A Review of
MAS 90
By J. Carlton Collins, CPA

Product Tour

The following article is designed to walk you through some of the look and feel and functionality of MAS 90. The objective is to provide prospective purchasers the opportunity to learn a little bit about the product before taking that next big step of contacting a sales representative. Hopefully, this information will help you pre-qualify the product and determine whether it is a reasonable candidate for consideration.

Bill of Materials Processing (BOMP)

MAS 90 has some very strong modules, however the MAS 90 Bill of Materials Processing module seems to have developed a particularly good reputation for being a strong module. This makes MAS 90 a fairly good fit for most any light-manufacturing situation. With good support for multiple warehouses, serial numbers, substitute items, bar codes, split cases, fractional selling, effective dates for price changes, physical counts, picking lists, shipping weights, alias names, and more - MAS 90 is well suited for many tough inventory/distribution/light manufacturing needs.  

Highlights for this module include 99 levels per bill, support for phantom items and even phantom bills, addition or deletion of “Kit Components” during sales order entry, print summary or detailed kits on invoice, accommodates scrap, forecasts demand for inventory, kits may be dis-assembled and the parts returned to stock, the ability to include labor and overhead expenses into kits, and support for bar code tracking through the production process. Impressive BOMP features include multi-locations, support for serial numbers, and support for scrap.

Inventory Item Master File

The power of the bill of materials processing module builds on the extensive features in the inventory module. MAS 90 provides support for multiple warehouses, item transfers between warehouses, alias item numbers, pricing for each item by customer and quantity, unlimited history, and bar code support. Commissions can be based on price, cost, or profit and can include an additional base amount on top of calculated commissions. You can also renumber an item or groups of items using a wildcard mask. Inventory items are set up here, notice the 5 tabbed item set up screen, the extensive item information (history, sales, quantities, and pricing, etc.) There is also good support for categories such as color, size, etc. According to the folks at Best, the entire United States operations are run with MAS 200 Client/Server. With hundreds of million in sales, this is a formidable task. Within the industry, this practice is known as “eating your own dog food.” Best likes to think that their own in-house use of MAS 200 is a testament to the power of the product – especially when it comes to distribution and bill of materials processing.

Presented above are additional screens where inventory item transactions are managed.

Financial Reporting

One of MAS 90’s strongest points is financial reporting – which is perhaps one of the reasons that CPAs have long embraced this product. While many other accounting vendors charge extra for a report writer, MAS 90’s report writer has always been built right in and included with the general ledger. In addition to these built in capabilities, MAS 90 includes other reporting products such as FRx, Crystal Reports, F9, and Excel. When it comes to financial reporting, there are no better tools than Crystal Reports, FRx, F9, & Excel. MAS 90 is well integrated with all four of these products. Crystal Reports is an industry standard report writing tool that enables the user to extract virtually any data out of the MAS 90 system and produce presentation-quality output. Further, all of the reports in MAS 90, including check forms, invoices, packing slips, etc are written in Crystal Reports, which makes it easy to edit these reports. FRx is the industry standard when it comes to financial statement reporting – nobody does it better. With FRx, financial statements can be scheduled and e-mailed to users, or groups of users, complete with password protection both at the report level and drill down level. And of course Microsoft Excel is the ultimate power users tool. Because the ODBC drivers are automatically installed with MAS 90, all MAS 90 systems are ready to export, import or hot-link to Excel. With F9, this process is even easier. One feature that we would like to see added in the future is the ability to keep the titles on the screen when scrolling through reports printed to the screen. The Export button makes it easy to export any report.

The Task Menu

A trend we have seen in several of the top accounting software packages includes the ability to create a custom defined menu that launches only those tasks more frequently used by the user of the system. The Task Menu shown above can be customized for an individual user in about 5 minutes, but can save hours throughout the year just by making it easier and quicker to access specific screens and produce desired reports. Perhaps the best benefit to using a Task menu is that first time users are far less intimidated and become comfortable with using the product much faster. This makes the consultant’s job easier, reducing their time on the job and potentially increasing profitability (when value-billing, or through avoiding a write-down). Set up those tasks that are commonly performed on a routine basis. Then the user need not wade through the hundreds of menu options just to find the correct screen or report menu.  

Explorer

The Explorer menu shown above allows you to navigate easily throughout the MAS 90 product to quickly locate detailed information concerning a vendor, customer, inventory item, employee, sales order, etc. You do not have to exit out of your current screen to use explorer – it pops up when you want it and hides quickly when you don’t need it.  You can even change company within Explorer to look up information on a sister company.

Customer

MAS 90 provides extensive customer information. In the screens above, we see several examples of information offered by MAS 90 that are frequently not available in other accounting software products. Among the power features are: Support for Temporary Customers, Credit Hold Option, e-mail address, credit card information, drill through invoices, drill through sales orders, and strong customer history records.

Sales Order Processing

Sales order processing provides another good module that contains plenty of highlights for customers who need strong distribution capabilities. The screen above shows where users can inquire into sales orders, and then drill around to other information concerning customers, inventory, payments, journal entries, etc. MAS 90 supports blanket orders, partial shipments, promise dates on each line of the sales orders, convert quotes to orders, extended descriptions, split commissions (up to 5 sales reps), and allow salespersons to set special pricing – with password protection on minimum profits. Deleted order tracking with lost sales reason codes and customer last purchase inquiry.

Custom Office

The screens above show the Custom Office module, which provides nifty wizard-driven communication capabilities.  This feature allows you to integrate MAS 90 data into Word documents for mail merging. You can filter the MAS 90 data based on any field using a variety of criteria. From there, you can send the resulting letters to the printer or to the customer’s respective fax number or e-mail address. MAS 90 includes pre-defined mail merge templates for overdue letters, welcome letters, and more. For example, assume a user has toggled to the customer screen and is viewing the customer data for a particular customer. The user clicks the Custom Office button at the bottom of the screen that launches a menu of Word documents, Excel Templates, and E-mails. The user clicks on the E-mail entitled “good customer discount”, and immediately, an e-mail is sent to the customer notifying them that an additional .5% discount has been extended.  It is a great feature, and you should take a look at it if you get the chance. 

Customizer

MAS 90 provides excellent customization tools which allow the end user to tailor the product to his or her particular needs. The Customizer component of custom office allows you to edit the MAS 90 user screens to add fields, change text, rearrange the screen, and perform many other customization options. The Customizer’s features include: add user-defined fields; edit screens by company and by user; insert pop-up dialog boxes; set up default values; insert DDE links to external applications or scripts; add tool tips to buttons; and much more. MAS 90's customization tools provide access to each data input screen within MAS 90. In my opinion, this is the most important feature in all of accounting software. To learn more about the importance of customization, click here.

Fixed Assets - Many accounting software publishers choose not to offer a fixed asset module - it is perhaps the most frequently missing module in the industry. One of the reasons many publishers avoid writing this module is they have found it easier and better to instead link to Best Software's Fixed Assets module. In this case, both MAS 90 and best Fixed Assets are owned by the same company, which virtually assures tight integration between these two products.

ACT! 2000 & Sales Logix - Best Software also owns ACT! and Sales Logix, perhaps the best value in contact management and CRM solutions on the planet today. Once again, because MAS 90, ACT! 2000 and Sales Logix are owned by the same company, this virtually assures tight integration between these products.

Abra Human Resources - Best Software also owns Abra Human Resources, perhaps the best value in HR solutions in the mid-market arena. Yet again, because MAS 90 and Abra are owned by the same company, this virtually assures tight integration between these two products.

Business Alerts & Business Insight Modules – MAS 90’s Business Alerts allows you to create event triggered reports, which are then e-mailed to the appropriate persons in the event that a preset parameter is exceeded. These automatic, user-defined e-mail notifications can inform you, your sales representatives, your customers, employees, and vendors of date and time-sensitive events. Along similar lines, MAS 90's Business Intelligence module offers an executive dashboard for at-a-glance monitoring of key company information, ratios, and data.

Visual Integrator Module – MAS 90’s Visual Integrator module allows you to build-in integration to other applications. To accomplish this feat, MAS 90 uses the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) standard. Using ODBC, Visual Integrator allows you to schedule imports or exports of data directly to or from any ODBC-compliant application such as a custom or vertical software application. At the same time, MAS 90 applies business logic to maintain data integrity.

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