How Will CAPITAL Office Address the Needs for E-Commerce?

The CAPITAL Office strategy is to offer maximum compatibility and ease of use of integration with industry leading e-commerce solutions as well as custom solutions. In order to achieve this objective the interfaces between the inputs and outputs of the accounting system have to be flexible, seamless and automated. This is achieved through CAPITAL E-Gate.

What is CAPITAL E-Gate?

It is an integrated suite of programs that encompasses these services:

	CAPITAL Scheduler can be set to execute tasks on a periodic basis
	Alerts users to tasks that did not succeed
	Automated "zip" based back-ups of your accounting data
	Dynamic importing of transaction files from external sources, such as E-Commerce software, vertical market accounting applications, EDI, Digital Assistants, etc.

How Are These Inputs and Outputs Made Easy to Use?

Two systems in CAPITAL make this particularly easy. The report writing tool CAPITAL Visual Builder can not only print paper based reports, but can just as readily generate data files. These data files can be uploaded or e-mailed to the e-commerce system on a scheduled basis.

In a similar manner, CAPITAL's powerful Integration Manager allows mapping of external ASCII text files to the databases of CAPITAL. The file format used by the e-commerce system can change and this will not necessarily result in any re-programming costs. You can instruct the Integration Manager to map the data in the external file to the contents of CAPITAL's databases in a different way, dynamically.

What About Direct Integration With CAPITAL Office?

CAPITAL's data is stored in a common  industry standard format. Many popular applications can already understand how to read CAPITAL's files. Reading is also possible through ODBC or through native database access. If a programmer or computer consultant wants to access CAPITAL's data files directly, this could also be achieved. For example, Sequiter Software Inc., has developed a database access library that will speak CAPITAL's native database language. Versions are available for C, C++, Visual Basic, Delphi, and Java programmers.

How Can Data Transfers Be Automated?

This is achieved through the CAPITAL Scheduler application which sits on the Windows Taskbar monitoring the system for events. Events might include the arrival of new data files (through e-mail) or sending off data files after a certain period of time. (Such as running a Visual Builder report on a periodic basis.) A human operator does not have to be involved in executing these tasks.

What Are the Advantages of This Strategy?

By focusing our resources on integration and cross-compatibility issues, users have a much wider choice of potential e-commerce solutions to choose from. If we built our own "one size fits all" e-commerce solution the number of users we could potentially please would be limited. There would also be a conflict of interests as we would be compelled to dedicate resources to our own solution rather than encourage open standards for accessing the system from third-party applications. Users would be unlikely to get the best possible solution. Wide choice translates into price competitive solutions and more features and options to choose from.

Does CAPITAL Office Recommend Specific E-Commerce Solutions?

It is our objective to make our user base aware of consultants who have built web sites and e-commerce solutions that integrate with CAPITAL Office. However, we will not be compiling such a list until we have had the opportunity to the evaluate the costs and benefits of each available solution.

When Will CAPITAL E-Gate Be Available?

We intend to release CAPITAL E-Gate soon after the official release of the complete CAPITAL Series 7 system.