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Quoting & Pricing: How does Cyrious Online calculate prices?
Cyrious Online is pre-configured to use 2 pricing methods, but if you want to modify the pricing to match your preferred approach, you can. Cyrious Online has powerful capabilities. The ways of pricing are almost limitless.
The first built-in pricing method is size-based pricing (a.k.a. square foot pricing). This allows you to set standard rates for your products based on area, length, weight, etc. This is the most common approach to pricing in smaller businesses where their equipment and other resources are as constrained.
Most large businesses (and many small ones) prefer to use a cost-based approach to pricing, the second pricing method built into cyrious online. Because Cyrious Online is automatically generating the bill-of-materials for an order as it is entered, the cost information is readily available for pricing. Standard Cyrious Online products can also prices by applying multiplies/margins to the various costs.
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Quoting & Pricing: How does cyrious online automatically create the Bill-of-Materials for each order?
As a reference, imagine that you had a list of all of your material costs, employee costs, and equipment costs. It might be a spreadsheet with 4 columns – quantity, name, unit cost, and cost. For any given order you could open this spreadsheet, fill in the quantity columns, and have the total costs calculated. Cyrious Online is not using a spreadsheet, but it is doing a similar thing. Only instead of just entering a number, cyrious online is computing the quantity of the item needed. Control’s powerful pricing engine is able to run all of these computations in a fraction of a second – giving you real-time Bill-Of-Material and costing information.
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Quoting & Pricing: Can I tailor the materials and costs for my products?
Absolutely! No two businesses produce exactly the same or have the same costs. cyrious online gives you the control to adjust everything you need to get accurate, fast, real-time costing.
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Quoting & Pricing: What products are preloaded into Cyrious online?
Cyrious online comes preloaded with hundreds of products, which can represent raw materials (like rolls of paper or vinyl), or finished sellable items (like Digitally Printed Posters laminated and mounted).
The current starting product set targets the following industry sub-sectors:
Large Format, Small Format, Vinyl Signage Vehicle Wraps (coming)
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Quoting & Pricing: Can I tailor the pricing?
Certainly! Cyrious realizes that no two businesses work exactly the same way. Cyrious online allows you to change the pricing, components, stations, and workflow for each of your products.
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Quoting & Pricing: Can I create my own products?
Yes, you can even create your own products to handle items outside of the predefined categories cyrious online covers. However, online support from Cyrious is only available for standard products.
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Production: What does Cyrious mean by Stations?
Stations, a.k.a. Workstations, are areas where work is performed or where the work waits for some action. Typical stations might be Design, Printing, or Laminating. Stations for queues are also used by some customers for things like WaitingForArtworkApproval, ReadyForInstall, etc. The final station for every item is always Completed, which designates the item is completely finished. Cyrious online gives you the ability to set up an unlimited number of stations.
Stations are the key to production efficiency. All work and materials are broken down by station. Cyrious online products can even automatically determine which stations should be used based on the information entered in the order! An employee that is working in a particular station need only monitor his or her station to find all of the information needed to do a job.
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Production: What does Cyrious mean by Workflow?
A Workflow is a particular sequence of stations involved in the production of a particular order. This can be thought of as an intelligent, self-modifying flowchart of the work. The workflow not only tells Cyrious online which station the job is currently in, but which stations it came through and the order of the stations it will go through next.
Each product in cyrious online can determine the proper workflow based on the information entered. For example, if a particular product may need to route through your laminating station if the product is laminated, but should skip it otherwise. Similarly, it could route to Installation, Shipping, or Hold4Pickup based on the choices made by the user.
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Production: What is Visual Workflow?
Cool stuff! Imagine you could look down into your production area from 50 feet in the air. You would see all the work at each station and get a good idea of what is going on in production. Now imagine if for any particular order, you could automatically see the path it has traveled through so far and the path it will take on the way to completion. Now you have a sense of what visual workflow is.
But visual workflow is even more than just seeing all of your production in a visual mode, zooming in and out, and know where thing are. It is also for working. The screen shows information on materials needed, estimated times, due dates, and more. To advancing a particular job to the next station in its workflow, simply click one button or dragging it to the new station.
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Production: Can I change the workflow on the fly?
Definitely! You can change the workflow of an item from its default during order entry or inside of production. Doing so requires little more than clicking and dragging the workflow line to a new station.
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Production: How do I mark a job as “Done in Production”?
The last station in any workflow is always Completed. To mark an item completely done in production, all you have to do is advance it to that stage or click on the job (in visual workflow) and drag it to the Completed station.
When an order is marked Sale, cyrious online presumes production is done and changes any items not already there to Completed.
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Orders & Estimates: How complicated is putting in an order?
Cyrious online was written from the ground-up with one overriding principal – make it easy to figure out what you need to do. The entire order or estimate process is done from one screen. Different screens were developed for different types of products to make it super quick and easy to learn to quote these different types of jobs.
Cyrious online gives you cost, materials, and workflow information in under a minute!
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Orders & Estimates: How do I print an Invoice or Work-Order?
Once you have saved an order, you will see the Work Order and Invoice buttons appear on the order. Simply click those and cyrious online will automatically generate the appropriate PDF for you to print, save, email, etc. It is not possible to print until the information is saved.
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Orders & Estimates: What are order statuses?
Most accounting-oriented programs like standard QuickBooks don’t understand the concept of an order you’ve taken but not delivered. They assume that taking and delivering the order is the same thing. cyrious online uses order status to differentiate the status of an order. The following statuses are used in cyrious online:
WIP – Work in Process means this order is taken, but still being worked on.
Orders in WIP are not considered sales.
Sales – An order in Sales has been delivered and is considered a sale for accounting purposes.
Voided – A voided order was cancel. Cyrious online allows you to void a WIP or Sale order.
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Orders & Estimates: How does cyrious online compute sales taxes?
For each customer, you can enter what the default sales tax rate is or if the customer is tax-exempt. During order entry, you can also override these options.
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Orders & Estimates: Does cyrious online take payments?
At this time, payments must be handled outside of cyrious online. However, look for payments and integrated credit card payment processing in the coming months.
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Orders & Estimates: Does cyrious online export to QuickBooks?
Soon, cyrious online will be able to generate an export file (*.iif) that can be imported into most versions of QuickBooks. Some configuration of QuickBooks may be required for this option.
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Customer Relationship Management: I’ve heard that cyrious online is Company-centric. What does that mean?
We know that by-and-large your customers are over 80% companies. Within that company, you may have a primary contact but you also could deal with 6 (or 60) other people. cyrious online organizes the customer information around the company, where each company can have an unlimited number of contacts. Each estimate or order still deals with people (contacts), but the company is how most people “think” about the customer.
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Customer Relationship Management: Can I track all my notes and calls with a company?
Yes, cyrious online allows you to create an unlimited number of activities, notes, and warnings for a company. These notes can even be “pinned” to the top so that they are always visible. Additionally, cyrious online will automatically add activities in the customer record to show information about orders.
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Customer Relationship Management: How many contacts can I have in one company?
There is no limit to the number of contacts you can have in the system or for one company.
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Training & Support: What training is available?
Cyrious online is so intuitive; most users find they can immediately begin using it without any formal training. Even so, Cyrious recommends that all new users watch some of our short (fewer than 5 minute) videos. This not only helps with the basics, it also reveals some of the really cool features that might take a little bit of use to which ones you want to use in your business.
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Training & Support: What support options are available?
Cyrious offers free online support for cyrious online users. To request assistance when logged into cyrious online, click on “Help” in the menu.
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General: What is a “cloud” application?
When you plug in to an electrical outlet, the power you get can come from anywhere (and everywhere) on the power grid. This is how the power grid ensures reliability and makes sure you can get enough electricity when you need it.
A cloud application is a program that was built to be run across dozens (even hundreds) of computers in different locations in order to be able to respond rapidly and perform reliably. True cloud applications like cyrious online can survive the outage of one or more servers with little or no impact on the user. Cyrious online is one of the only systems available that is a “cloud” app. Virtually all of the others are “web” apps, which do not have these protections.
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General: Where is my data kept?
Cyrious online’s data is housed in one of several extremely large data centers run by Microsoft. Working copies of the data are stored simultaneously on at least 3 servers to ensure fast access as well as redundancy. The data centers implement extensive physical security measures as well as full redundancy in power, internet, and other operating resources.
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General: On what devices will cyrious online operate?
Cyrious online will run on all major browsers (Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox) on Windows or Macintosh. cyrious online will not operate on tablets and phones that use Apple, Android or Blackberry OS.
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Billing: How is the cost of cyrious online determined?
The base cost for cyrious online is $29.95 per month. This covers up to 3 users and 1 GB of storage.
At the end of the month, Cyrious determines your bill by checking the number of users your company used that month ($7.50 for each of the 4th and additional users) and the amount of extra storage space used ($10.00 per each additional GB).
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Billing: When is my credit card billed?
The credit card on file is billed on 5 business days before the start of the month, plus or minus 1 work day. This leaves time to work out any payments issues before the month begins. If payment is not received when the month begins, service will be suspended. The base charge is always billed in advance for the coming month. Other charges are billed in arrears for the just completed month. Normally, both of these charges are combined into one transaction though in certain cases they may be processed separately.
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Billing: What is the commitment term?
Cyrious online is available on a month-to-month service. You can cancel at any time before the end of the month and owe only the unpaid charges for that month. The final month is charged in full, regardless of when during the month you cancel.
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Billing: How does cyrious online determine how many users I am charged for?
Any of your active employees are allowed to log in to cyrious online (assuming they know their password). A record is created each time a user logs into cyrious online. At the end of the month, cyrious online computes how many different users logged in for your company to determine how many users you are charged for that month. If a user does not log in, then you are not charged for that user in the system. Note: The amount of use is not factored in to the billing charges. Whether a user logs in for 12 hours every day, or just once during the month they are considered an active user account for that month.