What FeePrime is

Business is easy, right?

Wrong. Business is not that easy.

But isn’t business just buying and selling?

No. There is more to it than that. Every business does six jobs:

Buy. Keep. Make. Sell. Pay. Count.

• Buy. You buy goods from your suppliers.
• Keep. You store those goods in a shop or a warehouse.
• Make. You turn raw goods into something people want. A bakery turns flour and butter into croissants.
• Sell. You sell to your customers.
• Pay. You pay your staff. You pay the rent. You pay the light bill.
• Count. You keep track of what you hold, what came in and what went out.

All six of these happen at the same time, every day.

Then it gets harder.

Small customers pay you cash. Big customers, like a hotel, do not. The hotel takes the goods today and pays you in thirty days. So now you have to remember who owes you money, how much it is, and how long it has been. Forget, and you lose it.

The same thing happens on the other side. Your suppliers let you take goods now and pay later. So you also have to remember what you owe, to whom, and when it is due.

A notebook will not carry you far. Nor will a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet does not know that a sale should bring your stock down. Paper does not warn you that a customer is three weeks late. Neither one can tell you on a Tuesday whether you will have enough money to pay your staff on Friday.

That is what FeePrime is for. One app for every part of your business.

One app instead of five

In FeePrime, your customers, your stock, your money, your staff and your website all sit in one place. When you make a sale, the stock goes down, the money goes up and the customer’s record grows. Nobody types it in a second time.

Each of those six words is a part of the app. You will meet all of them in this course.

• Buy. Purchase orders, bills, suppliers.
• Keep. Inventory items, warehouses, stock counts.
• Make. Recipes and production runs.
• Sell. Orders, invoices, customers.
• Pay. Staff, payroll, expenses.
• Count. The reports. FeePrime builds these from the work above, so you never add anything up by hand.

You do not have to learn all of that today. For now, just know that it is one building and not six.

The shape of everything

Almost every part of FeePrime has the same three levels.

  BUSINESS  (your organisation)
     |
     +-- MODULE  (Contacts)
     |     +-- record  (Hôtel Akwa)
     |     +-- record  (Nadège Fouda)
     |
     +-- MODULE  (Invoices)
     |     +-- record  (INV-2608-4471)
     |     +-- record  (INV-2608-4472)
     |
     +-- MODULE  (Inventory items)
           +-- record  (Flour 50kg)

Your business sits at the top. A module is one kind of thing, such as contacts, or invoices, or inventory items. The menu shows each module as a section. A record is one of those things: one customer, one invoice, one bag of flour. When a colleague tells you to open the Contacts module and find a record, this is what they mean.

Two doors, one set of information

FeePrime shows the same information through two doors.

The app is where your staff work. It is the screen with the sidebar listing the modules. You need a login to get in, and you need permission.

The public site is what your customers see. Your home page, your product list, your news. There is no login and no sidebar.

They are not two systems. Put a product in the app and it shows up on the public site a moment later, because it is the same record either way.

Why your screen looks different from your colleague’s

Modules are switched on for each business. A shop that does not track stock has no Inventory section at all. A business with no members never sees Members. Then your permissions decide which of the modules that are switched on you can actually open.

So when a colleague talks about a menu item you cannot find, nothing is broken. Either that module is off for your business, or nobody has given you access to it. Both are normal, and whoever runs your business can fix either one.

Practise while you learn

This course is much easier if you click along as you read. Use staging.feeprime.com. It is a practice copy of FeePrime, kept apart from the real thing. Invent silly customers. Delete things. Break whatever you like. Nothing you do there touches your real business.