The NECS entrée computer software system was designed to handle the critical daily needs of a foodservice distributor. Most entrée users are full line distributors, while many specialize in meat, seafood, produce and cheese.

There are thousands of features that are included in the entrée software, however, the items listed below are some of the more commonly asked about:

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Order Entry Enter customer orders with lightning speed and unparalled accuracy. Order entry is the heart of the entrée® system. Your sales staff (whether they be in the office or on the road taking orders with the laptop system, entrée®.DSR) have a wealth of information available to them. This includes a history of customer buying habits showing a complete listing of last purchase dates, quantities and pricing. Our "standard order" feature ensures your staff never forgets an item a customer may need and our instantaneous search features keeps your entire inventory list at their fingertips. The entrée® system can also remind your sales reps of customers that still need to be called for specific day and warn them if different types of sales quotas for the day are not met. Many NECS customers made the strengths of our order entry process a key reason for purchasing our system as it increased their sales dramatically and brought ordering errors almost to zero. Our Order Entry features also include: sales orders quotations automatically create orders from pre-defined customer data track credit memos track customer credit history including credit limits define "hot messages" per customer to remind them of specific information before an order is placed invoices can be printed using a laser printer and include your companies logo for a professional image or you can choose a variety of pre-printed, multi-part forms. graphic images can be attached to each item, as shown in the screen shot to the left. these images can appear in various places besides order entry, including price lists and online ordering via our entree.NET application.

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Inventory Control The entrée® system includes the most advanced inventory control system available for food distributors. With ease, you'll always know how much is in your warehouse(s), purchased quantity due for arrival and when and sales breakdown including oversells. entrée® will track: catch weights constant weights lb. items case to piece breaking lot control which include lot qty, date, weight as well as purchase and sales history kit definitions (simple bill of materials type inventory control for food distributors that manufacture their own products) detailed movements of items with bar & pie chart analysis extensive sales and gross profit reporting promotions, spiffs and rebates

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Pricing A food distributor's need for flexible pricing options is included and exceeded with the entrée® system. Some of our many pricing features include: customer special pricing which allows you to set a special price for every customer and every item they might purchase from you pricing levels per item with up to 99 levels based off current cost or profit percentage group pricing sale pricing based off multiple pricing scenarios future pricing price matrix definitions (for more complex pricing needs)

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Purchasing Automatic P.O. generation using on-hand levels, turns, lead time, order points, pallet configuration, cubes, gross weight, etc. Reports such as purchase order guides and buyer's stock status Integrated faxing of purchase orders to your suppliers Direct tie-in with NECS entrée®.UPC

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Truck Routing The entrée® system includes support for helping you route your trucks, assign stops for the driver in the appropriate sequence, and ensure that the driver has complete and organized delivery manifest before starting his route. The system allows each of your customers and their ship to locations to have their route, stop sequence and preferred delivery time to be defined for each day of the week. After orders have been placed, our Assign Route screen can easily show what stops have been assigned to each driver, number of stops on a truck, the total weight, and total case count. Route information can be easily changed and updated based upon specific needs of that day.

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Accounts Receivable The importance of your accounts receivable to your companies bottom line as well as the tools to help you collect past due amounts were given high priority in the design of our software. Everything from easy to read statements for your customers, to the tools to help your office and sales staff in this process are included. Our easy to use cash receipt process will speed your office staff in entering payments from your customers while ensuring that information is accurate. Some of entrée®'s accounts receivable features include: allowing terms, credit limit, payment days and discount days to be defined per customers on customer invoices the calculated "payment due date" as well as a list of outstanding invoices can be printed order entry staff can be blocked for entering orders for customers over their limit statements and letters of dunning can easily be generated showing both open invoices and payment details in a variety of formats cash receipts can be quickly and efficiently entered a customer's open accounts receivable status can be easily brought up throughout key areas of the system, such as order entry (either in the office or by your sales staff using our laptop system, entrée®.DSR).

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Commissions Tracking the commissions your sales staff earns and making sure they are paid the proper amount at the proper time is a cornerstone of the entrée® system. You can track commissions for both salespeople and brokers and base them off: gross profit percent invoice sale amount customer payment (which includes the option of not calculating a commission until the customer pays the invoice as well as decreasing their commission amount by the length of time it takes the customer to pay) special commissions per item including exceptions and overrides commission formulas that can be based off the sales amount or gross profit detailed reports including sales analysis for both yourself and your sales staff

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Ordertaker Call List The Ordertaker Call List is a useful tool you staff can use to keep track of their daily calls. It's also helpful when an employee is not in the office, so thier replacement can easily see what customers need to be called. From data defined in the customer file, the system knows what customers need to be called and at what time they prefer to place their order. The desired customer can be quickly selected by doulbe-clicking their name in the customer grid. For those customers that are not yet ready to place their order, a call back comment maybe easily entered and referenced later in the day.

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Catchweights Many food distributors, especially meat, poultry, cheese, seafood and produce, sell and track their inventory as catchweight or random weight items. When these items are sold, the billing weight of each unit needs to be entered into the invoice so that the extended amount is calculated properly. These weights can be entered quickly into the system or automatically scanned in when our entree.UPC module is running. The system tracks a minimum, maximum and average weight to ensure proper weights are entered. When the Loading Sheet prints (for your warehouse staff), an area is provided for them to write down the catchweights per line item. When the completed Invoice prints, each of the catchweights, as well as the total weight will be printed. Because some companies deal with imported products or ship overseas, you have the option enter catchweights using kilograms instead of pounds. You can set the system to not print a final invoice until all the weight information is entered.

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Item Shortage Adjustments entrée® lets you view and adjust the shipping quantities for each customer that ordered a product with a specified date range. This is helpful when you have oversold an item, but want to be sure that everyone gets some quantity, rather than nothing. All changes made here will update the invoices, without the need to further edit the invoice. Some distributors also use this as a tracking tool. Because you are able to enter a date range, you can quickly determine who purchased an item.

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Reporting - Ré3 The new entrée® reporting system (Ré3) has been designed for maximum flexibility and ease of use. Today's food service distributors face a wide variety of needs, and the Ré3 report system provides businesses with the customization options they desire. It took over a year and half of development time to bring Ré3 from the concept board to your fingertips. We incorporated numerous requests and ideas from our current client base and we are sure you will be ecstatic with the results. In fact there are so many features in the system it would be impossible to list them all here. Below you will find a couple of the key features found in Ré3, but feel free to download the Ré3 Overview for a more in-depth look at the entrée® reporting system. Consistency - All of the reports in the Ré3 Report System have the same look and feel. This makes for a very easy learning curve to become proficient at generating any of the entrée reports. Amount of Data - We have increased the amount of data at your fingertips. Most reports have over 50 available columns of information to be printed, and on some reports that number grows to well over 100 data columns. With so much data at your fingertips you will be sure to be able to get exactly what you are looking for out of the entrée system. Enhanced report filtering - Field filters provide users with the means to reduce the amount of data that is returned on the reports. Only records that match the criteria specified in the Filter Value will be included on the report. Enhanced visual options - Shade columns & rows, attach your company logo, double space the report, or even print reports in full color. Report Styles - Styles provide a means to quickly configure the report layout to match or closely match a previous version of NECS food distribution software. Optimized print scaling - The scaling methods used in Ré3 are far superior than those of it's predecessors. Dot Matrix Mode - Dot matrix mode offers high speed output to dot-matrix printers. This feature is great for those in-house reports like pick lists or inventory count sheets. File Output - Any Ré3 can be exported to PDF, Word, Excel or even HTML. For more a more detailed look at Ré3, please download our PDF guide.

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Sales History & Graphs The entrée® system cannot just run your business today, but give you the information you need to plan for the future. The system carefully tracks your sales and purchase history and can provide you with both the numbers you need and visual graphing options to clearly see sales patterns. A central part of sales history is built into many reports. For example, our "Customer Comparative Sales Analysis" report can take your customers sales history and analyze sales dollars, cost, gross profit, gross profit percentage, percent change by period... and produce it compartively by week, month, quarter, year or a custom format you specify. This is just one example that shows you the power of our software. Besides many reporting features, the ability to generate graphs is also included. This includes bar charts, line graphs and pie charts. You can take any item, customer or vendor and product a graph of its activity.

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