Reckon Enterprise Update Industry Specific Versions - What Exactly are these?

Question

So I downloaded and installed v34, went OK if a little clunky. Open it and, instead of just being the latest version with appropriate changes, it hits me with a screen to choose between industry specific versions of General Business, Retail, Contractor, Non-Profit, Professional Services and Manufacturing & Wholesale Editions.

I don't know what these are and I don't know if I was using a particular one before, or how important it is to get this selection right rather than just have a guess. Three could suit my use case (General, Contractor and Professional Services).

So I pick Exit and go looking for info on what the subtleties are between the versions. There seems to be no information available to explain this, beyond the fact of the versions existing. Does it exist? And how would I know if selecting any particular one is going to make important changes to existing data? Thank you.

Rav · Accepted Answer

Thanks for the additional context @VinceS

You'll find details of the specific industry based reports in our guide here -

https://help.reckon.com/article/oarj99bz7k

VinceS · Accepted Answer

For the benefit of others, what p23 onwards of Rav's linked 12 year old document reveals is that "General Business" just means no extra reports. Each of the other 5 nominated areas gets additional dedicated reports, some of which would be quite useful in the particular sector and others are long overdue for streamlining / combining.

So the reality is, you probably can't make a mistake in this selection. May as well pick the most prospective non-general category to have a few extra standard reports available, and just figure out what is helpful at a later date. The nuisance may become that picking something other than what you picked previously, which there is no clue how to know that, may mean reports you used just vanished. Can versions be changed later to access now-missing reports, one wonders?

Given this is a platform level choice, and that platform encourages multiple divisions for economic administration, varieties of reports should be available at all times, and selected from a drop-down (or other) menu that categorises them.

Running a small charity on the side? (we did once), pick from the non-profits menu. Runing a bunch of site specific activities? The Contractors reports are your friend. A single service category gets you straight to professional services and anyone dealing with significant inventory needs the Manufacturers reports, no matter how 'that stuff' turned up. Retail is, well, retail, you know how that goes… But get a multi-pronged engineering product sub-contracting business to fly? You really need to make your own bespoke reports as the inadequacies of the cooked in ones, become evident. These stay with the company files, so shouldn't go missing; I have made a few! But I will pick Professional Services for now and get on with it, as that represents the closest alignment between the needs of running this kind of business and what really happens on the ground, given sitework is mostly subcontractors. Phew. Next…