Smart Office Pack 2

Price: $11.99
  

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Reader Reviews
Smart Office Pack - Avanquest Publishing USA By Zac Mac, AAUG Member Reviewed 8/19/06 Avanquest Publishing USA's Smart Office Pack bundles four business oriented software programs - Invoices, Mail Lists, Labels, and Business Cards - into one office package. The Smart Office Pack might be best suited to the start-up, small business or an established business looking to streamline its information and add a little style to its image. The software package comes with an install disk and a Getting Started Guide. Installation was easy. The Getting Started Guide needs to be supplemented with the User's Guide provided on the install disk in PDF format. Each of the guides is approximately 100 pages in length. All of the guides are necessary in order to get the most out of the product. The product box boasts "3 easy steps to: . . . creating great looking business cards . . . managing your billing & cash collection . . . customizing your labels . . . managing your mail list." While those might be defensible claims, "3 easy steps" oversimplifies the process. All four programs host many templates for consumers to use "as is" or to customize to fit the consumer's needs and tastes. For purposes of testing out the software I created a fictitious law firm as the business that needed the support of Smart Office Pack programs. Business Cards The business card software creates a business card with a lot of graphics and color or a traditional black and white card. Entering business data is straight forward. The program has many templates for the background of the card which enhances the "eye-catching" quality of the business card. The user can rearrange the information on the business card or emphasize a certain piece of information on the business card by modifying the layout. The font of the information can be chosen from a list of fonts that seems as inclusive as of the fonts typically listed in any word processing program. Once the information, background, and any graphics are placed on the card, the user adjusts the positioning of the lines of information, background, and the graphics to his preference. The printing is simple and Avery product codes numbers can be entered into the software in order to match the software to the correct card stock. If creativity and flare are important for your business cards, this program will be fun and fits most needs. Just make sure you have a color printer and get good card stock. As for my fictitious law firm, I think we will have to order our cards from a professional printer as the perforations on card stock might send the wrong message. Invoices & Estimates To start the user selects the type of invoice by choosing from the template categories (ie. Professional, Hourly, Contract, Product). From there the user customizes the invoice. Everything seems to be customizable on the invoice from the columns that track the hours and description of services provided to the invoice number sequencing. Graphics for a business logo can be added to the heading where the business name is located. The columns that hold the description of the services and the hourly rate and other information can be linked together and used like a math equation. "Hours" x "Hourly Rate" = "Amount". For products "Discounts" can be applied by the line or globally to the entire invoice. (I was not able to create an invoice equation for discounts to be applied to hourly rate type of work.) The software allows for the application of tax rates to the invoices and estimates. The customization of the invoice numbering system is a feature that is particularly useful for my fictitious company. The invoices in a file automatically increase in number from 1001 to 1002 to 1003 and so on. However, if your firm assigns a number to a client file such as 2006-47, you can make that the first part of the invoice number and add "-01" to it. From then on the invoices will continue to increase in number as created, but you will always have the file number in the front part of the invoice number for your internal tracking purposes. The customized invoice numbers would look like this 2006-47-01 increasing to 2006-47-02 with the second invoice that is created. A user can organize the invoices by customer. Balances owed for a particular customer can be forwarded onto newer invoices so that a customer's account is kept current or brought up to date. A user also has the option to run reports based on the invoice and estimate information. These reports can help spot trends in sales or customers who need reminders to pay in a timely manner. Label Designer This program works well with Avery label product. The first thing that the program asks the user for is the size of label. If Avery label products are being used, enter the product number and the size of the Avery label product becomes the template for the label in the Label Designer program. The user next enters the static text. The static text refers to text that the user wants on every label that is printed under the current template. In my case I entered in the fictitious law firm's name and address. I then modified the font to match the font of the business card and heading on the invoice I created for the law firm. I then modified the size to fill the space on the label. In order to know exactly how much space I had to work with, I clicked on the gray non-printable option under "view". This option creates a light gray band designating the area in which printing will show up on the label. Any characters outside of the gray band will not print out. I then justified the static text by centering it. Graphics and art can be added to the label if you want to match your logo from your business cards to the logo on your invoices to the logo on your labels. These labels can be sequenced similarly to the invoices sequencing. When the label looks like you want it in order to represent your business, then you can enter data for the recipient's address. The program also has an index from which a user can pull information so that a long-time customer's address need not be typed in every time a label is created. Mail List and Address Book This program can store personal or business information for mail lists or address information. The program enables the user to search by any of the categories of the information entered. The information can also be sorted in different ways. One feature that a business might find handy is the statistics button that will tell the user the number of document that contain a certain name or city or for whatever you search. Through the statistics a shipper of goods might be able to track the markets where he does the most business. The statistics button can be modified to gather statistics for many different subjects that the user can choose. The Smart Office Pack contains four software programs that can be used separately or integrated. The user guides provide the assistance needed to get the most out of the product. This product takes a little time to get use to, but the functions of this package should be well worth the price tag to someone who needs even two of the four software programs. Comment | Permalink | (Report this)