- Income Stream – The flow of money generated by a business.
- Indirect Cost - The cost not directly attributable to the manufacturing of a product.
- Indirect Labor – Employees or workers (such as accountants, supervisors, security guards) who do not directly produce goods or services, but who make their production possible or more efficient. Indirect labor costs are not readily identifiable with a specific task or work order. They are termed indirect costs and are charged to overhead accounts.
- Intangible Asset - Something of value that cannot be physically touched, such as a brand, franchise, trademark, or patent.
- Internal Rate of Return – IRR. The rate of return that would make the present value of future cash flows plus the final market value of an investment or business opportunity equal the current market price of the investment or opportunity. also called dollar-weighted rate of return.
- Inventory Turnover – The ratio of a company’s annual sales to its inventory; or equivalently, the fraction of a year that an average item remains in inventory. Low turnover is a sign of inefficiency, since inventory usually has a rate of return of zero. For instance, if a company was able to generate $10 million in sales but averaged $5 million in inventory, the inventory turnover would be 10 million / 5 million = 2. This number indicates that there would be 2 inventory turns per year, meaning that it would take 6 months to sell all the inventory.
- Lead Time – The amount of time between the placing of an order and the receipt of the goods ordered.
- Liabilities – A liability is a financial obligation, debt, claim, or potential loss.
- Liquidity – The ability of an asset to be converted into cash quickly and without any price discount.
- Margin – The face value of a loan minus the value of the pledged collateral.
- Markup - The difference between the lowest current offering price among dealers and the higher price that a dealer charges to a customer.
- Market Share – The percentage of the total sales of a given type of product or service that are attributable to a given company.
Financial terms you should know – Part 4
Integrating Zen-Cart With Gallery2
Gallery2 is a web-based software product that lets you manage photos on your own website. It creates a catalog of photos which visitors can view as thumbnails as well as in its original size. It has an intuitive interface to create and maintain albums. It can create thumbnails automatically and can be used for image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning, searching, and some other functions.
You can use Gallery2 to build a community site for sharing photos. You can create the community using Gallery2 and registered users can share their photographs by uploading their own photos.
You need to integrate Gallery2 with Zen Cart if you want to sell photos from your photo gallery. Gallery2 has a great mechanism to integrate with Zen Cart. The Gallery2/Zen Cart integration module is available at the Gallery2 download site http://dakanji.com/g2stuff/zcg2-3_2_1a-full.zip. Using it, users can organize their photos and other multimedia files into Gallery2, and offer them for sale through Zen Cart.
In integrating Gallery2 with Zen Cart, you have to configure Zen Cart first. Follow these steps for Zen Cart:
- Download the Gallery2/Zen Cart Integration module and extract it.
- Copy the zencart/includes folder into your Zen Cart installation directory. This directory contains some templates for Zen Cart. Copying these files will not overwrite any existing file.
- Login to your Zen Cart administration panel and create a new product category, such as Photographs. Photo items from Gallery2 will go to this category.
- Select Tools | Template Selection and choose one of the Gallery2 Integration templates provided. You can take a copy of the template folder (../includes/templates/pgxxx) and modify stylesheet.css. You can also modify these templates.
- Edit ../includes/languages/pgxxx/english.php if you want to change language strings or date formats.
- Replace ../includes/templates/pgxxx/images/logo.gif with your site’s logo.
Remember that for Gallery2/Zen Cart integration, both Zen Cart and Gallery2 data tables need to be in one database.
In Gallery2, you need to make the following changes:
- Upload the module files in the gallery2/ directory to your Gallery2 installation’s modules directory.
- In Gallery2 Site Administration, click on Plugins and find Zen Cart under the Commerce heading. Then click Install.
- After Installation, click Configure.
- Enter the entire server path to your Zen Cart installation, for example, /home/your_name/public_html/zencart/.
- Select the category you created in Zen Cart earlier (for example Photographs) from the drop-down menu.
- Click activate next to the Zen Cart listing on the module page.
- Refresh the page and click on the Zen Cart link under Admin Options to edit product details.
- Edit permissions for the individual items as you wish. The module will have assigned permissions to non-album items on activation.
If you do not want to sell an item, you will need to disable that item in Zen Cart as the module adds all data items in your gallery to Zen Cart.
You can add photograph items from Gallery2. Adding any item to the Gallery2 album will simply show that item in Zen Cart. You can add product options from Gallery2 by clicking on the Zen Cart link in your Gallery2 site administration menu.
When you have installed the Gallery2/Zen Cart bridge, you will find a product type in Zen cart named Product-Gallery. All the items from Gallery2 need to be of this type. If you edit any item from Zen Cart and change the product type of any Gallery2 item, the link with the Gallery2 will be broken. Also, note that the Gallery2 bridge will co-exist with Zen Cart image handler and lightbox add-on for Zen Cart. These will handle product images for Zen Cart, whereas Gallery2 add-on only handles images added in Gallery2.
You cannot assign the Main category in Zen Cart as the root product category for Gallery2. The category you are selecting in the Gallery2 bridge configuration must be a sub-category product.
Once the configurations are done, you can see the photographs from Zen Cart. Visitors can also order photographs from Zen Cart. While you are in Gallery2, you can also place an order by clicking the add to cart link, which is redirected to Zen Cart.
Financial terms you should know – Part 3
- Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) – The amount of orders that minimizes total variable costs required to order and hold inventory.
- Earnings – Revenues minus cost of sales, operating expenses, and taxes, over a given period of time. Earnings are the reason corporations exist, and are often the single most important determinant of a stock’s price. Earnings are important to investors because they give an indication of the company’s expected future dividends and its potential for growth and capital appreciation. That does not necessarily mean that low or negative earnings always indicate a bad stock; for example, many young companies report negative earnings as they attempt to grow quickly enough to capture a new market, at which point they’ll be even more profitable than they otherwise might have been.
- Earnings Per Share (EPS) – Total earnings divided by the number of shares outstanding. Companies often use a weighted average of shares outstanding over the reporting term. EPS can be calculated for the previous year (”trailing EPS”), for the current year (”current EPS”), or for the coming year (”forward EPS”). Note that last year’s EPS would be actual, while current year and forward year EPS would be estimates.
- Equity – Total assets minus total liabilities; here also called shareholder’s equity or net worth or book value.
- Fixed Assets – A long-term, tangible asset held for business use and not expected to be converted to cash in the current or upcoming fiscal year, such as manufacturing equipment, real estate, and furniture.
- G&A Overhead (General & Administrative Overhead) – The costs necessary for operations but not directly associated with developing a product or providing a service.
- GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) – Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. A widely accepted set of rules, conventions, standards, and procedures for reporting financial information, as established by the Financial Accounting Standards Board.
- Gross Profit – Calculated as sales minus all costs directly related to those sales. These costs can include manufacturing expenses, raw materials, labor, selling, marketing and other expenses.
- Growth Rate - Year-over-year change, expressed as a percentage.
Integrating Zen-Cart with Drupal
Drupal is a powerful CMS and is widely used. There are a wide range of modules available for Drupal and it is used for different types of websites. There are a great number of Drupal users who want to integrate Drupal and Zen Cart-as both are considered useful in their category. Until recently, there was no easy way to integrate Drupal and Zen Cart. Very recently, Zen Cart Integration module has been released as a development version. For now, it works on Drupal 5.x and Zen Cart 1.3.7. Once this module is installed and configured, you can create Zen Cart categories and products from Drupal. As other nodes, these products and categories will be displayed as nodes in Drupal. When visitors click on these products they see product details as a Drupal node, but when the product is added to cart, it redirects to the Zen Cart shop. This module also provides a single sign-on facility.
For integrating Zen Cart into Drupal, download the module from http://drupal.org/project/zencart. Before we proceed with the integration of Drupal and Zen Cart, assume that you have installed Drupal and Zen Cart on the same server. Let us suppose, Drupal is installed in e:wwwdrupal57 directory and Zen Cart 1.3.7 is in e:wwwzc directory, and these two uses separate database on the same MySQL server.
Follow these steps:
- Download and unzip Zen Cart integration module: For integrating Zen Cart into Drupal, download the module from http://drupal.org/project/zencart. On your computer, unzip the zencart-5.x-1.x-dev.tar.gz package. You will get a folder named zencart, under which there are some files and a subfolder named zencart.
- Copy files for Zen Cart: Inside the zencart subfolder you will find the includes folder. Copy this subfolder, that is /zencart/includes, to your Zen Cart installation directory, that is e:wwwzc. This will overwrite the e:wwwzcincludes directory, but will not overwrite any files. Once you have copied all the files in this folder, you are finished with Zen Cart.
- Install Zen Cart installation module in Drupal: Copy the zencart directory with all the files inside it, except the zencart subfolder, to Drupal’s installation directory, that is e:wwwdrupal57. As an administrator in Drupal, you can install this module from Drupal’s Administer | Site Building | Modules section. In the module list you will see the Zen Cart Integration module group. You will find the following modules in this group:
- Zencart-This is the main module for integrating Zen Cart shopping cart to Drupal. This is required by other modules in this group.
- Zencart Catalog-This module allows creation of Drupal nodes for Zen Cart products and categories.
- Zencart Category Node Hierarchy-This module depends on the Node Hierarchy module and organizes Zen Cart products and categories. Download the Node Hirarchy module from http://drupal.org/project/nodehierarchy and install it before enabling this module.
To enable these modules, select checkboxes in Enabled column and click Save configuration button at the bottom of the list.
- Configure Zencart Integration module in Drupal: After enabling the modules, you can configure those from Administer | Site Configuration | Zencart Integration screen.
- The Zen Cart Status section will provide you information about your Zen Cart installation. The module will search and find the Zen Cart installation and show its version, path to Drupal installation and other information.
- The Zen Cart Settings section will give you the opportunity to mention the Zen Cart installation directory path. Type it into the Path to Zencart field.
- The Zen Cart Page Redirects section allows you to configure page redirects from the Zen Cart page to Drupal node.
- Zen Cart Catalog section allows you to configure redirect from the Zen Cart catalog items to Drupal. While using this integration module, you create Zen Cart catalog and products from Drupal. If you want to create these categories and products from inside Zen Cart and synchronize those with Drupal, then check Update product info on cron. This will synchronize product information both on Drupal and Zen Cart by running cron command on linux/unix. Checking Redirect Product Info Pages will automatically redirect visitors from the Zen Cart product info pages to equivalent Drupal nodes. Similarly, checking Redirect Category Listing Pages will automatically redirect visitors from the Zen Cart category pages to equivalent Drupal nodes.
- The Zen Cart Users section allows you to configure single sign-on options for Drupal and Zen Cart. If you want to allow Zen Cart existing customers to login to Drupal, then check the Allow Zen Cart Customers to login to Drupal checkbox. On the other hand, if you want to allow Drupal users to login to Zen Cart as customers, check Allow Drupal Users Customers to login to Zen Cart as Customers. Checking Allow Single Sign-On will allow users to login once and access both Drupal and Zen Cart.
- Create Content Type in Drupal for Zen Cart categories and products: If you have ever used Drupal, you know how to create content types in Drupal. You can add new content type from Administer | Content Management | Content types | Add content type. Now you will get a Zen Cart Catalog group. From this section you can define whether this type will be used as a Zen Cart product or category. You can also configure node hierarchy-ability to be parent or child (default is parent). In the Identification section, type a human readable name, for example Zen Cart Product, in the Name field. Then type a machine readable name of this content type, for example zc_product, in the Type field. Provide a description of this content type in the Description field.In the Submission Form section, provide a label for the title and body field, minimum number of words, and explanation or submission guidelines. Configure default options in the Workflow section. Finally, click the Save content type button.Create two content types?one for the Zen Cart category and another for the Zen Cart product.
- Add Category and Product in Drupal: You can create categories and products from Create Content section. In the list, click on Zen Cart Category. This will open Submit Zen Cart Category form. In this form, type the category name in Title field, type a description of this category in Body field. In the Node Hierarchy section, you can select a parent category. Check Category is Active to make this category visible. Configure other options like Menu settings, URL path settings, Publishing options, and so on and click the Submit button to create the categorySimilarly, you can create Zen Cart products by clicking on the Zen Cart Product content type. This will display the Submit Zen Cart Product form.
Fill in the Submit Zen Cart Product form with appropriate information, such as product name, model, quantity in stock, tax class, base price, and so on. You can select its parent category in the Node Hierarchy section. Check the Create Menu option to make a menu item for this product. Configure other options like Menu settings, URL path settings, Publishing options, and so on and click the Submit button to create the product. - Test Zen Cart Integration to and from Drupal: Now it is time to test whether the Drupal-Zen Cart integration is working or not. First, go to your Zen Cart shop, for example, http://localhost/zc. There you will find the categories and products you have added. Click on any of these, and you will be redirected to the respective Drupal node. Again, in the Drupal, click on a product link, type a quantity and click the Add to Cart button. That will redirect you to the Zen Cart shop’s Your Shopping Cart Contents page.
The Zencart Integration screen has the following sections:
Once you have configured these options, click the Save configuration button, or revert to defaults by clicking the Reset to defaults button.
Similarly you can test single sign-on features by signing in to either Drupal or Zen Cart and trying to purchase items from these two shops.
For more information, please visit:
http://www.PacktPub.com/zen-cart-ecommerce-application-development/book
Financial terms you should know – Part 2
Part two in my series of “Financial Terms You Should Know”
- Capital stock – Total amount of a firm’s capital, represented by the value of its issued common and preferred stock (ordinary and preference shares).
- Cash flow – Incomings and outgoings of cash, representing the trading (operating) activities of a firm. In accounting, cash flow is the difference in amount of cash available at the beginning of a period (opening balance) and the amount at the end of that period (closing balance). It is called ‘positive’ if the closing balance is higher than the opening balance, otherwise called ‘negative.’ Cash flow is increased by (1) selling more goods or services, (2) selling an asset, (3) reducing costs, (4) increasing the selling price, (5) collecting faster, (6) paying slower, (7) bringing in more equity, or (8) taking a loan. It is termed the ‘life blood’ of a firm—more firms (including the asset-rich ones) go out of business due to an anemic cash flow than for any other reason. However, the level of a firm’s cash flow is not a good measure of its performance, and vice versa: high levels of cash flow do not necessarily mean high or even any profit; and high levels of profit do not automatically translate into high or even positive cash flow.
- Compound growth rate – A measure of how much something grew on average, per year, over a multiple-year period, after considering the effects of compounding.
- Current assets – A balance sheet item which equals the sum of cash and cash equivalents, accounts receivable, inventory, marketable securities, prepaid expenses, and other assets that could be converted to cash in less than one year. A company’s creditors will often be interested in how much that company has in current assets, since these assets can be easily liquidated in case the company goes bankrupt. In addition, current assets are important to most companies as a source of funds for day-to-day operations.
- Current ratio – An indication of a company’s ability to meet short-term debt obligations; the higher the ratio, the more liquid the company is. Current ratio is equal to current assets divided by current liabilities. If the current assets of a company are more than twice the current liabilities, then that company is generally considered to have good short-term financial strength. If current liablities exceed current assets, then the company may have problems meeting its short-term obligations. For example, if XYZ Company’s total current assets are $10,000,000, and its total current liabilities are $8,000,000, then its current ratio would be $10,000,000 divided by $8,000,000, which is equal to 1.25. XYZ Company would be in relatively good short-term financial standing.
- Days accounts receivable – Average number of days a firm takes to collect payments on goods sold. Numbers much higher than 40 to 50 days indicate collection problems and significant pressure on cash flows. Numbers much lower than 40 to 50 days indicate overly-strict credit policies that might be preventing higher sales revenue. Also called days sales in receivables or debtor days. Formula: Average accounts receivable x 365 ÷ sales revenue.
- Days sales in inventory – A measure of performance, calculated by average inventory divided by average daily cost of sales. This returns a figure equivalent to the number of days an item is held as inventory before it is sold. The lower the days inventory, the more efficient the company is, all other things being equal. Days inventory is the first step measured in the cash conversion cycle, followed by Days Sales Outstanding and days payable outstanding.
- Debt service coverage – A measure of a company’s or individual’s ability to cover, or pay off, debt. Debt service coverage refers to the amount of cash or cash flow required to pay off a debt, and how much the total debt actually is. The better the debt service coverage, the better off a company or individual is.
- Debt/equity ratio – A measure of a company’s financial leverage. Debt/equity ratio is equal to long-term debt divided by common shareholders’ equity. Typically the data from the prior fiscal year is used in the calculation. Investing in a company with a higher debt/equity ratio may be riskier, especially in times of rising interest rates, due to the additional interest that has to be paid out for the debt. For example, if a company has long-term debt of $3,000 and shareholder’s equity of $12,000, then the debt/equity ratio would be 3000 divided by 12000 = 0.25. It is important to realize that if the ratio is greater than 1, the majority of assets are financed through debt. If it is smaller than 1, assets are primarily financed through equity.
- Direct costs or expenses – A cost directly attributable to the manufacturing of a product.
- Direct labor – Employees or workers who are directly involved in the production of goods or services. Direct labor costs are assignable to a specific product, cost center, or work order.
- Dividends – Share of the after-tax profit of a firm, distributed to its stockholders (shareholders) according to the number and class of stock (shares) held by them. Smaller firms distribute dividend usually at the end of an accounting year, whereas larger, publicly held firms usually distribute it every quarter. The amount and timing of the dividend is decided by the board of directors, who also determine whether it is paid out of current earnings or the past earnings kept as reserve. Holders of preferred stock (preference shares) receive dividend at a fixed rate and are paid first. Holders of common stock (ordinary shares) are entitled to receive any amount of dividend, based on the level of profit and the firm’s need for cash for expansion or other purposes. Corporate legislation generally forbids payment of dividend out of anticipated but not yet received (unrealized) profit. Normally all dividend payments are taxable, often at the source (the firm).