Due to differing state laws or franchising agreements, some rental operations must set up more than one set of accounting files and divide their rental locations between two or more separate accounting companies. Yet at the same time, there is the need to allow vehicles to float between all locations regardless of the accounting company involved. This separation of accounting data plus the sharing of rental files is accomplished by the CARS+ Shared Fleet feature.
As an example, if you were running rental operations at both Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, airports, you may choose to define a separate accounting company for each state. Each company would handle its own receivables and produce separate financial statements. Yet, by using the shared fleet logic, vehicles are free to float between both cities, and rental contracts opened at one city can easily be closed at the other using the standard close program. This is illustrated below:
RENTAL FILES
Shared by both
----------------- Portland and --------------
| Seattle |
| |
| (Company 00) |
| called the "base company" |
| |
| |
PORTLAND SEATTLE
OREGON WASHINGTON
ACCTNG FILES ACCTNG FILES
(Company 01) (Company 02)
called an "accounting company"
In this situation all rental files, including Fleet, RAs, Control files, Customers, Forms of Payment, etc., are shared by the two locations. This means that the vehicles can freely float between all locations and RAs opened at one company's location can easily be closed at another. Yet when DBRs are posted, all transactions are posted to the appropriate company's accounting files based on each contract's opening location.
Firewalls: As another example, several operators (such as a corporate operation and one or more licensees) may share the same data base. Under this configuration, "firewalls" can be imposed that allow each operator to maintain privacy and prevent users at other operations from accessing data other than their own.
Under the Firewall logic, a user can only:
1. Access reservations whose pickup location belongs to his organization.
2. Access RAs (via the open, close, edit close, etc. ) that either opened at one of their locations or whose anticipated return location is one of their locations (this allows for seamless one-way handling).
3. Access vehicles via the Vehicle Inventory Control program that are either owned by their organization or currently at one of their locations. Note, that when Firewall logic is on, regardless of how this user is defined in Field 9 of page 1 (Fleet access mode) when accessing a foreign owned vehicle, they can only look at page 1 and they are blocked from making any edits.
4. Change locations (via either Change Environment or Change Location) to a location that is also owned by their organization.
This appendix shows how to setup and use the Shared Fleet feature of CARS+.
This set up will be done by a Thermeon Customer Support representative.
A. Create the required files.
The system is normally delivered with two sets of data files defining two companies:
File System "00" = Your "live" files
File System "99" = Training filesFile Systems (companies) 01 through 98 can be used to create separate accounting files for multiple rental companies by following the steps below.
1. At a CARS+ menu, type RUN (RET).
2. After the prompt, "Name of program", type RWOBJ/MCOMNT (RET).
3. Follow the instructions in the appendix of the RealWorld A/R Manual for creating a new company number. The example above required the creation of company numbers 01 and 02.
4. Create empty files for each new company: At a CARS+ menu, type RUN (RET).
5. After the prompt, "Name of program", type one of the following:
CROBJ/CRINIT (RET) = To create Rental files
AROBJ/ARINIT (RET) = To create Accounts Receivable files
APOBJ/APINIT (RET) = To create Accounts Payable files
PROBJ/PRINIT (RET) = To create Payroll files
GLOBJ/GLINIT (RET) = To create General Ledger files
6. At the "Company ID" Field, enter the new company number which were created in Step 3 above.
7. After each file name listed, enter one of the following two characters:
8. Repeat these steps for all accounting files needed for each company.a. If the name of the file has the word "LOCK" in it, enter a period, "." and press RETURN.
b. For all other files, enter the letter "A" and press RETURN.
B. Create employee codes that can access various companies.
CARS+ security files are shared by all companies. The steps to set up these codes are:
1. Sign into CARS+ with an Employee Code which has access to the Edit User Access File program on the Security Menu.
2. Using this program, create new Employee Codes linked to specific companies by entering a valid company number in Field 7. NOTE: On a stand-alone system, if an employee must have access to more than one company's data files, he must have a unique Employee Code for each company. However, for users of CARS+ Internet, one Employee Code can access multiple companies as long as the user knows the company's "password."
3. On page 2 of the User Access File, indicate whether or not this user will be restricted by the CARS+ firewall logic.
C. Modify each Company File
Using one of the newly created Employee Codes, sign into CARS+ and access the Edit Company File program from the Control Files menu. Enter the correct company name and address.
D. Assign locations to the appropriate company.
As stated earlier, all rental files in the base company are shared by the various accounting companies. In order to pass accounting data to the correct set of files, each rental location in the base company must be identified with the correct company number (which was created in Step A above). In the Location records, enter the appropriate accounting company number into Page 2, Field 3 for each location.
E. File linking
Among the files that will be shared between all companies are the Customer File and the Auxiliary File. In order to make that file fully accessible by each accounting company, a linking process must be done at the operating system level. Contact Thermeon Customer Support.
WARNING: If the Customer File is ever rebuilt then the link must be reestablished prior to bringing the system up.
F. Data entry requirements
Because each accounting company shares the same set of rental files, the following General Ledger account numbers must be identical in each accounting company's General Ledger Chart of Accounts File.
1. All accounts listed in Edit Options GL Posting Records.
2. All Accounts Receivable account numbers referenced in Customer File records.
3. All accounts for every Drawer record (see Section IV below for more information on this requirement).
4. Account numbers referenced in the CARS+ A/R Control Fields.
5. Account numbers for the Optional Charges used at each company location.
6. Account numbers used on the Edit Reimbursements program.
7. Realize that all companies share the set up of the Forms of Payment. That is, forms of payment such as Mastercard , Visa, and American Express can be set up as either cash-like credit card (customer type 'CC') or billable (customer type 'B') or batch processed billable (customer type 'BC') for all companies. One accounting company cannot use AMX as cash-like credit card and another company use it as billable.
8. Sundry Invoices use a Tax Code. When posting to a different company than the operational one, the Tax Code must exist in the posting company.
A. Posting DBRs
With the Shared Fleet logic turned on, locations must have their Accounting DBR posted one at a time. Following the Accounting DBR, a separate Account Summary Report prints for each posting company having transactions.
When a location's RAs are posted, the system looks to the Location File to determine the proper set (Company number) of accounting files to be accessed.
B. Customer File
The following consequences result from sharing the Customer File.
1. The Period-To-Date, Year-To-Date, and Current Balance fields in the customer record will reflect the accumulative total of all companies.
2. The credit limit warning on the RA Open and Reservation screens will be based on the combined receivable balance from all companies.
3. As a result, the Set Customer Balance program on RealWorld's A/R menu should NEVER be run because this will change the balance to that from only one company.
4. The Customer/Vendor Purge program MUST only be run from the base company. Attempting to run this program from an accounting company will produce the message "No records found." The customer purge program when run from the base company will check each accounting company's A/R Open Item File before purging a customer record. If any company's Open Item File retains detail for the customer in question, the record will not be purged.
The following limitation currently exists in the Shared Fleet logic:
A. Travel Agent Commission Posting.
Presently, travel agent commissions will post only to the base company's accounting files (Company 00 in the example in the Introduction). Commissions will not post into each accounting company.
However, when setting up the base company, if each location has a unique profit center number, it is then a simple matter to make general journal entries into the appropriate accounting company using the commissions expense account shown in the A/P Distribution report for the "base" company.
CARS+ does not have utilities to merge two existing rental companies into one "base" company using the Shared Fleet logic. This has to be accomplished manually. This section outlines the steps involved explains how to accomplish this manual transition. The same steps are used if merging data from separate CARS+ computers or from two different rental companies defined on the same computer. The different systems (computers or file systems) will be referred to as:
Remote system. This is the system which will have all its files merged into the base system.
Base system. This is the file system into which data will be merged.
A. On both systems it will be necessary run the following reports:
1. Purge as much data as possible.
2. Run all the Control File reports possible from the Print Control Files Menu.
3. Run the Fleet Edit Report.
4. Run the Selected Customer Report for all customers and customer sales data.
5. Run an A/R Open Item Report.
User tip: Purging as much data on both systems will make the task much easier.
B. All of the Locations from the remote system must be added to the base rental company. Any Rates, Classes, Pricing Codes, Options, etc. that are used on the remote system that are not in the base system must be added to the base system's rental files. Rates that are unique to one location can be handled by defining a new Rate Set in Edit Rental Rate/Rules.
C. Vehicles which are currently "Foreign Vehicles" that belonged to the remote system need to be modified to be Owned Vehicles in the base rental company. And vehicles that the remote system uses that are not currently in the base rental company need to be added.
D. Customer File.
1. Customers which currently have a balance due on the remote system MUST be added to the base system's Customer File.
2. All other customers can be added if historical data is desired. Otherwise, new records will be created when repeat customers rent on the newly configured base system.
3. When adding remote customer records, remember to record historical data, if desired, in the appropriate fields of the customer record (year to date sales, number of rentals, etc.)
4. Customers in the remote system who are also customers in the base rental company will assume the existing customer number of the base system. Further details of how to handle customer balances, times rented, etc. are discussed next.
E. Because the A/R files will also make use of a shared customer file with new customer numbers, all open receivables from the remote system must be manually entered into the new A/R files on the base system. There are two methods that can be used to load the Account Balances.
1. Use "Load A/R open item data" to enter customer account balances or individual open items. If this method is used, you will also need to manually correct each customers' Period to Date, Year to Date, Current Balance, and Times Rented fields in the Customer file to reflect the data entered into the Open Item file.
2. Use "Process Sales and CR/DR Memos" to enter individual open items. By debiting the A/R account and crediting a P&L account created for this purpose, the customers' Period to Date, Year to Date, and Current Balance will automatically be updated. One advantage of this method, over the first one, is that an edit report is available for auditing before items are posted. After all items are entered and posted, a single offsetting entry must be made in the General Ledger. This entry should be a credit to the A/R account and a debit to the P&L account used for the total of all items entered.
If using Accounts Payable, General Ledger, or Payroll, all of these data files may be brought over from the remote system.
This will be done by a Thermeon Customer Support representative.
Steps to extract the RealWorld data files:
1. Log on as root and type:
cd /usr/carsplus/AIf the current company number of the data file you wish to extract is not the company number that you will use on the base system, then you must copy these data file to that new number. To do this type:
../copycomp XX YY where XX is the source company and YY is the target (new) company number
2. Create a file, using vi, named "rwfile". In this file type these CARS+ file names, where "xx" is the appropriate CARS+ Company Number:
For Accounts Payable, include these file names:
APRCURxx.DAT
APOPENxx.DAT
APCHKFxx.DAT
APDISTxx.DAT
VENHSTxx.DAT
APTRXFxx.DAT
TRXDISxx.DAT
ADJTRXxx.DATFor Payroll, include these file names:
DEDCODxx.DAT
TAXCODxx.DAT
EMPFILxx.DAT
PRDISTxx.DAT
KHISFLxx.DAT
QTDHISxx.DAT
YTDHISxx.DAT
TIMTRXxx.DAT
TIMDISxx.DAT
MANTRXxx.DAT
MANDISxx.DAT
EMPAUXxx.DAT
EMPFCAxx.DAT
QTDFCAxx.DAT
TAXFCAxx.DATFor General Ledger, include these file names:
TXTFILxx.DAT
CHARTxx.DAT
TRXFILxx.DAT
LAYOUTxx.DAT
GJTRXxx.DAT
SJTRXxx.DAT3. Next using either a floppies or tape, type:
tar cvFf rwfile /dev/xxxxx
/dev/xxxxx is the floppy or tape device, call Thermeon if you do not know your device names.
4. To place the files on the base system, log on as root and type:
cd /usr/carsplus/A
tar xvf /dev/xxxxx5. Use the following commands to change the protection on the data files. From the /usr/carsplus/A directory, type:
chown carsplus *
chgrp carsplus *