 nd week of the month'

To make sure you keep in contact with your customer base, you can view your regularly scheduled appointments for the next 7 to 10 days and send reminders for service to your customers by email. View also those jobs performed only once with random customers within last month to make a list of those you would like to recall and try to schedule more appointments with them.

All orders have a status, so they could be viewed as Draft orders, Complete Orders, Negotiated Orders, Canceled Orders, and On Hold Orders. You can also get some immediate statistic data about of orders sorted by customers or by periods of time.

Here you can also create invoices. The system keeps all the information about your customers and when creating a new invoice for them, all their billing information will be automatically included and to specify those tasks with outstanding payments you can use the drop down menu. Invoices can also be customized. Just fill in your company settings form and as you need those information, such as company logo and/or a set text you chose, will automatically appear on your documents. All documents may be printed or emailed to clients as PDF files directly from the system.

•  Production

This module manages employees and all expenses made in order to provide your services. You can enter/view all information about your employees such as name, address, photo, working days and time, hourly rate and/or monthly wage; add new task or time card – all in one window.

Employees can also use it to submit working time Reports using the Time Cards functionality. This is a very useful feature to track working time and to be sure that every employee's time claim was accurate.

Employees can have different level of access. You can control of their level of access, you decide whether they can view tasks and submit time cards or not, simply specifying the login name and password in the “System access” tab of the employee card.

•  Receivables and Payables

AvailSuite is what you need for simple accounting functions. In the Account Receivables Module you can scan your customers` debts as well as all invoices and payments sorted by customer and by month. On the Accounts Payments Screen you will see payments due to your vendors and employees and also all invoices from your vendors grouped by status as Drafts, Negotiated, Completed, Cancelled, and On Hold.

•  Inventory

AvailSuite Standard now offers support for multiple warehouse locations, with the ability to track vendors, purchase orders and all products you have with their location, their warranty information, on-hand quantities, prices and everything else you would like to visualize about your warehouse. Using the Vendors Module, you can quickly review your buying history, credit limit and discount offered, and all necessary information about your vendors – their contact info, grace period, terms, and price list.

This feature is much more than just tracking your inventory. AvailSuite notifies you on shortage of items in stock. You can easily create a list of those products you need to be notified about when reaching a predetermined threshold value.

Create and print Purchase Orders, track their status and your payments, view POs grouped by vendor or by month.

•  Reports

This is definitely something you need business management software for. AvailSuite provides about 40 reports about all aspects of business, allowing owners to have key information at their fingertips. Users have one-click access to Profit & Loss report, P&L comparisons, payables aging, purchase orders or whatever items are needed. A menu groups all available reports by various categories such as Sales reports, Receivables reports, Payables reports, Inventory reports. All reports can be exported into PDF, XML, XTML, Word and Excel for further modification.

•  Calendar

This is the one of the features that distinguishes AvailSuite software. It is very flexible and easy to use. It schedules appointments directly on the Calendar screen and coordinates technicians` workload, you can view all the different tasks assigned to your technicians on one screen shot or on a personal base. For each scheduled appointment on your calendar you can set up reminders at different times.

AvailSuite's Calendar has all the point-and-click and drag-and-drop capabilities for easy scheduling. You can move tasks from one day to another with a single mouse movement or re-assign them from one person to another. Change of the task's duration takes only a double click on the task bar that opens a screen with all tasks' details. On the same screen you can also view all unassigned tasks.

Once the scheduling is done, you can print the daily job lists for your employees and get them started.

Expandability

Availsuite knows that tiny business always strive for growth. And this is why an upgrade path is already included in the initial package. AvailSuite will work in a multi-user mode, and adding new users, in fact, is just a matter of buying the appropriate number of user licenses.

If you outgrow AvailSuite Personal, moving up to another product requires little effort. AvailSuite Personal is the best way to start, no other business management software fits with the needs of micro-businesses and start-ups so perfectly.

Data migration

New users can import existing data (customers, vendors, services, and inventory) from their legacy software using Microsoft Excel files. One wizard makes the tedious setup process functional and smooth. If your software can't save data in Excel files, send an inquiry about migration process to BusinessWare Tech's support team. They are currently running a promotional campaign and offering data migration for free.

Customization inquiries

AvailSuite website:
http://www.availsuite.com

AvailSuite demo movies
http://www.availsuite.com/demo

AvailSuite Personal download page:
http://www.availsuite.com/personal/download