Support FAQ

RTO Pro Support Web FAQ

This page contains answers to common questions handled by our support staff, along with some tips and tricks that we have found useful and presented here as questions.

If you are on a support plan, Subscription, or within your first 90 days of purchase you are eligible for any updates that are released.

To download an update click Updates or Download Updates on the top right of the Main Menu of RTO Pro. When using this function on a networked version of RTO Pro you only have to download the update from 1 computer and after installing the update on that computer you will be prompted to install the update on the other computers when you run RTO Pro for the first time after installation.

If you are not current on support plan, to purchase an upgrade you can order online here, or call 352-383-9375.

Depreciation is done by the inventory agent. Most stores only need to have 1 agent, however there are instances where multiple agents may be useful. An example store is illustrated below.

Example 1: ABC Rental purchases RTO Pro 11-1-98. They receive all old inventory that they were using a manual system to depreciate with an agent name of “ABC OLD”. They do not setup “ABC OLD” for depreciation instead they plan to continue with the manual system to depreciate these items.

All items that have not began depreciating yet and all merchandise received after 11-1-98 they receive with “ABC NEW” as the agent. They set up "ABC NEW" for 3 year MACRS depreciation. They also set up 11-1-98 as the Last Depreciation Ran date. (See Agent Maintenance). Then Monthly after the first of each month they would run a depreciation report for "ABC NEW". (Depreciation reports do not have to be run monthly, you could wait until the end of the year and run all months at one time.)

Example 2: ABC Rental does a lot of retail sales and they want to be able to get retail cost of sale figures weekly. In this case they would want to have at least 2 agents, a retail agent and a rental agent. The rental agent would be setup for the type of depreciation you wish to use. The retail agent would not be setup for depreciation.

ABC Rental purchases RTO Pro 11-1-98. They receive all old inventory that they were using a manual system to depreciate with an agent name of "ABC OLD". They do not setup "ABC OLD" for depreciation instead they plan to continue with the manual system to depreciate these items.

All items that have not began depreciating yet and all merchandise received after 11-1-98 they receive with "ABC RETAIL" as the agent. They also create an agent named "ABC RENTAL" and set it up for 3 year macrs depreciation. They also set up 11-1-98 as the Last Depreciation Ran date.

Once a week, or whenever they wanted they would run a flip report. They select agent to flip from as "ABC RETAIL" and flip to "ABC RENTAL". When they run this report it shows them the inventory that was sold and gives the total cost of sale for these items. It also shows items that are flipped to "ABC RENTAL" (The items flipped to "ABC RENTAL" would be the items that were rented out so that they may begin depreciating.). Monthly they would run the depreciation report  for the agent "ABC RENTAL". This report gives them the depreciation or rental cost for the month.

Agents can also be used to handle inventory that is financed or floor planned by banks, etc.

Above are only examples of how depreciation works it is generally different from store to store depending on how you wish to handle it. RTO Pro can also depreciate merchandise that you were doing manually before, however to set it up for that the merchandise must be loaded and then edited for the correct balance (cost – depreciation claimed) and depreciation began date (See Inventory Maintenance). To setup old merchandise for depreciation in the above examples you would load all old inventory that has begun depreciation as “ABC NEW” then edit the balances and begin depreciation date, then RTO Pro would depreciate all of the old inventory for you also.

RTO Pro comes with a backup utility that can write to any device that can be accessed through a drive letter. This includes Thumb Drives, Mini USB Drives, External Hard Drives, Zip Drives, 3.5" floppy drives (not recommended) and many others. CDR drives can be used if you have software that enables "Packet Writing". Click here for instructions on backing to CDR. There is a program called DLA that will enable you do backup directly to CD the link is below:

http://www.roxio.com/enu/products/dla/overview.html

Most tape drives come with their own backup software and can only be used with the software that it comes with. If you are using one of these type drives simply follow the instructions that came with the backup software that was included with your hardware, and select the directory to backup.

The RTO Pro Backup Utility allows you to do data backups and full backups. If you are using a high density drive (capable of storing 100MB or more) you should do a data backup daily and a full backup monthly.

3.5" 1.44MB floppys ARE NOT RECOMMENDED for backup, they are unreliable.

USB Drives also known as Thumb Drives or external USB Hard Drives are recommended for backup. At the time of this writing (2/22/2008) 4GB Kingston Datatravelers (USB Thumbdrive) are only $19.95 at www.buy.com.

There are also free online storage sites available that can be used to store backups such as Microsoft Live SkyDrive: http://skydrive.live.com. They offer 5GB of free online secure storage.

RTO Pro makes it easy to save invoices to one multi-page PDF file with a setting on the billing page. This is useful for companies who outsource their mailing of invoices.

See this help topic for more details

Your computers date and time are kept by Windows and the computer itself. RTO Pro does not have any functions in it to prevent employees from changing dates or time, however you can password protect RTO Pro to prevent employees from changing the system date and then accessing RTO Pro.

If you want to prevent your employees from changing the system date at all some versions of Windows will allow you to do this using Windows account features.

Below is a link to software that can be used to password protect the ability to change the date / time in any version of Windows.

http://www.winability.com/folderguard/

The link to the Webpay Master Login page is below. Click the "Create New Login" button and follow instructions on the screen to create a master login for webpay.

The master login feature allows you to login and see the same online info your customers see when they login. You can pull up any of your active customers from the master login simply by entering an account number or searching by the customer name. This feature can be used to take mobile payments from customers in their home while doing in house collections. It could also be used to aid in remote payments, when you are taking a payment for another store.

Webpay Master Login: https://rtowebpay.com/master

 

Many services such as credit card processing, ACH, SMS Texting, Voice Broadcasting and many others rely on internet services. As we all know internet services are not up 100% of the time, service outages can be caused by anything from problems with your internet service or internet provider to the service provider or anything in between. Most services rely on a lot of interconnected systems working together, if there is an issue with any of these systems it can cause service outages. Most issues get resolved within a few minutes, so if you have a service that has been working at it stops, wait a few minutes and retry, more than likely it will start working again without you having to do anything.

To troubleshoot internet service outages you should start by checking your own internet service to verify it is working. To do this open your internet browser and try opening a few websites, just because your home page comes up that does not mean your internet is working, your home page and pages you visit often can be saved to cache and open even if your internet is down.

Below is a link to a good article about internet outages.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2523959/-the-internet-is-down---what-does-that-really-mean-.html

 

RTO Pro does not provide email service, we only provide software to send emails to your customers, you must use your own email service or email provider as your outgoing email service. RTO Pro will work with most services that offer outgoing SMTP service, such as Amazon SES, SendGrid, the service most ISP's offer along with internet service, as well as thousands of other email services that are available that you can find by searching Google for "Email Service Providers".

Below is a link to the help topic with more details of where you put your SMTP info and credentials in RTO Pro after you have decided which email service you want to use and set up that service with the service provider.

http://www.rtopro.com/help/index.html?help_desk_rto_pro_sendmail.htm

 

Have you ever turned your computer on because you need to do something real quick only to find out Windows or the software you needed to use decided it wanted to update before it lets you use it? We are of the opinion it is great to have software updates, but the user should decide when they want to update, not the software company.

We make it very easy to update with just the click of a couple of buttons, and we put out updates often, but we leave it up to YOU to decide when you want to update, we will NEVER force you to update when you are in the middle of trying to get something done!

 

In case you haven't found the answer for your question please feel free to contact us, our customer support will be happy to help you.

The RTO Pro Help file can be found online at the link below, it has a lot of useful information and has a search feature.