ByDesign Wins Top 25 Sales Technology Award for 2017

ByDesign Technologies recognized for contributions to the direct selling industry and the overall consultant experience through innovative technology.

ByDesign Technologies, the leading provider of software for the direct selling industry, has been named a Top 25 Sales Technology Provider for 2017.

The award was based on an evaluation of ByDesign Technologies’ all-encompassing cloud-based, direct sales solution for Direct Sales, MLM and Party Plan companies. The annual list of companies is selected by a panel of experts and members of CIO Applications’ editorial board to recognize and promote technology entrepreneurship.

“We are glad to announce ByDesign Technologies as one among the Top 25 Sales Technology Solution Providers 2017. ByDesign Technologies has long been a leading player in the sales technology landscape, and their progress and advancement in direct selling and the consultant experience is impressive. This award distinguishes their success as innovators, thought leaders, and market movers in the sales technology sector,” said Joe Phillip, Managing Editor, CIO Application Magazine. “We’re pleased to recognize their achievement.”

“We are proud to have been selected for this prestigious award. Our 2017 focus has been on reimagining the role of our software to dramatically enhance the consultant’s journey-to-success and the customer experience” stated Daryl Wurzbacher, President of ByDesign. “Being recognized by CIO Applications is a powerful testament to the importance of this accomplishment for our industry and our clients.”

During 2017 ByDesign launched more than 600 updates and enhancements to their platform. Including their state-of-the-art shopping experience as well as the fully responsive Revolution Mobile Application. The company’s innovation roadmap for 2018 includes both strategic growth and technology transformation initiatives. Additionally, ByDesign will continue their focus on the broader strategy to advance the direct selling industry.

About ByDesign Technologies

Since its founding in 2000, ByDesign continues to be recognized as the industry thought-leader pushing direct selling technology forward with first-to-market solutions that simplify the many complexities behind party plan and direct sales business models. Today, ByDesign is dedicated to delivering leading-edge capabilities in software-as-a-service, and platform-as-a-service solutions. With more than $6 Billion in orders processed and nearly $2 Billion in commissions paid, we deliver proven results globally.

To learn more about the vision that is innovating a unique competitive advantage for direct selling companies, please visit http://bydesign.com

About CIO Applications

CIO Applications is a technology print magazine, published from Silicon Valley, CA that is a prime platform for CIOs to discuss and ponder about innovative enterprise solutions. While analyzing the U.S. media landscape, it is a comprehensive tool that helps the upcoming enterprise IT vendors to engage and show case the solutions for the enterprises. It helps technology leaders with the analysis on new technologies and gives a better understanding of the role that enterprise solutions play in achieving the business goals.

For more info: http://www.cioapplications.com/

• Improved error messaging on the Shopping Cart to be more clear & relevant to help future research time. (506907)
• Enhance Cart 2.0 procedures to consolidate and streamline the asynchronous calls made when the cart pages are loading. (484025)
• Revised Related Items Logic to display up to three inventory collections, and for each collection, show up to 12 items. (505226)
• Adjusted Customer Signup Email Validation when no email is provided. (507018)
• Enhanced the customer blind shopping experience to ensure that items do not double in the shopping cart. (507386)
• Enhanced the shopping cart to ensure that language selection is retained when leaving and returning to the cart. (505777)
• Enhanced Cart 2.0 by adding logged in welcome message identifying user that is logged in. (496692)
• Enhance Cart 2.0 by adding configurable setting to determine if a Referring Customer Number field will show and/or be required for customer account creation. (498530)
• Updated commission graphs to include dynamic compensation engine data. (493393)
• Developed new version of Pay Quicker (Velocity)  payout file that matches updated requirements in order to process the payout file. (492955)
• Improved the system to avoid erroring in some situations which could have prevented changing or editing a rep number. (503729)
• Enhanced the Revolution Downline report removing the HTML tags on output columns to improve export results. (496350)
• When clicking “View All Orders” in the Back Office Rep’s page, it now auto-executes the search for the appropriate rep speeding up user experience. (504735)
• Corrected an issue that could have prevented customers from being deleted in rare situations. (507005)
• Update Customer Reset Password functionality to utilize newest accounts when duplicate accounts are permitted. (498522)
• Improved Cart 2.0 Customer Creation to respect password security setting: X2_PASSWORDS_REGEXTYPES. (500210)
• Created three new archived tables to migrate classic bonus data to improve system performance.   (488869)
• Enhanced the design of the New Guest form within the Party module of Revolution giving a balanced alignment. (504943)
• Implementing new techniques in saving and accessing file on the resource server. (417193)
• Improved error handling on the Inventory Image Upload page (504914)
  Enhanced the inventory deletion procedures to pre-check if any inventory
• categories exist which may interfere with deletion operation. (504507)
  Enhanced the Product Specific Email to Rep AutoResponder to filter contents based on an order’s party association or not. (506845)
• Created three Restful APIs to be able to perform the following actions to official orders: UnPost, Add Items & Post. (498459)
• Enhanced Product Specific AutoResponder Character Limits (502464)
  Created a restful API to return currency conversion rates. (493870)
• Update credit card logos used in the shopping experience to use more mondernized Visa/Mastercard logos. (501106)
• Updated Klarna & Adyen to be able to send in separately the item price and item tax fields. (498245)
• Enhanced Customer Order-Email to Customer and Customer Order- EMail to Owner Rep by adding 9 additional field tags to both AutoResponder Types.  The new field tags will allow displaying Order line price extended, order line volume and order line volume extended. (500514)
• Introduced optional warning messaging if generating Invoice PDFs of orders with zero items. (502728)
• Enhanced the Revolution Organization summary page to prevent graph duplication of graphs. (505780)

 

Protected From The Meltdown & Spectre Vulnerabilities

Meltdown and Spectre are the latest threats in the software/hardware vulnerability realm, impacting servers with Intel microprocessors. ByDesign’s private cloud hosting provides adequate defenses to these vulnerabilities because we do not allow foreign code to be run/installed on our servers.

Because our cloud is a private cloud, we do not allow or sublease extra space on our servers for non-Freedom applications, which is different than AWS or other public cloud providers, which is their entire business plan.

Public Cloud providers spin up servers and allow you to upload and use their servers however you want. You manage and dictate the purpose of the server down to the operating system level.

This threat is able to penetrate lower than the operating system exploiting areas never experienced before, potentially into other Virtual Machines (VMs) on the same server…..aka…other customers on the same cloud servers…which could be hundreds or thousands. This is the crux of the threat. Because ByDesign owns its bare metal hardware, and the only VMs allowed are Freedom’s software application, foreign code isn’t allowed to be installed.

This makes our private cloud infrastructure far less susceptible to this threat.

Really Techy Talk

Meltdown breaks the isolation between user applications and the operating system, and allows an application to access all system memory (this includes kernel allocated memory). Meltdown affects a range of Intel processors.

Spectre breaks the memory isolation between different applications, and allows an application to force another application to access arbitrary portions of its memory. Spectre affects a wide range of processors: Intel, AMD, and ARM.

Our Action Plan

Both vulnerabilities require that a server be compromised before either vulnerability were able to be exploited. Because of this, the risk of exploitation is fairly low. At ByDesign we have already begun the process of patching all systems and continue to do so at a rapid pace. Although this is a low risk for us, we do take these vulnerabilities seriously and are taking all precautions necessary to mitigate risk. It would be foolish not to.

 

FTC Business Guidance Concerning Multi-Level Marketing

The FTC has released an updated Business Guidance Concerning Multi-Level Marketing.

Multi-level marketing is a diverse and varied industry, employing many different structures and methods of selling. Although there may be significant differences in how multi-level marketers sell their products or services, core consumer protection principles are applicable to every member of the industry. The Commission staff offers this non-binding guidance to assist multi-level marketers in applying those core principles to their business practices.

From https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/business-guidance-concerning-multi-level-marketing

 

How To Process 1099’s

The Form 1099 is used when filing taxes to the IRS under several scenarios, but most importantly for direct selling companies is reporting services reported by someone who is not your employee (including parts and materials) valued at $600 or more.  All Form 1099s must be mailed out to vendors no later than January 31st and you are required to compile all of your 1099s with a 1096 and submit them to the IRS by the following month.  Some states may also require you to file a 1099 MISC with state taxes as well.  This form also applies to work performed out of the U.S.  If you are unsure on the 1099 filing process, we highly recommend seeing a tax professional.

Have you been keeping your rep information up to date?

We have reports to find missing and duplicate Tax Numbers.  We even have a process for flagging bad addresses for reps and a report to find that information when you are ready to update it.

To find missing Tax Numbers: Departments > Reports > Reps > Reps > Without Tax Numbers.  To find duplicate Tax Numbers: Departments > Reports > Reps > Reps > With Duplicate Tax Numbers.

To Flag a Rep’s address as bad: From the Rep account in Back Office > Edit Rep > Bad Address.

To Batch your bad addresses: Administration > Tools > Batch Bad Address.  To pull a report of bad addresses: Departments > Reports > Reps > Reps > With Bad Address.

Do you need to manually generate a Form 1099?

We have that ability as well!

From Departments > Accounting > 1099s > New Freehand 1099.

You can also pull up all the 1099s from here: Departments > Accounting > 1099s > List 1099s. Keep in mind that if you happen to delete your 1099 batch, these manual entries will need to be generated again.

Ready to print your 1099s?  We offer the ability to calibrate your alignment to match your printer you will be using your 1099 Forms with.  Just go to: Departments > Accounting > 1099s > Download & Print 1099s.  This page will have some printing instructions for you as well as section on alignment for your pre-printed forms.  The pre-printed forms are available at a variety of locations or orderable from the IRS website.  Please make sure that you verify your forms and instructions with your tax professional.

If you would like more information and detail on how to implement the 1099 process, please be sure to visit our Training Video Archive as well as our “How Do I…” page from Freedom Back Office.  Those pages are located in the “System Wide Help” section in the top right of all of our pages.  If you are still stuck, we are more than happy to assist you.

Contact Support at 813-253-2235, Option #1.