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•	Enfinity Release 3's Top Ten
•	Customers up close: Eric Zenner
•	"Heads up" when changing ISPs
•	Refresher: Venyu confirmation emails
•	Upcoming events, and more

UPCOMING EVENTS

•	The Special Event SBC Booth #611 January 26–28, 2011 Phoenix, Arizona
•	ARA: The Rental Show SBC Booth #3635 February 27–March 2, 2011 Las Vegas, Nevada

2010 HOLIDAY CLOSURES

Christmas Eve–December 23 at noon
Christmas–December 24
New Year's Eve–December 30 at 3pm
New Year's Day 2011–December 31

ABOUT SBC
Delivering mission-critical software solutions to the rental industry, SBC takes into account the total rental experience-from the owner/operator, to the user, to the end-consumer. For nearly three decades SBC has provided advanced technology and services to thousands of rental operators to help them better manage their daily operations and grow their business.
www.solutionsbycomputer.com

CONTACT INFORMATION
www.solutionsbycomputer.com
Email: sales@sbcma.com
North America: 800 950-2221
United Kingdom: 0800 968-470

"Top 10" highlights of Release 3

Enfinity's Release 3 software, now in testing, includes a number of enhancements reflecting input from our customers. Here are 10 features you'll want to watch for:

ASSEMBLIES. This is the name given to an additional type of "kit" added in Enfinity R-3. It's designed to handle rental items that are often, but not always, combined into a single rentable unit. A common example is a generator "six-pack": six generators that are rented together as one item, but need to be tracked individually for maintenance purposes.

CASH DRAWER SHARING. With the installation of R-3, cash drawers no longer have to be driven from a particular terminal. They can be shared among several terminals at a rental counter by connecting to a designated networked receipt printer.

EMAIL ENHANCEMENTS. As of Windows® Server 2008, Microsoft discontinued its program Outlook Express-the application Enfinity employed to send emails. To solve this, Enfinity's email function has been reengineered in R-3 to render documents in PDF format and send them directly to addressees using the rental operator's email address as the "Reply-to."

In Release 3, on the Rental Period form, a new button called Select Rental Period saves you time when you select a period from a Shortcut list. Enfinity applies the period to the Open/Out date you chose and automatically calculates the Due date.

Enfinity now gives you the option to collect rental revenues during the reservation stage. You can do this by selecting "Confirmed" in the new dropdown menu on the Customer Pricing Group form in Database Maintenance.

PHYSICAL INVENTORY-TAKING. A new capability in R-3 allows you to take inventory while open for business without disrupting transactions. Enfinity compares your physical counts to the quantities in the system, adjusting for the intervening movement of inventory in/out of your store. Upon completion of the process, the quantities in the system are reconciled if necessary.

PULL-FOR-DELIVERY. When large orders are staged for delivery, Enfinity's new "Pull-for-Delivery" process produces notification of last-minute order changes that happen after the pulling begins - a key way to ensure that complex orders are staged accurately.

FULL DEPOSIT CALCULATION. Responding to requests, we have added a new deposit method that calculates the deposit based on the sum of all rental items, all resale items, all delivery charges, all damage waiver and tax amounts, and all miscellaneous account charges.

TAB SEQUENCE. You now have the ability to designate the sequence in which the originating tabs appear, to conform to the way you prefer to operate.

RESERVATION REVENUES. If you prefer not to wait until contract opening to record revenues, Enfinity now gives you the option to charge and collect rent and other revenues during a reservation. Enfinity's original method is still available: deposits collected on reservations, but revenues only realized when contracts are opened.

RENTAL PERIOD SHORTCUTS. To save time when writing transactions, R-3 gives you the ability to set up shortcuts linked to common rental periods. For example: 1 Day, 2 Days, 3 Hours, 4 Hours, Monday Morning, Overnight, End of Day, etc.

TRANSACTION PRINTING FLEXIBILITY. Enfinity's capabilities have been expanded in R-3 with a more concise and powerful tool for changing the format of contracts, delivery slips, receipts and other transaction documents.

Enfinity Release 3 contains additional enhancements not mentioned here. To request a full set of release notes, please contact SBC Support at support@sbcma.com, or call 800.950-2221.

Customers up close: Eric Zenner

Eric Zenner
Director of Purchasing,
The Costumer
Albany and Schenectady, New York

www.thecostumer.com

"The Costumer has been a major force in the costume industry since 1917. The company is privately owned, in the same family since 1974. Our business operates two large retail stores and a mall location that opens seasonally before Hallowe'en. Another segment is served by our Internet catalog. We write a lot of transactions with theater customers, and all of our divisions are closely intertwined, so we need to stay on top of managing our inventory, customers and suppliers.

"When I joined The Costumer in 2006, the business had already been running very successfully on CounterPro for about 10 years. We made the transition to Enfinity in June of 2009. It was time to move to a Windows-based system; not just for the rental side, but also for resale. We probably have over 14,000 SKUs in inventory on the resale side alone, and over 100,000 rental costumes.

"It is very difficult to find a system that can manage both rental and resale well, but CounterPro and now Enfinity have done a good job for us. In fact, there are features in Enfinity that are helping us run the business better now. For example, it's a lot easier to see inventory items in the tree builder in Enfinity, and the visibility is immediate.

"We had been accustomed to department numbers and category numbers in CounterPro, and Enfinity uses an alternate ID-so that took some getting used to. But now we actually like it better because we can assign a specific number to every single item. If you search for number 13397, only one item is going to come up, no matter how many departments you have. It's very efficient.

"For a while, after we made the switch, we had employees saying, 'We did it this way in CounterPro, and it's different in Enfinity.' That's natural-people dislike change, and it seems easier to stay with what you know. But the advantages that Enfinity brings are important to our business. I explained to our staff that it's a matter of understanding where we want to take the company long-term.

"There is always a need to adapt as you grow. Realistically, you can't expect to avoid change in a business. Once our employees saw that there was a good rationale for moving to Enfinity, we were able to adjust our internal processes a little bit and really harness the software.

"Enfinity is going to help us move forward. It's already done that. Everybody is now on board; they recognize that Enfinity is a benefit to our business a major advantage, because we bring in seasonal help and we need to get them up to speed quickly. The combination of Enfinity applications on Windows® has made it very easy to train new employees.

"Personally, I like this system because of its Windows server. I can get into it and try to figure out where any issues are coming from, and have a meaningful discussion with SBC Support. There were some growing pains during the transition to Enfinity, but we expected that. We went into our busiest time of year with a brand new system. On any given day, we were probably writing a couple thousand transactions at one location, so any growing pains got worked out pretty quickly!

"The people at Solutions have been really supportive. If there's a problem, they understand that it needs to get fixed as soon as possible and they know that it behooves them to develop the fix because then they can roll it out to the rest of their customers. Overall, we're very satisfied with our decision."

Remember to Opt-in

Don't miss out on future communications from SBC! Use your preferred email address to send your opt-in request to contact@sbcma.com.

A "Heads Up" Makes All the Difference When Changing Internet Service Providers

From a business perspective, there are a lot of reasons why it may make sense to change your Internet Service Provider (ISP), including better reliability, additional speed or cost savings. With advance notice to SBC Support, this should be a near seamless transition for your system.

Advance notice is especially important if you have more than one location using the Internet to provide data service for your Solutions' applications. Please make SBC Support aware of your plans to change well ahead of time. There are parameters in your VPN routers that will need to be changed at the time of the switch, and we can help you be proactive to eliminate as much downtime as possible.

After discussing your plans with you, we can provide a form for you to give to your new Internet Service Provider that requests all of the necessary information to ensure a smooth changeover process.

Whether you have one location or ten, please let us know first so we can help! Contact us at support@sbcma.com, or call 800.950-2221.

How does our new Pull-For-Delivery feature give you an edge? Here are three of many ways!

CUSTOMER SERVICE. It can be difficult to dispel the negative impression of arriving at a customer's site with items missing from the order. It's much more professional to show that you can handle last-minute changes on the fly.

FUEL COSTS. Have you ever opted to purchase missing items at retail near a delivery site, rather than make an extra roundtrip? R-3 eliminates the need to choose between added fuel costs and out-of-pocket purchases.

RESOURCE ALLOCATION. Driver hours and vehicles are fixed resources. One of Enfinity's goals in R-3 is to help you satisfy each rental as efficiently as possible, with the fewest number of deliveries and pickups.

Reminder for CPRO credit card software users

Release 11 offers increased security for credit card transaction sessions, including the visual encryption of card account numbers so that only the last four digits are displayed. To install Release 11, your system must be running on CPRO Release 9.3.7 or later. You can find the number of the release you're running on printed at the top left-hand corner of any CPRO contract or report.

Plan your Vegas dates!

SBC's User Meeting will be held on Sat., Feb. 26, 2011, from 1:00 to 5:00 pm at the Mandalay Bay North Convention Center, Lower Level. The agenda and room number will be made available prior to the event.

Refresher: Venyu confirmation emails

With an increasing number of SBC customers choosing our Venyu® off-site data back-up option, we want to address one of the most important features of the service: the confirmation email.

Here's how to troubleshoot

Once SBC has set up your Venyu Internet Backup, you'll begin receiving daily email confirmation messages about the status of each day's backup process. It's important that you know how to read the information in the email so you can confirm that you're getting good backups.

The important fi eld to review is the Deltized Bytes Processed. This is the raw size of the data that was sent to the Venyu vault. On normal business days, this size should be greater than 1 MB. If the data size looks unusually small, that should be a warning sign of a possible problem.

The following illustration shows a sample Venyu confirmation email:

Warnings or Errors are not necessarily significant if the Deltized Bytes Processed field seems to be correct, because a Warning or Error indicates the failure of a single session, and Venyu will make several attempts to complete your backup.

Two other things to watch for are: 1) the backup completed successfully but the size is zero; or 2) you did not receive an email at all. In those cases, the scheduled task which copies your database or the backup process itself may not have run. There are several common problems that could cause this, and some easy solutions:

Problem: Someone turned the Venyu workstation off when they left your business for the day.

Solution: It's human nature to "shut down for the night." Make sure your staff understands that the Venyu PC must be left running at night.

Problem: Windows is set to Hibernate or go on Standby.

Solution: The Hibernate and Standby features must be turned off in order for Venyu to run. This is easily done on your Windows Settings screen.

Problem: Windows Automatic Update ran on the Venyu workstation and required a system reboot.

Solution: Adjust the Windows Update setting to warn you when updates are available, but do not have them run automatically. Windows will alert you when updates need to be loaded, and you can load them at your convenience during the workday, when they will not disrupt Venyu.

Problem: You've changed your login or password on the Venyu workstation.

Solution: The Venyu "scheduled task" in Windows must have the login and password information changed to match the new login and password.

It should be noted that the vast majority of our Venyu users backup daily with no problem, but when issues arise, it usually means that your Windows system needs attention.

If you have taken the steps above, and your backups still do not run properly for two days in a row, please contact SBC Support at 800-950-2221 or support@sbcma.com so we can look into the cause. Your data is one of your most important business assets, and we want to make sure your backup is as current as possible should the need arise to retrieve it from the vault.