Core Business Processes
FOURA is a powerful software package that unifies your company’s core business processes under a real-time, end to end business management system.
Growing businesses often place the importance of planning for an integrated business system on the back burner simply because they are trying to keep up with customer demand. What typically happens is these businesses throw quick-fix applications and spreadsheets into their core business functions that don’t talk to each other. This often creates business process glitches and inefficiencies down the road.
In FOURA, all of the core business processes are tied neatly together in one single software system, in one database. Because everything is fully integrated, you have accurate information at your fingertips, in real-time. No need to spend countless hours getting data out of several different sources, and glue it together, which often produces unreliable information.
All users of FOURA share a common experience – from the inventory clerk in the warehouse to the owner in the corner office. FOURA’s super-intuitive user interface is built so that all business activities have the same look and feel. This makes user adoption and training a breeze, and promotes productivity.
FOURA can help Bring Order to the Chaos
Many businesses are being bogged-down by starter accounting software, coupled with endless spreadsheets and glued-together apps that don’t talk to each other. Employees are entering the same data twice, or even three times. These situations create inefficiencies and increase costs unnecessarily.
We know, we’ve been there – that’s why we built FOURA – unified business management software designed for growing businesses.
FOURA’s integrated workflows save time – enter data once and its available to be used in downstream processes. Sales, purchasing, order management and other activities are seamlessly linked through systemic processes to functions such as accounts payable, inventory, accounts receivable, cash, and fixed assets.
FOURA’s flexible and powerful Financial Reports and Browse Forms put information at your fingertips and allow real-time monitoring of business activities – so you can make informed decisions, on the fly.
Features Overview
Accounting/Finance
Invoicing customers, collecting cash, meeting your supplier obligations and keeping accurate and timely books is critical for the success of your business.
FOURA Accounting and Finance has all of the features you and your team need to stay on top of things – and it’s super-intuitive which saves time and increases productivity!
General Ledger
The General Ledger (GL) is the central accounting hub that systemically collects and tracks all financial transactions originating from FOURA’s other core process modules. The transactions stored here roll up into the company trial balance – and this in turn is used to generate the main financial statements for your company – the balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement.
FOURA comes out of the box with a standard, flexible natural chart of accounts – you choose which accounts you need, de-activate accounts you don’t need, or easily add new accounts. If you want to maintain your existing chart of account scheme in FOURA, we can migrate it for you! It’s easy to classify your revenues, expenses, assets and liabilities where you want them on the main financial statements through the flexible reporting fields in the chart of accounts.
In addition to the natural accounts, which track revenues and expenses by their “nature”, FOURA allows you to track your P&L activities by accounting units, or cost centers. This provides the ability to track and report on your P&L in separate buckets, so you can have visibility into profit by activity. For example, if your company needs to track P&L by customer type and region, you can set up separate accounting units that use the same chart of accounts, and then track, report and analyze the P&L by customer type and region.
The GL module enables you to control posting periods, manually enter or copy/paste manual journal entries from an Excel template, and sweep transactions from the various core process modules using FOURA’s unique Posting Assistant. Closing out the year is super easy with FOURA’s Year-End Close process.
Order Management
All sales revenues begin with a customer order – whether its automatically created by FOURA from a Sales Quote, newly created by the user, or copied from a previous customer order.
With FOURA Order Management you can create separate order types to accommodate your business needs – then assign a default Price Book and Warehouse, and also assign accounting defaults – so that when the order is invoiced and inventory is relieved, all of the revenues and cost of sales go to the correct accounts, automatically. You can also create order checklists per order type, that you can use to track action items related to orders.
Set up unlimited ship to addresses and have FOURA look up the applicable sales tax rates for that address – which will then automatically calculate the sales tax on taxable lines when your order is invoiced.
When your order is entered and released, if it is for an inventory item, a pick ticket is automatically generated for the warehouse personnel – they can view it immediately, pick, pack and ship items, and complete the pick ticket. Completing the pick ticket moves the order from released to fulfilled, and starts the customer invoicing process.
Accounts Receivable
FOURA helps you keep on top of your customer receivables and get them collected on time.
FOURA’s powerful Customer Master set up enables you to set default order types, parent customers, assign sales and/or account managers, set both credit and transaction limits, assign price books, terms, and default accounting codes. All of these are then used down the line by other processes in FOURA, automating tasks and streamlining data entry, saving you time.
FOURA Accounts Receivable supports both manual invoicing, and automated invoicing based on product shipments, linked to inventory pick tickets, which are linked to customer orders. Process invoices in batches or one at a time. Enter invoice specific notes tracked by date entry, to keep track of customer communication. Easily email invoices and statements to your customers, with customized messaging, directly from FOURA.
Monitor your receivables with the Aging Report, using the default standard aging buckets, or add your own customized aging buckets.
Cash Management
FOURA’s cash entry forms feature both easy direct entry and copy/paste from Excel or CSV options, for customer deposits and all other cash entries. Allocate customer payments to invoices easily with the Cash Allocation feature, which automatically opens after processing a customer deposit.
The Cash Browse Form enables you to easily view, search, and filter cash transactions, as well as drill-in to transaction details and view attachments.
FOURA’s bank reconciliation feature makes it super-easy to reconcile your books to your bank account statements each month.
Accounts Payable
FOURA Accounts Payable (AP) helps you meet your obligations to your suppliers and stay on top of your cash flow requirements.
With FOURA’s AP you can create and maintain your suppliers, and assign default payment types, terms, currencies and incoterms, remit to addresses, contacts, and items. Select 1099 and SBA classification categories used for reporting purposes. Attach supplier specific documents like W-9 forms or contracts to the supplier form, so you can easily view them when you need to.
FOURA’s AP is fully integrated with Purchase Orders. Enter the purchase order number in the AP voucher entry form – and the form populates the items received for that purchase order, and automatically brings in the accounting codes from the purchase order. Match the invoice lines to the receipt and away you go – true process-based three-way matching! Not every AP invoice originates from a purchase order – use the Non-PO AP invoice type for those, and free form entry.
All supplier defaults populate in the AP invoice entry form, but can easily be modified for special circumstances. FOURA AP automatically calculates Pay Dates and discounts based on the supplier terms selected – so when paying invoices, you don’t pay more than you need to! Select and pay AP invoices by due dates and payment types (check, wire transfer, credit card, or ACH) and manually edit the list to line up with your cash flow needs.
Fixed Assets
Safeguarding fixed assets is important to your company, and you need an accurate system to help you keep control over them.
FOURA helps you track assets by account and subaccount, and allows you to assign assets to specific locations and employees or custodians. Recording new assets is easy, and mainly come through accounts payable transactions – but FOURA Fixed Assets are so versatile, and offer several different ways to get assets on the books.
Configure your fixed asset, accumulated depreciation and depreciation expense account accounting and useful life in the Chart of Accounts once – then easily add, reclassify or dispose of fixed assets, and record depreciation expense with the click of a button during your monthly closing process.
It’s easy to track your fixed asset costs and net book values for tax reporting purposes.
Project Accounting
FOURA’s Project Accounting enables you to set up and manage unique project efforts and analyze and report on their profitability. Each project can also be assigned to a cost center, or accounting unit, so you can track and analyze your projects by business line, region, or any number of dimensions. Track your actual project costs in whatever natural accounts you wish to set up for labor, materials and other direct costs, and compare to budgeted or forecasted amounts.
FOURA has defined revenue recognition methods that can be assigned per project (for example, percentage of completion, as-billed, completed contract) and automatic revenue booking processes that post to the general ledger, based on the method assigned to each project and default accounts you set up. You can also choose to book revenues manually. With FOURA’s flexible billing functionality, you can either tie revenue recognition to billings, or separate it based on your internal processes or contract requirements.
Project Accounting is fully integrated with other FOURA processes such as sales orders and accounts receivable, purchasing and accounts payable, inventory management and of course the general ledger.
Budgeting
Budget time comes around each year like clockwork, and it’s an important step in managing your business – but it’s likely not high on your list of favorite things to do! FOURA’S budgeting features can help you to minimize the headaches and maximize the positive outcomes.
Multiple concurrent contributors can complete their portion of a budget by utilizing a variety of inline tools to make the process easier – such as create a new budget from last year’s budget or last year’s actuals, autofill row capabilities, import from Excel, and more.
FOURA also provides the ability to store comments on each budget line and attach supporting documents directly on your budget form – so management can easily determine where the values are coming from.
Create as many budgets and forecasts as you like, and choose which one to report and analyze your actuals against, on the fly.
See how easily FOURA can integrate into your business
Features Overview
Sales
It’s essential for growing businesses to manage sales leads, pricing, promotions, discounts and quotes in order to achieve their goals for customer satisfaction and revenues.
FOURA makes it easy for you!
Sales Quotes
In many businesses, preparing a sales quote for a customer can involve massive Excel spreadsheets, PDF product catalogs, and different product and pricing databases, alongside a disconnected ERP system. In FOURA, the Sales Quote process is a unified part of Sales Management!
FOURA’s Sales Quotes incorporate information from Sales Leads, Promotions and Discounts, and Price Books. You can pick products and prices, add discounts and get automated update of all amounts without leaving FOURA.
Create alternative quotes and edit and update your proposals throughout the sales process until you’ve reached the desired result – which is producing accurate and professional looking quotes to your customers that will result in sales!
Sales Leads
FOURA’s sales lead forms and process-based sales funnel provide your business with real-time status and offer several ways to evaluate sales history, and measure progress against goals.
Many companies believe that all employees can be great sources of sales leads – with minimal training, you can have any employee capture a sales lead in FOURA. Then the sales manager can assign the lead to an account manager – who can then make contact with the prospect, document answers to key questions, enter free form notes, and input an expected sales value for a potential order.
FOURA tracks your leads along its process-based sales funnel, which increases the sales probability percentage upon certain system events occurring. The sales funnel is mechanical, so your sales team only needs to update minimal content about what is being quoted, and perhaps some supporting notes in order to keep the business accurately informed about what stage the opportunity is in.
The sales funnel provides insight to sales managers on lead and follow-up activity, to your accounting team on revenue and cash flow forecasting, and to inventory managers on required stocking levels.
Sales Promotions and Discounts
Promotions are used to generate market awareness with the goal of increasing sales for your business.
Use FOURA’s promotions feature to create promotions and assign date ranges, set budgets, track promotion costs, and attach your related documents like artwork, sketches, or quotes from your suppliers. Set up sales discounts to use with your promotions, and assign percentage or dollar discounts, and minimum quantities or sales amounts. Then track your sales or sales lead activities by order type promotion on your customer orders and invoicing, to determine what is working best for your business!
Price Books
Using Price Books for your products helps eliminate any confusion on product pricing with your customers – so you can send accurate quotes, and they can provide accurate orders to your business, which speeds along the sales and fulfillment process – and that makes everyone happy!
With FOURA, you can create multiple price books for your products (linked to your inventory item master, of course), with multiple units of measure per price book. Assign effective date ranges and owners to your price books. Set prices and target margins for your products, and then monitor your actual margins or markup right in the price book – along with sales quantities and amounts.
Assign your Price Books to specific order types, and customers – so the right unit price automatically defaults onto your customer orders.
See how easily FOURA can integrate into your business
Features Overview
Inventory Management
You can be in complete control of your inventory – from the day you receive it to the day it leaves your warehouse, using FOURA’s versatile and intuitive inventory management system.
Set up your inventory, perform light-manufacturing and and keep track of your products in real-time. FOURA supports multiple warehouses and locations, so you can get your inventory super-organized. Set initial unit costs, then FOURA automatically recalculates average cost with every new purchase order received.
Item Master
Good item master management is key to maintaining accurate records – your items are used throughout your organization in purchasing, price books, sales quotes, inventory, invoicing – literally everywhere.
Set up your inventory items in FOURA’s Item Master with an internal item code and description – the item master can have raw materials supply items as well as finished product items.
Designate external Sales Descriptions on your products and services for use in Price Books, Sales Quotes and Customer Order lines; assign items to product families for reporting and tracking. Assign items to class codes which determine the default inventory GL account codes used on transactions.
Establish lead times for purchasing, set requirements for item serialization if needed, assign item end of life dates, and define multiple units of measure/packs per item. Manage and view item costs per supplier.
Bill of Materials/Light Manufacturing
Define Bills of Materials (BOMs) for your products based on raw materials and/or sub-assemblies, and services such as assembly labor, with multiple revisions per BOM.
Once set up, you can use the BOMs in FOURA’s WIP In/Out process to move raw material items into Work in Process, and build products into Finished Goods.
All of the accounting is done automatically on the back-end based on the item set up; your costs always move with the items so your inventory balances are always accurate.
Pick Tickets
Pick Tickets are really handy when your inventory is organized in specific locations – they can speed along the packing and shipping process!
Once a customer order with an inventory item is released, an inventory Pick Ticket is automatically generated for warehouse personnel to fulfill – showing the exact location of where the items are located in your warehouse.
Pick, pack and ship the items to your customer, and complete the Pick Ticket – the correct costs always follow items in FOURA, so your inventory and cost of sales are accurate. You can elect to have customer invoices automatically generated based on Pick Ticket completion or invoice later, whichever you prefer.
Physical Counts
Successful companies perform cycle or full inventory counts periodically, to ensure you maintain control and accurate balances.
FOURA’s versatile Cycle Counts feature enables you to set up and perform item, location, spot, or full inventory counts, and presents you with results by warehouse, location, quantity and value of adjustments. Double check the counts, investigate discrepancies and their causes, and take corrective actions. The inventory transactions are frozen once a cycle count is started – so you are not looking at a moving target!
Once you are satisfied and hit the Complete Count button, your inventory quantities are adjusted to the physical count, and all of the accounting entries are automatically generated.
Stock Control and Stock Calcs
These are two more of FOURA’s powerful Browse Forms that put relevant and timely information at your fingertips.
The Stock Control form shows you in real-time how many units of each item you have on hand, the average cost, the UOM, how many units are allocated to orders, how many are pickable, how many units are due in on purchase orders and when. If desired, you can manually set safety stock levels, lead times, min and max quantities, etc.
The Stock Calcs form presents a rollfoward view, by item and warehouse, of units and costs at the beginning of the period, activity in and out, and the units and costs at the end of the period. It calculates and presents some useful statistics such as Average Inventory, Inventory Turns, Days of Inventory on Hand, and Average Age of Inventory.
See how easily FOURA can integrate into your business
Features Overview
Purchasing and Receiving
To sell product, you need to get it in the door at the right price, and on time – then get it accurately recorded in the system.
FOURA’s integrated processes help you meet your schedules!
Purchasing
The use of Purchase Orders is a great way to clearly communicate your intentions to your suppliers – including buying goods on terms for cash flow purposes. They also help your business have visibility into what is coming in and when – so you can better manage getting products to your customers on a timely basis.
FOURA Purchase Orders is fully integrated with Inventory (ordering, receiving and costing) and Accounts Payable (three way matching) so you don’t enter the same information twice.
Email purchase orders to your suppliers directly from FOURA, and check goods receipts directly from the Purchase Order screen. Easily create a clone of a previous purchase order to speed up items ordered on a recurring basis.
Receiving
Accurate receiving means accurate inventory records – FOURA makes it easy for you.
When receiving items into inventory on purchase orders, simply enter the purchase order number – or the supplier, and choose from the outstanding purchase orders from that supplier.
The items and quantities ordered, along with default stocking location, unit of measure and accounting codes automatically populate in the form. Simply enter the quantity received and you’re done – the items received are immediately included in your inventory details and available for three-way match in Accounts Payable. Its even easier if your item ordered is a non-inventory item!
See how easily FOURA can integrate into your business
Features Overview
Financial Reporting in FOURA
Information at your Fingertips!
Financial statements can paint a picture of the overall health of your company. FOURA’s Financial Reporting and Browse Forms provide real-time information so you can make informed business decisions.
Drillable Financial Reports
FOURA’s drillable, professional looking Financial Reports provide you with real-time information, when you need it. FOURA reports include standard Trial Balance, Balance Sheet, Income and Cash Flow Statements, some of which can be reported against budget. All reports can be run for specified time periods and interval ranges. Choose monthly, quarterly, or annually, in order to provide you with the most useful information.
You can easily drill-down from the top-level reports to show results by different data dimensions, such as account and customer. Drill-in on a dimension to get more details, all the way down to the source document level, and view attachments. No need to be asking anyone to go search in paper files for that supplier invoice!
The financial reports can be exported to Excel, and look exactly like they do in FOURA. You’ll have clean and neatly formatted statements, with all formula subtotals and totals intact.
Browse Forms
Use FOURA’s powerful Browse Forms to search for documents and document lines. Easily query transaction or master data tables with large numbers of records, in real time. Display multiple rows at one time in a spreadsheet format where each row represents one record and each column represents a field or attribute of that record.
There are Browse Forms for virtually all types of data. They often include multiple Zoom Links that enable you to instantly zoom to related information, as well as source documents and attachments.
Individual users can easily customize these Browse Forms. Drag columns to appear in any order you want, hide or add columns, and save your preferred layout. Create customized filters to limit the results to show just the cross-section of data that you need, and save these filters for later use.
See how easily FOURA can integrate into your business
Features Overview
Open Architecture
Built on Open Standards for Easy Implementation
We built FOURA because we couldn’t find anything out there in the market that really met the needs of growing businesses. FOURA is new software built from the ground up, and it’s entirely based on sound accounting standards and effective processes, and incorporates the latest stable technology. We don’t rely on any required third party apps – so you’ll never have to deal with any hidden fees or external provider relationships.
Integration With Other Applications
Have specialized apps you need integrated with FOURA? No worries! We’ll figure out the best integration points and processes and make it happen, seamlessly.
Data Migration
Migrating your legacy data into FOURA is a breeze. We’re experts at data migration and system implementation. Installing the FOURA client on a machine literally takes less than a minute. Depending on how much history you want and how detailed you need it, we can typically get your legacy data migrated to FOURA in a weekend.
Highly Customizable
FOURA works awesome out of the box. But if you need FOURA to do something more, we can make that happen too. We believe that 90% of all business have similar functional systemic needs to conduct their business. It’s the 10% of what you do that makes your business unique and special in the market. Let Fourasoft customize and integrate that 10% into FOURA to give you an additional market advantage.
See how easily FOURA can integrate into your business
Features Overview
Enforced Data Integrity
Your Data is Always Valid
For modern enterprises, data integrity is critical for the accuracy and efficiency of business processes as well as decision making. Compromised data, after all, is of little use to your company. For this reason, imposing and maintaining integrity is a core focus of FOURA’s business management software solution.
Data integrity refers to the overall completeness, accuracy and consistency of data over its life cycle. This concept ensures that all data in a database can be traced and connected to other data. This guarantees that everything is recoverable and searchable. Having a single, well-defined and well-controlled system increases stability, performance, re-usability and maintainability.
In FOURA, data integrity is imposed during the database design phase through the use of standard procedures and rules, and maintained through the use of vigorous validation procedures. As a result, you can rest assured that your data is always valid.
See how easily FOURA can integrate into your business
Features Overview
Security Where it Matters
System and Event Auditing
FOURA enables you to monitor who is connected and their login/logout time. The system also has extensive audit tracking and allows for the auditing of transactional data and changes to reference data by user, date and time. Who did what, and when!
Database Security
If you are using FOURA’s cloud hosted solution, your data is backed up daily. Your data is encrypted in motion. Data in motion is your data actively moving from one location to another. Rest assured your data is encrypted while traveling between your workstations and the cloud server. Backups are encrypted at rest, so your backup data is protected and cannot be compromised.
FOURA is written to ACID Compliant Standards, so your data can’t be corrupted.
Role-Based User Security
As your business grows, you’re delegating more and more tasks to a larger number of your staff. You may feel the need to tighten things up a bit, security-wise. FOURA’s flexible Security Roles feature allows you to grant permissions to individual users to perform specific functions. Easily create new user logins and assign to appropriate security roles – enforcing segregation of duties and internal control.
FOURA’s Security Roles enable you to overlay system security on top of your Organizational Chart to ensure your employees have access to everything they need, but nothing more.
Users can be assigned to multiple roles, each of which will add to the user’s overall rights within FOURA. Some roles allow create and edit rights, while others allow only viewing rights. When a security role is assigned to a user’s login, then the associated forms and functions will light up on the user’s Main Menu.
FOURA comes out of the box with several standard pre-defined user security roles – and if you need something more specific to your business operations, we can easily create new roles for you.
See how easily FOURA can integrate into your business
Features Overview
Deployment Options
Deploy FOURA however you want to.
How you access FOURA is up to you – we’ll help you decide which option is best for your business.
Regardless of which option you choose, we’ll provide you with both a Production database and a Training database. This enables your staff to quickly get up to speed in a training environment, using your company’s real data.
On-Premise Solution
This option may work best for you if you have a dedicated in-house or outsourced IT department managing your network resources and security. Installing FOURA is simple and fast. We want to ensure your success, so we ask our On-Premise customers to backup their data regularly and have an actionable disaster recovery plan in place!
Hybrid Cloud Solution
This option works best if you don’t want to manage both FOURA databases, software updates, or data backups. FOURA is hosted on Amazon Web Services which only requires the FOURA Client software to be installed on your local machines. The Hosted Cloud solution performs a full backup of your Production database every week, and does an incremental backup daily. Fourasoft maintains eight weeks of backups in order to minimize any risk of loss or auditability. All all backups are encrypted at rest, so your data cannot be compromised.
Virtual Machines and Cloud Workspaces Solution
Need to access FOURA from a non-Windows device? Using our cloud workspaces solution, you can now run FOURA on a virtual machine from a number of platforms or devices, including MacOS X, iPad, Android Tablet, Chromebook, Fire Tablet, and Linux.
See how easily FOURA can integrate into your business
FOURA - FOURA by Fourasoft LLC
Get rid of your dependency on spreadsheets, manual processes and disconnected apps.
Application Category: Business & Financial Management
5