System Overview

Scalable COmpany Order Processing System

System Overview

Welcome to S.CO.O.P.S. (Scalable COmpany Order Processing System [SCOOPS]). It is our belief that SCOOPS is the biggest bang for your accounting software dollar. It is perfect for a start-up company, and one that has surpassed the abilities of an existing accounting package, and a company that needs Inventory Control e.g. Warehouse Management, and a fast growing corporation that must control their balance sheet. It's the solution for just about any company. Don't find yourself saying, "Oops, I should have gotten SCOOPS!"

What You Should Know and Consider

SCOOPS has security integrated in all modules. This can be annoying to some people. You must know the passwords and/or be authorized to use that module. If security is not important to you, then please don't try SCOOPS.

The SCOOPS Administrator is logically a person with computer and accounting knowledge, however, two people with knowledge of one of the two areas can accomplish all the administrative tasks in SCOOPS as a team.

Accounting knowledge is very important to understanding what and why things are done as they are in SCOOPS. This knowledge can be vested in an employee or your Accountant. Using the software does not require any knowledge of accounting principles - setting SCOOPS up does! Understanding debits and credits, journal entries, the importance of a General Ledger account, internal controls and so on are critical to a properly configured system. If someone with this knowledge is not available to you, please look to a lesser accounting package.

If you are considering converting from one accounting package to another you must determine answers to the following questions:

Do you have the time to visit and exercise all aspects of the software in the Sample/Demo company?
Do I have less than 30 concurrent users?
Can I export my inventory records to a comma-delimited text file?
Can I export my customer/client records to a comma-delimited text file?
Can I export my vendor records to a comma-delimited text file?
Do you have and know how to use a spreadsheet program to edit comma-delimited text files?
Do you have, or have access to, someone who knows accounting terminology, internal control practices, etc. that can assist in the setup of the package?
Do you have the time to setup another accounting package while continuing to run the old package?
Do you have the staff and/or time to run in parallel on both accounting packages for at least one month?
Do you have the time to learn a new accounting package and train others before going live with the new package?
Is company management willing to adopt new forms and methods of doing business mandated by the accounting and business management software?
Is your current local area network compatible with the new software?
Are your current PC's and network server capable of hosting the new package without upgrades or changes?
Is your budget sufficient to cover any new computing hardware/upgrades, consulting and training in addition to the cost of the package?
Do the capabilities of the new package resolve all of the problems I am having with my current package?

Many software companies have migration paths built-in to their software. This eases the conversion from one package to another. You may wish to explore them first.

SCOOPS Import function allows you to import comma- delimited text for Contacts, Clients, Vendors and Inventory. The General Ledger structure in SCOOPS is so different from other packages that the import function is very complicated. It requires high knowledge levels for both computer use and accounting.

SCOOPS will be a one-time purchase for most companies. Keeping a Software Support Option subscription active with us will ensure that you will be able to install critical patches, version upgrades and reference files without risking any data loss. A different SCOOPS Suite may be offered based on an SQL database engine in the future. This product will be designed for more than 30 concurrent users. There will be an upgrade discount for this package and conversion utilities for all your data and history files.

We encourage you to explore using SCOOPS in the demo mode exhaustively. Help is readily available through our tool tips and help files for each module. If you like what you see, then license the Base & GL modules and purchase any of the other modules that are right for your company.

Your success in business using SCOOPS is our goal. If you are not in business, then neither are we.

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Design Objectives Development Language Database Engine

Design Objective

This system was designed to make the entering, managing, maintaining, reporting and auditing of company information easier to do. This system uses a series of buttons to launch the associated applications from a main menu window. If the user does not have the appropriate access rights to the application area, a message is displayed that advises him/her that access has been denied in most instances.

Not all clients need a complete company management system, so that is why SCOOPS starts with the essentials in basic module, and has add-on modules. You can add on the modules you need when you need them.

All data sets are stored in the SCOOPS directory on your computer, or server, hard disk. Samples and other files that may have been provided are in appropriate subfolders off of the SCOOPS folder. SCOOPS is designed as a centrally processed system. It is not designed to be broken in to a distributed database structure. Data sets are inter-dependent with change and delete inhibits where appropriate to preserve data integrity.

Each user you create is assigned their own folder under the SCOOPS main folder for storing temporary files, and to maintain data integrity.

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Development Language

SCOOPS was developed using Clarion for Windows Enterprise Edition v5.5d. Clarion for Windows (CW) is developed and maintained by SoftVelocity, Inc. CW is a rapid application development (RAD) system. The language structure is very similar to Pascal and is object oriented. CW allows for the creation of executable programs (EXE) and dynamic linking libraries (DLL) to be compiled. Distribution of these creations are royalty free to the developer. Members of our development team started with the DOS version of Clarion over 10 years ago.

The CW application is dynamic. As the power of desktop computers increases, the capacity to process and display more information faster through CW is made possible by updates and additions to the software development engine. New versions of the CW software are released about every ten months, with interim upgrades and patches coming at any time in between. Adoption of a new version by SCOOPS takes months of testing as some enhancements require full regeneration of application code, while others are cosmetic, and others will not preserve custom code. The latter item is of significant importance as much of the SCOOPS system is custom code. The decision to adopt a new version of CW for reworking SCOOPS would involve significant programming hours to convert it. Updating SCOOPS to a new version of CW can not be avoided as support for earlier CW versions is customarily dropped after a period of time. Since all of SCOOPS is compiled as 32-bit code, the current SCOOPS system should be viable for some time to come.

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Database Engine

The database engine that controls all the data sets associated with SCOOPS is called Topspeed®. It is an enormously fast, well organized and well behaved database engine. It is very similar to Btreive® in that keys and indexes are part of the data table and not maintained separately. This is a cost savings to you as no SQL or Btreive® licenses must be purchased separately.

At the core of SCOOPS is the data dictionary. The data dictionary for SCOOPS at this writing is just under two megabytes. Several other related dictionaries are used for such things as file imports. The source code, including the data dictionary, for SCOOPS is available for purchase. Contact SCOOPS Sales if source code is desired. Refer to the numbers in the Support section of help.