The growing Contract Analysis industry needs to raise invoices and quotations for analytical work, and within large companies it is often the practice to "cross-charge" between departments or divisions. How much more convenient if these financial processes can be handled by the LIMS system that is also managing the analytical data!

A new Technical Bulletin from QSI describes the functionality provided within their WinLIMS package to handle the commerce of analysis, including pricing, quotations and invoicing.

By maintaining full customer and contact records, the system is able to efficiently identify the specific criteria such as pricing and discount structures, currency, tax rates and so on to be applied to a particular customer's work. Similarly, pricing structures can be set up to generate price lists reflecting parameters like sample priority, sample type or the number of repeats of a particular test.

Once these are established, quotations are easily generated, and can either be printed or automatically e-mailed to the customer. The invoicing function includes extensive facilities for analysing the financial data to assess business trends and performance. Finally, data can be exported to the company's accounting package, for example to update the sales ledger, free from the transcription errors associated with manual data entry.