When you install Business Administrator for the first time, you will be missing quite a lot of functions, including at least two managers. This is because the go-ahead to commence the financial systems has not yet been given, and you will have no access to any system that's financially based.
The process of giving the go-ahead is important because the timing of the start could be critical, and one you need to think about carefully. If you choose the wrong time, then you are likely to get a mis-alignment of business information, as well as warping of reporting processes.
Before starting the financial systems, consider the following;
VAT return time cycle
Your changing economics
You readiness to use an electronic management system
Your financial clock
If you feel the time to start the financial systems is favourable, then go to Business Manager - click through any messages, click on Business Settings, click on Start the Financial Systems. Click through the warnings as you see fit and complete the resulting dialogue. Continue the process until you are returned to Business Manager. If all went well then the financial systems should be running. Click on The Managers, and you should see Finance Manager in the list. (Finance Manager won't report anything yet - it has no data to report. In fact, it won't report much until you've been trading with Business Administrator for at least a month, or so).
Identifying customers and suppliers
Under the topic of getting started, your next job is to define your existing customers and suppliers. To add customers and suppliers (if you haven't already done so), add their details first in Contact Manager. Then you will see the commands Make Customer and Make Supplier in the Command Bar.
Consult the relevant sections in this manual to gain a full understanding of how to manage customers and suppliers.
Lastly, you will need to enter your stock, if you sell stock. In Supply Chain Manager, enter the Products mode and enter details of the products you sell. As you do, you will get the opportunity to convert them to stock. At this point you will also see that you could convert products as assets too, which is useful for asset management of listing products as hireable assets, if that's what you do.
In Stock Management, you will need to tell Business Administrator about the stock you already have. For each item, you will need to say what the stock item is, the suppliers' catalogue number (or similar), how many you have, how much you bought them for, and how much you want to sell them for. Business Administrator tends to propose a mark-up of 30%, but you can change this at will.
IMPORTANT NOTE: This is not the normal method of entering stock. Once the stock is registered, you should create an order and follow the normal supply chain process. This process is for telling Business Administrator about stock you already have when you first use it, so that the Business Administrator can be involved in the resale of that stock.