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Who should look at the System Setup menu?
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The commands in the System Setup menu, like the Configuration menu, is for someone who is a high-level decision maker since these commands often affect all sites within the organizational layout.
There are four main selections in the System Setup menu. Each selection is focused on a specific activity, such as setting sales tax rules or naming the profit centers for each site. Once you complete a task, you will not need to go back and change the settings very often. So you may not find yourself visiting this menu group as frequently as the others.
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Why should I define my organizational layout?
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In the System Setup menu group, you can set up the organizational layout just as you would create an organizational chart. The layout starts with a corporate location, and then you can build your structure beneath it, up to 10 levels deep. At each level, you can create groups, which represent business units or locations within your organization. At the lowest level, you can add the actual car wash sites that collect customer data and process transactions. Data is replicated up from sites to the corporate location at the top of your organizational layout. The levels you create in between are important for two reasons. First, they enable you to aggregate data, and then display it that way in reports. Second, the levels enable you to enforce logon security. The benefit of this, from a business perspective, is that you can organize your sites in whatever manner makes sense to you. For example, if you have regional managers, you can create regions, and restrict the logon privileges at those regions to accept only regional managers and their superiors. This kind of flexibility and control for multi-site management is unique to the car wash industry. No other software system offers this advantage.
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What is a profit center?
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Profit centers or income sources are defined to track income and labor. These are managed in the Profit Centers menu group. A profit center is a part of the car wash that can be treated as a distinct area where revenues and expenses are determined separately and profitability is measured. For example, you might look at the Conveyor as a profit center separate from Hand Finished Services. Profit centers typically roll up to Facility Totals. By managing profit centers, you can select them in reports to help determine which areas of the car wash are operating efficiently, and which ones are lagging in terms of sales objectives and labor performance.
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Can I see the settings for all of my devices?
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Devices are managed in the Devices menu group. You can view the settings for every device at every site, as long as that site is assigned to a group in your organizational layout and the device is communicating on the local network. You can also create a virtual device with the default settings you want for that device family. For example, say you have a bay of five Touch ‘N Clean devices. If you create a virtual Touch ‘N Clean device, you can apply its settings to every Touch ‘N Clean in all five bays. You do not need to configure each one separately. You can create numerous virtual devices for both the Touch ‘N Clean family and the Auto Sentry Flex family of devices. For customers with 30 sites, for example, this functionality greatly simplifies they way you deliver promotions to your customers. Imagine creating a special holiday promotion once, and then applying that promotion to 60 Auto Sentry Flex devices with one command.
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