Introducing Windward System Five for Lighting Showrooms

Hello and welcome to our webinar today on Windward System 5 lighting showroom software. This is going to be a live demonstration, and towards the end, there will be a Q&A session. Now, while we're going, if you think of a question, go ahead and place it into the questions area of the webinar service, and we'll address all questions at the end of the show.

Just going to give it a couple of minutes while people are logging in here.

Alright, just a little bit about Windward software. Software has been making business management software for the lighting industry since 1984. So, we support lighting showrooms just like yours. We believe in helping showroom owners to keep current with the changes to the lighting industry, and we believe that showrooms need to stay ahead of technological advances to survive and grow. You also believe that good tools can not only help your bottom line but they also help you improve your work-life balance. We've been helping showrooms manage industry changes for over 38 years. Like I said, we make business management software for lighting showrooms just like yours. We are an integrated solution, and we provide point of sale, inventory control, purchasing and fulfillment, accounting, accounts payable and accounts receivable, e-commerce and cataloging, and a lot more than that. And as you'll see as we go through this demonstration, we really pride ourselves on helping you run your business instead of just reporting on it.

Alright, today's presenter is Sean. He's a business developer for Windward software, and he's been with us for over 12 years. Definitely the person to be helping us out today. So, without further ado, I'll hand it over to you, Sean.

Agenda: Thanks a lot, Kyle. Really appreciate it. Alright, so for our demonstration today, we're really going to just try to cover the basics. The goal of our presentation is to show you what we do and how we do it, but also maybe solve some of those problems you're facing in your business today. Really, it's not about the features that we have; it's about fixing the problems that you have in your store and maybe even helping you advance a little bit further and make things a lot easier on yourselves and your lives.

So, the demonstration is we're going to talk about the basics because if you don't get the basics right, you really can't proceed any further. We'll talk about how our inventory works and focus on some lighting-specific functionality around room tagging and room locations. We'll talk about how to work with contractors and how we work with retail showrooms versus contractor-based showrooms. Then, we'll kind of walk you through the whole building of an estimate, the building of a sales order, and take you through how we go through that process of ordering product in specifically for a customer or for a build. That takes us really seamlessly through to the purchasing side. We'll talk again on special order management and how we handle POS, how we consolidate back to the receiving side, and that will bring us right back to where we started and fulfilling to invoicing, accounts receivable, and how that posts in accounting.

At the end of this presentation, we're going to go to a few other slides, and we'll talk a bit about our industry partnerships. We'll review some new functionality with Windward intelligence reporting, and we'll get into a bit about how you can manage some of those pesky catalogs and the e-commerce tie-ins that you might be running into with the business as well.So, without further ado, let's jump into the presentation.

Alright, so this is Windward System 5. Now, right now I am logged in, and pretty much I can do anything in the software that I would like to do. And as we go through this demonstration, we're going to show you how we can eliminate things like sticky pads from your work environment, Excel spreadsheets, and that type of thing, just by walking through a sales process from front to end. Now, the first thing to talk about before we go in here is that there seems to be an awful lot on the screen. Every person who logs in will have their own customizable setup. So, for example, if someone is not allowed to access the general ledger, that wouldn't even come up for them. So, in the very beginning, we're helping streamline your business by providing you with some role-based logins. Your salespeople will see the CRM, but your bookkeeper gets a little bit more access on the back end than their salespeople would.

We talked about the basics, so there's nothing more basic than just starting a very simple sale.

Making a Sale: In our software, all you have to do to make a sale is click on "New Sale" and select the type of invoice you're doing. In this case, we're going to do a cash invoice. I know there's a lot of accounts receivable; we'll get to that. Click on "Cash" at this point again. Windward is extremely fluid in how we run. You have the ability to force the software to choose a name of a customer. In my case, I don't have to; I've set it up so I don't have to choose a name. But we're going to go ahead and do that anyways with Smith Construction. Click on "OK", and now we're on the point of sale screen. This is important, more for the retail side of the business. On the retail component, you really want to be able to ring people in quickly, effectively, and efficiently and get them out the door as fast as you can with accurate pricing. So, in our software, we do have the ability to barcode scan and scan hanging tags and labels. If I did have a barcode scanner attached to my computer today, I could be able to scan that barcode and the item would just populate. Unfortunately, I don't, so what I'm going to do instead is type in a partial part number just on the screen. This is going to bring up a few options for me when I do this, and I'm just going to select one of the options on the screen today for the sake of ease.

Now, this feature can be turned on or off. This is one of the features you have the option of using. You don't have to, but you can choose to use our room tagging feature for maybe some of your contractor builds. When you start building out your house orders and your house builds, organizing what goes where can be very complex and difficult. So, in our software, you do have the ability to use what we call keywords to select a room that something is going into.

And this feature can be turned on or off, or it could be something that you add on a line versus me having a pop-up like you're seeing here. So now I have this brass halogen fan, I've got one being sold to the customer, okay, and I just need to simply take the cash. If I hit "Tender", I take the payment. 

Now, Windward does handle integrated credit card processing. So one of the things that we can help you with is if you're finding a disconnect between your invoicing and what people put through on the credit card machine, if you do run integrated, we can eliminate that step of plugging in $282.24 cents into a black box, which will make for more accurate transactions and help you get people through the door faster when it comes to those retail sales on the accounts receivable side.

On the contractor-based lighting showrooms that we deal with, a lot of times you may have contractors that have account credit cards on file, and Windward does support tokenization. So you're able to store a token that you can reuse repeatedly to run those contractors' credit cards to help them pay for their AR bills. But again, we'll touch a bit on that as we go along. 

We do have different invoice types in the software, so you can customize and design your own invoices. Ours are very basic in our demonstrations, but there is a designer in the back end that allows you to set them up as you see fit. As you can see on this one, we have a customer address, a shipping address, job number, and job information, that type of thing.

Now, we're going to throw a little bit more onto this. We're going to do something more than just a simple sale. I'm going to jump into an estimate and build out a quote for a customer. I'm going to show you how easy it is to flip that to a sales work order with a button click. And from there, I'll actually start speaking a bit about some of our lighting options. Now, for the sake of time today, I can't cover everything we do specifically for lighting, but I can at least speak to them a bit. And if there's anything that you see during the presentation right now that you want a further demonstration on, just let me know. I'll be happy to take a separate call and go through some of these things in more specifics.

Okay, let's click on "New Sale", and we're going to start this off as an estimate. In this case, I'm going to actually look for a customer by hitting "Find Customer". For the contractor-based customers out there, we do have the ability of having different addresses shipped to and billed to addresses. So if you have Bob the Builder, for example, and Bob works on multiple job sites, you will be able to add Bob for a new estimate. But then, when you're in the estimate, you can go and add a second ship-to address, and that ship-to address could be for pretty much anyone.

I'll hit "Find" again. Now, if you're doing a new housing build or an apartment complex build, something that's just starting up, you have the ability to put in, for example, instead of a physical address, you could put in the name of the build. I call it "Sierra View Apartments" or "Sierra View Condominium complex" or whatever it may be, and then you can have the lot numbers listed as a physical address. Once the build completes, you can then update that address and update that file to reflect the proper address on the property.

Now, an estimate is a little bit different than a sales order or an invoice. It allows you to be able to quote on a product without actually removing anything from inventory or having it affect the account in any way, shape, or form. Okay, so I'm going to start adding a few items to this estimate, some lighting-specific features right now and start talking a bit about some of those lighting-specific features that we have in the software.

First thing I'll do is I'm going to add a chandelier. Oh, once again, it's coming up and asking me what room location I would like this to go to. This is an example of a feature we have called modifiers. So in a lot of cases, you have different finishes you may have for your fixtures, you may have different chains that can go along with the different bulb options. So right now, this item has been staged to be able to show you, "Okay, I've got the chandelier. What finishing do you want?" And we'll go with the H brass. Then it asks me exactly what type of chain I'd like to go along with it, and there's appropriate upcharges associated with that. Let's just stick with some aged brass as well there for two of that too. And then it can ask you what bulb types I want to have to go along with the chandelier as well too.

Now, you don't have to do all this. You could plug some of these items in manually as separate lines. You can go and just type that information in as well too. But if you're having a disconnect from the back of the office and you want to have some consistency with the sales staff about what questions they ask and gathering that information before you do an order, modifiers can be a great way of streamlining your process and making sure that things aren't missed on the sales front. So you're getting the order right the first time.

I know multiple cases where orders have gone out, we have to wait for that lead time that seems to be happening now when it comes to product being received. And then when the inventory item comes in, there's something wrong, something the customer didn't request or ask for, and suddenly we're back at that whole order phase again, and with an unsatisfied customer. The whole point of having software in place is to make sure that we're not having to double and triple enter orders and that we're getting these orders right and to the customer in a timely fashion and that we're communicating within the company with the least amount of effort possible.

Okay, now, in order to flip, well, let's hold off before we do that. The other thing we have the ability to do in the software that you may run into is kidding. That's a little bit different than modifiers. Kidding allows you to actually add items together. So in this case, chandelier bulbs throws on the bulbs automatically. Ball tagging is going to be something that will help you a lot in regards to just making sure you've got everything on the estimate and the quote that you need to have on there.

Some other features to talk about in the sales process, just to kind of highlight them, although not going into them, Windward does have the ability to have commissions on your invoices, as well as it has the ability to take a look at previous purchases by a customer. When we look at these previous purchases, we can add those onto a sale or onto an estimate. The great thing about this feature that you're seeing right here is that if you do have customers come in and purchase things from you and they want to re-buy it, it's very easy to go and look those items up.

The other feature that we have and what we'll get to in a moment when I flip this to a sales work order is there some lighting-specific features in regards to contractors who allow owners to come in and purchase their own product. One of the nightmares I hear about in showrooms quite a bit is if you're dealing with a lot of the commercial contractor builds, you'll have an allowance given to owners to come in and pick out their individual fixtures, but keeping track of what to charge the owner of the day of and what to charge the contractor can be extremely challenging. In our software, you do have the ability on a sale to put an allowance in, put an extra allowance in, track how much a sale is actually going towards that allowance, and then when we go to invoice, it can prompt you at the invoicing portion to go collect the money from, well, in this case, James Morrison.

Okay, so let's follow the next step. I have a bunch of items on here. We're going to flip this to a sales work order. A sales work order in Windward's world does a couple of things. First off, it allows you to take inventory and allocate that inventory to an individual sale. The second thing it allows you to do is it allows you to take deposits against that work order that you can track. So in this case, if I were to ask the customer for a full deposit of $2424.52, this will now go into my accounting as a liability, and I'd be able to track that I've received that deposit but it's not posting it as revenue right away, money earned, because I haven't delivered on the products that are here.

Now, once I flip this, the software is looking at the inventory that's on the screen, and it's going, "Okay, Sean, you don't have enough in stock. What do you want to do?" Well, I can do several things. I could backorder, oversell, sell available, special order. A couple of the ones that are worth paying attention to in this case are special order, which will tell me to order this product in for the customer that needs it. This is really important for tracking purposes.

A lot of times, when it comes to special ordering, when people don't have a system that manages this part of it, they'll end up writing in a separate book or somewhere else, an Excel spreadsheet, what items they need for what customer. And then the purchaser has to go around and kind of consolidate those purchase orders and make it all work out. Windward, by clicking this button, will allow you to actually track an order from the sale side to the purchasing side.

Another option we have here that's worth talking about, but I won't hit today, is stealing. A lot of times, on a housing bill, you may have products that are sitting in the back, waiting to be delivered, but maybe the delivery date isn't for two, three, four months down the road. But to take that fixture and sell it to a customer that needs it immediately, but it will also kick off a reorder for that product to be brought back in for the original customer that wanted it. So we click on special order.

At this point, there's communication happening, so I'm a sales rep, I'm now telling my purchaser that I need this. Okay, I'm looking right here and I can see I have zero available for this item. It is a special order item, and I have zero on order. If I did have any items that were coming in, let's create a box down below, it would not be grayed out, it would be lit up, and I could actually request incoming inventory specifically for this order and this customer. So now there's kind of this computer communication happening that normally, in a lot of cases, isn't really happening unless you talk to the purchaser or you're having a conversation or you happen to know what the orders are. So right now, I could see how many are on order and coming in that aren't assigned to anybody else and potentially requested.

In my case, though, this is the first time I'm ordering this product, I need to queue it. So I've requested one, it is not on order yet, it is not arrived, and the supplier's progress. It's also not on an NPO. I'm going to click OK.

So normally, at this point, I move on to purchasing, but there's a couple of pieces I think that are worth talking about at this moment, and I know I will be talking about them later on. A lot of our lighting customers out there are either using Lights America or EXO logic. And what you've seen us do in the software today is what we do when we start an order in Windward from scratch. However, if you are using Lights America or you're using EXO logic and you build out a wish list on those websites, you can submit those wish lists in Windward, and the process would literally start right here.

So all that entry you saw me do doesn't happen when we will take that order in. It will then add it like a work order as it is now, and then allow you to continue on with the purchase order process. From that standpoint, it's really fluid. There's no double entry and no worry about mistakes. If you have inventory items on your Excel site or on your Lights America site that aren't in Windward, that's fine. When you submit that order in, it's going to create those parts for you.

So that's part of our strengths as well. For being in the business for 38 years, we've built up these relationships with industry players to make your job a lot easier in the showroom.

The other area that I haven't highlighted yet, that I think I will before we go any further, is that Windward does have the ability, if you have a catalog that is not from EXO-Logic and a catalog that is not from Lights America, an Excel file, if you will, from, let's say, in this case, Poisel, you can actually take those catalog files and load them. And in our software, they'll be put in what we call a virtual warehouse, so just kind of sitting there waiting for you to look at, select, and double-click on the item. And then it will prompt you to create the part. The pricing and the cost will be imported from your Excel spreadsheet that you loaded earlier, and suddenly the part is there. So once again, handling that catalog to inventory management side of the business, it's eliminating you having to go through all the steps, having to create a part number, maybe getting something wrong in that process, and then trying to communicate with the supplier and get a product ordered in. It's keeping it as simple as possible, as easy as possible, so you get the product as quickly and as efficiently as possible in the door.

Alright, so from here, what we'll do is start switching over and talk a bit about inventory. We'll open up an inventory record and briefly look at it, and then we're going to switch immediately to purchasing. Before I do, look at this inventory record, okay, I want to warn you all that there's a lot here. There is a lot of information on the inventory record. If I click on it right now, you're going to see a whole bunch of sub-tabs. You can look up inventory in a variety of ways. In fact, I'll show you that in a moment. But in our software today, an inventory record really is a central hub for everything about this item. And a few of the key things that pertain to the lighting industry that we're able to do very easily in our software, first off is costing. So Windward has the ability to add freight or duty or extra fees to their cost to actually get a pure landed cost value. Cost is such a moving target in this day and age with all the prices changing, the inflation. Windward can update costs from a PO. We can also diff just track these extra costs to get a true landed value for your product.

The other thing that Windward is very good at is pricing. So Windward has up to 99 different price levels in our software. Now, on that sale for Bob the Builder, when I added Bob the Builder to that sale, it was looking at his customer record and trying to see what his price level was, and it was assigning him his pricing based on that. And in Windward, you can make exceptions for Bob's price level. So he may be on, let's say, Builder level one for some products, and then it could be on a completely different discount for other products. It's really handy for controlling how deep of a discount you give to what contractor.

Another key feature that we have on our inventory records that really is incredible is alternate suppliers. Windward can take multiple barcodes, multiple part numbers from different suppliers with multiple pricing, and they can track it all. So if they scan, if I had an item coming in from one supplier that I can order from a second supplier, I can scan either their barcodes and turn either their part numbers, and it will point to this inventory record. So you don't have to have multiple inventory records for the same item.

Environmental fees are all handled by Windward as well. We are able to handle multiple taxation and tax rates. And finally, before we go any further, if it comes to discounting and negotiating, we are able to do that other than your price schedules on the fly by clicking on subtotal or line discounts.

Okay, moving on to purchasing. I'm just going to double-check one thing before I do. Believe that is progress. Okay, perfect. So, moving on to purchasing at this point, most showrooms will do one of two things. They will have a purchaser whose job is to order product in and manage that whole workflow from the sales rep through. Or if it's a smaller showroom that we're working with, sometimes the salesperson will be the one doing the ordering. If it's the latter, we can actually create a PO straight from the screen and the salesperson can order the product if that's what you want to do. But in most cases, we're moving on to the next step, which is going and creating a PO. So, I'm changing roles at the moment. Okay, creating POs.

And imagine if you will, I'm a salesperson in your business. I've done my job. I put my order in. The nice thing is, now I don't have to do anything else. I don't have to print off a copy of paper and put that in the mailbox. I don't have to write a sticky note. I don't have to fill out a form detailing which items I need to be special ordered. By hitting save, I've done my job. Maybe I've printed a copy off for the customer, and from there, that's great. Or I can email a copy of the work order or the estimate to the customer as well too. But now, I'm changing roles. Now, I'm no longer the salesperson. I'm the guy in the back office. I'm the one who's coming in with a cup of coffee, and I'm sitting down on Monday morning, and I have no idea what it is I need to order.

So, I'm going to start and pretend that today is the day that I create a PO for Progress, that I have no open POs for Progress currently. I can show you how we look those up in a moment. But I'm going to sit down and start my day by clicking on "purchases" and doing a new purchase order. I'm going to do a new purchase order for Progress Lighting.

Now comes the question, "Okay, great. You're starting a new PO for Progress Lighting. What is it you need to order in?" And this tab is where we start orders. The Orders tab shows you everything that needs to be ordered in for Progress Lighting or anything that needs to be ordered in general. So, we can see here already, I've got an item listed right here under special orders, and that's my multi-tier chandelier that I queued up beforehand. I can see my cost price for the item. I know who the main supplier is. I can have alternates, and I can see the customer is Bob the Builder and the invoice one feature here to talk about that I didn't stage for our demonstration today is the delivery date. If you are tracking when a project is due or when the items have to be received by, by filling in the delivery date on the work order or on the estimate, that'll track throughout the software when it comes to some of the reports that we run as well as the POS.

So, I'm going to go ahead and add this item to the order itself. Now, the other thing that I have is our suggested orders button. Here at the moment, I don't have anything I'm out of stock for with Progress. I'm going to list off all my parts just to make this easier to pick some items up. But a couple of things to talk about suggested orders is, it's looking at right now my highs and lows and telling me based on my highs and lows what I should be ordering in. But it's not just as static as that. We can set up highs and lows that are different for different times of the year. 

For example, if you carry more outdoor products like landscaping that are seen to be more in demand in the spring and the summer due to buildings going up, well then in Q1 and Q2, you might have a higher high and low for those types of products. If you're dealing more with interior fixtures and renovation-type products in the third and fourth quarter, once again, you can go ahead and change that up and change that kind of makeup of what's high and low. You can set as many seasons for highs and lows as you like. 

You can also run this report based on sales over a date range and get some suggestions of what you should be ordering in on what's been selling. Now, there are a number of reports in our software that help you kind of figure out what you should be ordering. Stock management reports, stock value reports, we've got the ability to set budget limits and that type of thing on what you ordered, on what category. Tons of features on just getting that information mined out of the software. But again, for the first time today, we're just looking at the practical, how do we build out a PO?

So, we'll go select a few items and we'll add them. Now, you'll notice an item in green, and that is the special order item that we need for Bob the Builder. The rest of them are in white. So, Windward does differentiate between the items that are special order and what is not special order. You can also see on the other side here, we can add job information to be able to track and look at that information from here. These items are on a PL, and I know that in the showroom you typically, for some of your suppliers, are waiting for free freight days to send these POs off, so you don't have to send this today. In fact, we can back right out of this PO and leave it unsent. 

But that special order item has been updated. So, there are four statuses. When I click that box way back when I was on that work order of "requests for special order," it gave it a status of "not on a PO." Now that I've actually added this item to a PO, its status is "PO not sent." In our words, just by me adding this to a PO, I'm communicating with the sales rep who made this order originally and telling them exactly what's going on with the item. It'll be a lot of fun for a purchaser to look at a salesperson who comes back and goes, "Hey, where's my stuff at?" The purchaser will now be able to look and say, "Hey, have you taken a look in Windward to see what the status says?"

So, in this case, the sales rep knows that I'm coming and talking to the purchaser, "Hey, it's on a PO, but I haven't sent it yet." Another key thing to talk about is the Freight Duty and extra fields. If there is freight to be paid into this, you do have the ability to distribute those freight numbers across the whole PO, and that can be done as a ratio, quantity, or cost, whatever that may be. 

Now, for the sake of this order, I'm going to send this PO immediately. I can close them back out. The moment I hit send, I can email the PO off and submit it that way. But the moment I hit send, that status is updated yet again. Now the status for the item is "sent, not arrived." 

A major challenge in a showroom is keeping track of where the inventory is, and when it does come in, who it belongs to. It's a moving target. So many special orders are coming in the back door and going out the front door that fulfilling these customer requests can be extremely challenging. 

Once I've entered in this order, once I've clicked a few buttons and created a purchase order and sent that off, I can now also track where in that special order process my product is. So we have a report called the special orders report. That special order report will allow you to see where your product is based on what status it's at. Is it waiting to be put on a PO? Is it waiting to be ordered? Is it ordered but not arrived? Is it arrived and not invoiced? 

I can run this report based on certain salespeople. I can run it for a specific person. And right now, looking at this report, we can see that I've got a couple of special orders on the go right now. One is for Jim Andrews, a wall sconce. I've ordered it, but it hasn't arrived. It was supposed to be delivered in 2018, so I think we're a little backlogged. The second one is by Bob the Builder, one multi-tier chandelier. I've ordered it, it has not arrived. I expected it today. 

So, you have the ability also to fill out expected dates for products. If I want to go and take a look at Bob's order in full, all I have to do is double-click on the line, and it would actually open that sales work order again. This special order report should be available to everybody that is in the order process, just so they can keep an eye on their specific stages for products being ordered and products being received. 

You're probably seeing some other icons here that might be drawing your eye, things like RMA or warranty return and warranty tracking, promotions, jobs, and projects. Windward does handle all these things, but just for the sake of the demonstration today, I won't be touching heavily on them. By all means, again, if you want to know more about some of the reports that may pop up or any of the items I just mentioned, let me know, and I'll be happy to do a personal demonstration. 

Receiving Merchandise
Okay, so we're going to skip ahead a couple of weeks, a couple of months sometimes, to when a product actually comes into stock. We're going to open up that purchase order. 

So, I click on "Edit Receiving PO." We do have the ability to look at all your open POs by status, whether they're pending, active, or where they're at. In this case, we're keeping it really simple. I'm just getting recent. I've got an active PO for progress lighting. The PO is there, and now it comes to the point where you get to receive the inventory in. 

Now, if you don't have everything that's on the PO that's being received, that's fine. You can do a partial receive. What that will do is put the PO into backorder status and allow you to track the items that are coming. It'll track which dates the items arrived and which items are still outstanding, all on one screen like you're seeing here today. But for now, I'm going to receive all the products in. But the first thing I'm going to do is decide, "Okay, I've got this list of items, but I need to take the items that are for specific customers and set them aside." I need to fix that part of the process, so we're going to hit "Print Labels."

Windward does allow you to print off shipping labels with the customer's address, their shipping address, the location it's going into. In this case, it's the kitchen, what the part number is, and any other descriptors you want to pull off the inventory record. Don't get looks like at the end of the day. Windward has a designer to be able to design your own invoices, design your own labels, design your own receipts. This is just an example from the demonstration. So, if there's any information you want to have come out on your printouts, for example, what's missing, a barcode, perhaps you want a barcode for the inventory item and a barcode for the actual sales work order so you can track them both. Both can be printed on these tags.

Okay, so we'll hit "Receive," click on a packing slip number, receive again, and then we'll print off a receiving report for the person in the back, the receiver. The beautiful thing about this is this receiving report, even if you don't want your receiver in the software, it shows the receiver exactly what that special order is for stock and what the special order item is for, who it's for, and where it's being shipped to. So, they can set it aside. It can even have the job numbers being shipped to as well, so they can set the item aside and start building out in the warehouse or in the back that area and section for that housing built.

Another thing that's happened behind the scenes, and again, without anybody interfering with this, is we have started communication back with the sales rep. So, first off, by receiving that product in, the status for that special order has been changed to "arrive, not invoice." So, any sales rep who runs that special order report can see maybe they've got some money to collect and go after. But on the other side, what it does is it flags that sales work order. So, on our invoice lookup screen, our work orders can have subtypes.

We look up our work orders, and you can have a subtype for "inventory arrived" so it can automatically flag that open sales order of, "Hey, pay attention to me, I've got product here we can deliver on." Now, for now, I'm just going to look that up, click on it. Maybe I should click on it first, click on it, go into the work order, and review it.

Fulfillment, you can see now on the ordered quantity I have one and then four across the board, and now my quantity in hand is exactly the same. At this point, I can flip this to an invoice, and flipping to an invoice is as easy as a button click. So we have all the items in, I can now hit accounts receivable and flip that to an AR invoice, click, click, done, and that changes this from a work in progress to a sale. I will do that in a moment. I'm going to hold up and come back to it in a second.

But another thing that you deal with quite often in the lighting world, especially when you're dealing with commercial, is partial shipments. So Windward does have the ability to take items on an order, like you're seeing here, highlight them, and do a little feature we call "block and move." So we can actually go and select those items and move them to a new but linked invoice. Click on "Move blocked items," and you can move them to a brand new invoice. If I were to go through with this, it would open up a second invoice with the same number that is here, but it would have the letter "a" at the end of it, so it's linked. And it would actually have a note on the original that you shipped these two products. So you have the ability in Windward to do partial shipping quite easily. Windward also has the ability to do AR invoices that have back orders outstanding on it.

So let's flip this to an invoice, accounts receivable, and that's it. We're going to save the sale. It is done. Now, the main way that Windward helps businesses is by being integrated from the front of the house to the back of the house. You've seen me tie sales and purchasing. What about the accountants and the bookkeepers? What about the back office? I won't spend a lot of time digging into it, but I want you to see that in Windward, when I post that sale, it really is posted. So we're going to go take a look right now at accounts receivable, and in this case, we're going to run a statement run. So we're going to click on reports and just run a statement run. There are a lot of features here, but what you want to show in these statements, you can design your statements the way you want them to be. But the point I'm getting at is there's Bob the Builder. He only has one invoice in the system right now. Actually, I only have one invoice in the system right now, period, because I reinstalled our software before a demonstration. But there's the amount he's owed, and from here, I can email all statements with email addresses, fax all statements that have fax numbers, and print off the remainder. And again, I'm not printing anything off, I'm not dropping it in a folder, I'm not putting it in someone's box. This is just happening as a software post to everything else.

On the payable side, we did have a PO that came in. I can easily go in, and again, I'm going to probably not complete this but at least show you the linkage in our software. You can go in and take a look at progress lighting when you have their AB AP build that comes in, look it up, and then see any outstanding bills that you have for progress lighting. You can decide whether you're going to pay what you ordered versus what you received. If I were to double click on this, this would go into the PO, and I'd be able to edit it, accept terms, and all that as well.

That really takes a look at lighting from the front of the house to looking up inventory to some of the tools and that we utilize in the software to help make that manageable, to the purchasing side, to the AP side. There is a lot more information here to what we do and a lot more specifics to what we do. Things like, for example, having Builder Builder templates for your housing builds. Windward handles all of those components for the lighting showrooms out there, and I'm happy to kind of go through that in a more detailed presentation. But this really concludes right now the general overview of what we do with our software.

What I'm going to do now is quickly pass this over to Kyle and talk to you a bit about some of those outside-of-the-software things that we do. Alright, thanks John. Yes, as I said before, this is what we went over. You know, the basics: point of sale, inventory, room tagging, all the way through to the invoicing, accounting, and accounts receivable. Moving on to our next slide, let's quickly talk about a bit of our inventory partnerships and that type of thing.

Okay, inventory partnerships come with Windward Intelligence. So you've seen a couple of my reports in the software. We have a lot of pre-canned reports, a couple hundred of pre-canned reports and extras. Report designers in the software. Windward Intelligence is a fairly new feature that we have where we push up sales reporting into our Cloud solution into Microsoft business intelligence. This allows you to basically look at our information and sales numbers on a graph format and be able to crunch many years' worth of numbers in a really short period of time. It's a pretty inexpensive feature that we have for the software, and it changes reporting extensively. I recommend any of you that are looking at Windward, look into Windward Intelligence at the same time. Yeah, we actually have a full demonstration of that at windwardsoftware.com/intel if anybody's interested in taking a look at that specific feature on its own. Yeah, it's a pretty good video. It's absolutely right, check that out.

XO Logic is one of our industry partners. We're going to talk about a few of them today. So XO Logic, we do have some integration with them on the back end and the front end. As I mentioned earlier, with Lights America and XO Logic, we do have the ability to sync wish lists and push them down into the software so you can build your wish list up or your orders up in XO Logic and Lights America, and they can be submitted online. Lights America is exactly the same thing. We do have the ability to download and bring those wish lists into our software. We also have the ability to import catalogs from both XO Logic and Lights America. In XO Logic, we have our data feed, and in Lights America, we have the ability to import data 52 files in the back end if you're looking to do that. Both solutions are fantastic. We have great relationships with both companies and have for years.

Just as a heads up, there's one thing: we will be at Lightovation coming up. It's just over four weeks from now. We were talking about that the other day. So we will be in the Spectrum Center at 443209. Come by, ask for a demonstration, we'll take you through the software, have a conversation. And just to end this up and round this up, one last moment talking about partnerships today. Windward is a member of the American Lighting Association. We have been for a very long time. They're a great resource for us, and we are members of both the major buying groups in the lighting industry. So, lots more relationships and connections that we have, and a lot of that comes from being at Lightovation and just being a present member there over the past, well, I've been attending for the past eight or nine years.

And that would be it for me today. I'll pass it back over to Kyle for questions and all that type of thing. Yeah, go ahead and type all of your questions into the question and answer field. We had a couple that came through while you were talking there, Sean. Let me go ahead and pull these guys up real quick and see what we've got here. Already throwing some answers to a couple of them, but I think those only go to the individual, so we'll just go ahead and start from the very beginning.

The first one was, "Is this being recorded?" And it's absolutely being recorded. To access it, you can just go to the same place where you signed up for it. We'll be sending an email out with that link after it has been, you know, the video has to process and then we've got to get it uploaded to that site, but we'll probably have that there tomorrow, next day, somewhere in there.

The next question was, "Can you please confirm that this is the cloud version of the software?" And I responded to the asker that Sean is showing the on-premise version that's on his desktop, but the functions are the same. Yeah, absolutely. So the cloud version of the software is a hosted cloud solution that has this on it, and it allows you to have a kind of a virtual, your own secondary virtual desktop to it. There are some additional features with our cloud version. Customers will be able to have automatic backups, their own virtual desktop they can log into. We take care of the updates into that cloud environment, so it makes things a lot easier. It also, by having that cloud environment, you also don't necessarily have to have a server on-site for Windward. All you need is a computer with a stable internet connection, Windows. We recommend Windows 10 plus type thing, not let's not go with Windows 7 or anything like that. But with a Windows computer, essentially, you can access our cloud environment pretty much anywhere.

And a follow-up question to that is the cloud version accessed via the web or a remote desktop type of service? It is a remote desktop type of service.

We're using Windows Virtual Services or Terminal Services, something like that. We do handle all the security on that, as Sean just said, just to make sure that we're making everybody's business data safe. There's a lot of redundancy in the cloud environment, and we also have multi-factor authentication to make sure that it's impenetrable to the bad guys. I should have taken some more time to talk a bit about that. I mean, to add to what Kyle's saying, Kyle's absolutely right. The environment has real-time modern monitoring happening with it, very extensive security measures that keep and make sure that your data is safe and protected. If there are a lot of services with Cloud that would not necessarily come with, you know, a local store keeping a local environment, so there's a lot there and a lot of protection for your data in our environment. What we're using on the back end is Microsoft Azure is our back end or backbone for our hosted environment, and then like Kyle said, a terminal services type connection again into the cloud.

We got another question here. When you give a customer a quote, do you have the ability to print a document with the thumbnail of each item selected? We do. It can be a little bit cumbersome because, on the sense, not on our side, but when you think about it, if you have a thumbnail beside each item, that could take a lot of space up. But absolutely, you can import images in Windward, and those images can be printed out at different sizes on your actual quotes. So if you do want to have images of your products beside each of the line items on your quote, you absolutely can do that.

One other thing to kind of throw in there, I know you didn't ask this question, but I do want to throw this in on printed quotes. One of the features I don't talk about very often is people could take your quotes and shop them. Let's say online, go to direct manufacturers. We have a major problem in lighting now where, you know, it's really difficult to beat some of those big box stores for prices, and lighting is one of those industries where we're holding on very tightly to our family shops and to locally owned stores. And one of the things you can do is in Windward, any part number that you have, you can scramble so that you make it a little bit harder on people to go shop you off-site. So yes, we can have thumbnails of the image pages on the printouts to whatever size you see fit, as long as you have the images in the software, and you have the ability to scramble your part numbers to protect yourself from being shopped.

Okay, let me see if there are any more. I did have a couple of questions that came in from people that weren't able to attend live but still wanted them answered because they're going to watch the recording here. So there was a question about how to control multiple jobs for the same contractor, assuming that they have different projects that have different price structures. I'm assuming that maybe they have different prices negotiated for certain jobs or something.

Like that, yeah. Well, if that's what they're looking at, there's a couple of ways we can handle that. You do have the ability to use our jobs and projects tool. I don't have my screen share on at the moment, but it was highlighted before. Maybe an offside conversation might work with that to be able to control different jobs for different contractors. So you can have specific instructions for doing a job for Sean McAfee, and they can also miscontrol construction's job number two that is being done for Kyle Turner, and it can track multiple invoices and entries against that secondary job. Windward does have full job and project management. We also have the ability to do estimate templates, control pricing, and that type of thing for customers. So there's a number of answers I can give to that, Kyle, but I would say job jobs and project management that we have in our software, that utility might be where we start.

Yeah, and if there's anything that you want to go on a deeper dive down that rabbit hole, obviously we can set up a demo that is specific to your business, right? An easy way to do that is just to go to woodwardsoftware.com/demo, and I didn't put a link for that anywhere here, but we'll definitely supply that in the email that goes out afterwards because, you know, we were just doing the one-to-many presentation here. We would much rather have a one-to-one with you where we're really digging into the specifics of your site, the problems that your showroom is dealing with, or the things that we can help you with. Like Kyle's saying, the software is extremely flexible, and the whole job of being in lighting, the time that we have is that we have a lot of switches in the software to make it work in different ways and a lot of different ways of approaching how we bring in order, how we manage your business. So part of our process, as Kyle was talking about, is when we implement people to our solution, we train them, and we hear about their business, we learn about what their processes are, which ones they should keep, which ones they should improve upon, and then we do a real kind of tailored implementation for them. We also have the ability of doing a very standard implementation for lighting showrooms. That's something that's just come out recently with a new kind of option that we have available for customers too. Windward is flexible in how we set up software, how the software works, and how we implement the software in your business.

Okay, we got a couple more minutes here. If anybody has any additional questions, please go ahead and get them in there. We really do appreciate that. And if you have any additional questions beyond this, you can always give us a shoot us an email at sales@windwardsoftware.com. And I think we're just gonna wrap up here. Yeah, I appreciate everyone's time, and as Kyle said, if there's anything you would like to take a look at offline, feel free to give us a call, reach out to the website. I'd be happy to take you all the presentation. All right, bye everybody.