Group Discount module in TUHUND

TUHUND’s Discount group module helps you to set discount groups and offer discounts dynamically. You can have en-number of discount groups based on the customers and based on the sales you make.  They can be Cash Discounts, Credit Customers and Special Discount for example. Cash Discount allows the users to give the customers cash discounts based on the quantity and the customers with whom you deal with. Credit customers are those customers to whom you give credit sales and a discount on the purchases they make from you. This discount depends on the credit limit. If the credit limits is more, then the discount rate is calculated at the lower mark and if the credit limit is less, you can give the customer higher rate of discount. Special discounts are given where there is a special occasion, introduction of a new product in the market or during the stock clearance sales. Discounts can be applied to your existing customers by selecting them from the list of customers and then click on the check-box next to the customers. You can create a new discount group from the discount page in sales module and add more customers to the discount group. The discount group home page displays the list of discounts you have already set for the customers in your organization. You have options to Edit, Delete and Add a New Group in the discount Group home page.

Marketing Campaign module in TUHUND ERP

TUHUND’s marketing campaign module helps you to organize, manage and execute your e-mail marketing campaigns by providing a user interface where you can manage campaigns and select the periodicity and number of e- mails to be sent. Whatever you need to do for running an effective campaign is there in the marketing campaign module. Be it an HTML editor, calendar to choose the days to start or to enter the specific number e-mails to be sent per day, it’s all there in TUHUND. Enter the description for the E-Mail, set the content and select the day to start the campaign, servers will automatically start sending the mails on selected day as per your instructions and send exactly the same number of e-mails on a regular interval.

All you need to do is go to the Sales module, select the Marketing campaign option. A user interface with the fields to enter the name of the campaign, description, campaign start date, and a field to enter the number of E- Mails to be sent on a day is displayed. Enter all the details in the specific fields and click Save. The E-mail is ready to be fired now. Once you are ready, you can go to the main page and test fire the mail and see whether the mail is appearing as desired. If everything is fine click the Activate button to activate the Marketing Campaign and send the mails to the desired recipients.

Cost Centers in TUHUND – Cost Accounting Made Easy

Just like rest of the modules in TUHUND, cost center accounting is very simple and you do not have to be a finance expert to work with it. Typically cost center accounting is more basic than management accounting and it does not have to be directly linked to the financial statements. However, some companies do link them. While most of the ERP systems available provide one of the two methods, TUHUND Accounting and Finance module gives you both the options. You may use any one or a combination of both.

Traditional definitions of cost centers use technical jargon while we always try and avoid that. In plain English cost center management has two purposes. On one hand it helps an organization with optimum utilization of funds and to eventually cut down on the costs and on the other it helps determine actual cost of products thus giving an input for the planning of selling price. With TUHUND Accounting and Finance module, at any point of time, users authenticated to work with cost centers can get the reports that can be elaborated and expanded along various axes. You can check the actual transactions, costs under various heads or periodic reports like yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily. You can even generate reports for groups of cost centers and categorize cost centers. You can even set warnings and triggers.

TUHUND Financial cost accounting reports are generated at run time. That means if you remove a particular account from a cost center, all previous transactions will also be removed as they will shift under new cost center or not considered a cost big enough to be monitored. Therefore, it is not necessary to create cost centers before transactions are made. This is better way of managing cost centers but has a drawback. You will eventually end up creating too many accounts, your trial balance will have more number of records and the schedules for your balance sheets will be longer. Otherwise, this method gives you reports that have legal validity and match cent to cent with your financial reports. If you are into a business where number of customers and vendors is not very large, you should go for this approach. Once again, if this approach suits only a part of the organization like a business entity, few entities, a branch or few branches, you may adopt it for such entities or branches only. Even for a particular branch you can close to adopt a mix of both approaches.

In the management cost accounting approach, cost centers will have to be defined first and accounts attributing to the cost assigned to each cost center. Percentage of transaction under an account for each cost center can be defined in advance and the respective value will be pre-populated at run time. However, the value can be changed. Let me explain that with an example.

Suppose you have a factory defined as a branch under TUHUND and there are two CNC machines in the factory. Your average monthly electric bill has been $1000 so far and you know that out of $1000 machine A consumes power worth $600, machine B consumes $300 and remaining $100 is consumed by lighting and other electric appliances. You have a cost center named cost of running A and other cost center named cost of running B. Besides other accounts attributing to the two cost centers, Electric bill attributes 60% and 30% to the two cost centers respectively. Suppose for a particular month you receive a bill of $2000. When you select the electric expense account under the debit side in the form, all the cost centers affected by the transaction will automatically appear below the transaction. In this case we have defined only two cost centers so only two will appear. These will be pre-populated with values $1200 and $600 respectively. You will be free to correct the values. Suppose you know that you had a big order to deliver and that only machine A had to run 20 hours a day while machine B continued to run only 8 hours a day for the entire month. You will have to change the values accordingly, which in this case will be $1500 and $300 respectively.

Though normally you can create as many cost centers as you like and under as many categories as you like, several modules like Project Management module auto create cost centers automatically. It might sound "not so big" but it actually saves a lot of time.

So for those who say cost accounting is complicated, expensive and unnecessary, there is a news. With TUHUND Accounting and Finance module, cost accounting is neither complicated nor expensive. As far as being necessary or unnecessary is concerned, you can decide that. After all, whether you make a profit or not is a matter of choice. Your Choice! :)

The best way of entering opening balances in TUHUND – ERP

At the onset I would like to clarify that entering opening balances is a one time job for those companies or their legal business entities or branches that have been doing business prior to the implementation of TUHUND. It does not have to be repeated ever again. I would also like to clarify that normally ECS helps the customer with entering previous data including opening balances as part of the TUHUND implementation. The customer may choose to enter the data for any business entity, entities, branch or branches of the enterprise only if that is needed.

TUHUND Accounting and Finance module does not allow single point entry as that would result in error in the trial balance, correcting which is a cumbersome process. TUHUND has been built in such a way that even a person with minimal accounting knowledge can manage accounting. Therefore, accounting errors are prevented rather than just providing ways to correct them. In TUHUND Accounting and Finance module trial balance would always match and the purpose of proving trial balance in TUHUND Accounting and Finance module is to make those users comfortable who are used to derive information from trial balance. With TUHUND Accounting and Finance module that is not actually required as it gives you financial and management accounting reports including balance sheets, profit and loss statements and trading accounts in real time and with drill down capability. It also gives you accounts receivable and accounts payable with age warning and reminders.

There are two equally good ways of entering opening balances in TUHUND Accounting and Finance module. The right choice depends on the availability of balance sheets for the financial years prior to the implementation of TUHUND. The two methods are explained as follows:

Method 1 : One time entry

This method is suited if you have audited balance sheets along with the schedules of the financial year prior to the implementation of TUHUND available at the time of entering the opening balances. You can enter entire balance sheet through a single form as TUHUND Accounting and Finance module offers you unlimited debits and credits in the same transaction as long as the transaction is balanced. As this entry cannot be shown under any of the traditional accounting vouchers, you will need to create a new voucher. You may call this voucher "opening balances" or whatever you like. You will then need to create a new accounting form with any name, but calling it something like "opening balances entry form" will avoid any confusion later. After the form is created, you will have to enter all the ledger groups on debit side or credit side respectively. It is better to add all the groups on both sides as this form will anyway not be used in future. You also do not need to allow access to this form to any other user as nobody will need access to it. After the form is created, you are free to enter entire balance sheet in one go. Once the entries are made, you can deactivate the form.

You will have to repeat the process for each branch or legal business entity. It is neither necessary to use this method for all the branches if you are using it for a few nor is it necessary that one person or one office does this job. It is all in the hands of the management whom they will assign this task to.

Method 2: Balancing method.

This method is suited if you do not have the audited balance sheet of the financial year prior to the implementation of TUHUND available in time. In this method you can keep entering the data as and when it is available. If you have not been using an ERP prior to TUHUND, the previous financial data might take several months to come and you do not need to wait till then. You will need to create an account called "Balancing Account" under your assets or liabilities. It is alright to create it under any of the two but would be better to create it under assets if you think the branch or entity has made a profit in the previous financial year and under liabilities otherwise. You can base this decision on a guess if you are not sure. You can then go on entering the data as and when available till all the data is entered. This can be completed even when you actually have a balance sheet made for the previous financial year. Though trial balance will show good right from the beginning, the check for the correctness is the balancing account itself. As long as the net balance in the balancing account is not nil, you can be sure that all the entries from the previous closing balances have not been entered as the opening balances.

 

In both the methods above, once you have entered all the opening balances, you can tally the balance sheets and confirm the correctness of the data entered and make any corrections if required.

I would suggest you not to give auto-approval rights to the person or persons entering opening balances. This would ensure that another person has to approve the transactions before they are recorded. You may assign the task of entering to junior resources as it involves more of manual work and finally a senior manager, CFO or auditor can approve in one go after comparing against the previous balance sheets.