AIMS Helpdesk

Software Support Information

1. How can I get support from AimsHotline?

Contact us with your questions at any of the following:

2. Do I Have To Pay A Recurring Fee To Get Support?

If you are renting the software, the software support fee is included in the rental and there is no additional charge.

If you have financed the purchase of any software license from through us, then you must pay for the associated software support until you have paid for the license in full. Other than that, the recurring fee is optional.

For those customers who would like to use our support on a regular basis, we recommend purchasing a support contract that provides for substantial discounts over the pay-as-you-go rates charged to others.

3. Software Updates

If you have paid for a software support contract, you are entitled to all software updates for those products that you have legally licensed from us for the term of the maintenance contract.  Software updates are provided at no additional cost to when you use the download service on our web site at www.aimstsi.com.  If you request that we send updates on CD-ROM, we will charge you $50.00 per CD plus appropriate shipping charges.

4. Telephone Support

Call, email, or fax our technical support line as often as you like.  If you have purchased a support contract, the first 10 minutes of any call to resolve a problem are free.  After that, you will have an option to open a billable support incident if you want to continue. It's up to you.

5. Billable Support Online

Telephone and modem time is billable at $95 per hour for members and $140 per hour for non-members. The minimum charge per incident is ½ hour for members and 1hour for non-members.

6. Billable Support Offline

In some cases, we can work on resolving problems without being on the telephone or modem. If that is the case, we will give you a fixed price to do the work based on our estimate of the number of hours required.

7. Cancellation of Scheduled Appointments

There is no charge if you cancel an appointment with at least 24 hours notice.  Appointments for technical support that are cancelled with less 24 hours notice are subject to a $100 charge.  If the appointment is at your location, and you cancel after we arrive, we will charge you for the total scheduled time plus travel.

8. Custom Programming

9. Support vs. Training

Technical support is available to resolve problems and answer brief questions.  Technical support is not a substitute for customer training.  We charge $95 per hour for training.  Once again, if you have enabled remote online access, most issues can be resolved in a short, online training session that rarely requires more than 30 to 60 minutes.

10. Billing, Support Contracts & Passwords

If you are renting AIMS or have purchased your license on an installment plan, your system will require a password every 30 days.  The password is available 24/7 on our website to customers with accounts in good standing. If your account is past due, you will not be able to get your password on the website.

If you already own the AIMS license and are only paying for a support contract, be advised that support is paid like rent.  The money is due at the beginning of the period, not the end. So if you are paying support for the first quarter of the year, we must have your payment on or before January 1^st to activate you contract. If you call for support and you have not paid for your contract, we will require that you either remit payment for the contract, or pay the rates we charge to non-contract customers.  Currently, that is $140 per hour with no free minutes and a one-hour minimum, prepaid by credit card.

11. How Long Is A Support Contract?

Support is purchased by the month.  You can purchase any number of months, but the minimum is three months at a time (one calendar quarter).  If you purchase 12 months at a time, we will give you one month free.  Also, your account is exempt from any rate increases as long as you maintain continuous support.

12. Cancellation for Non-payment

If payment for your support contract becomes 60 or more days past due, we will automatically terminate your support contract. If you want to reestablish a new support contract, the following will apply:

a)       The new contract will be established at our current billing rates, which may be substantially higher than the rates you were paying on your old contract.

b)       You will be required to pay for support at the new contract rate from the date of cancellation on your old contract to the current date.

c)       Additionally, you will be required to pay a reinstatement fee equal to15% of your new annual support contract.

13. Rates and Charges

Specific rates and fees stated herein are subject to change at any time, without notice.

Information about technical support

You may contact technical support via telephone, fax or email.  We prefer email or fax over the phone. If you call on the phone, be prepared to leave a message on voice mail.  We do not have a live operator.  We continually monitor our voice mail during normal business hours, 8:30 AM to 4:00 PM Pacific time, Monday through Friday. 

Our goal is return calls within four hours of the time received.  that means, if your call comes in after noon, it is very possible that you will not get a call back until the next business day. If your call is returned in less than 4 hours, be happy. If it takes 4 hours, don't yell at us.  We are telling you to expect that. If it takes more than 4 hours, we apologize in advance.  However, it is impossible to be staffed for the worst-case scenario every day.  The truth is, most of the time we return calls in much less than 4 hours.  But on some days, when call volume is very heavy, it takes longer.  Generally, we return calls in the order they are received (read on).

If you have contacted us by email or fax, if possible, we will respond back the same way with a written answer to your question.

If your problem is an emergency, please be sure to let us know in your communication.  Generally speaking, "emergency" means your system is down and you cannot continue working until we resolve your problem.  It is our policy to give priority to these calls.  If you use the "E" word just to get us to call back sooner, we will put you at the end of the line.  Can I contact technical support for anything?  We are here to support the AIMS software product.  We do not provide technical support for hardware or networking problems or other software products.  If we try to help you with any issue other than the AIMS software, it is because we care about you and want to try and help. If we cannot resolve a non-AIMS related problem quickly and easily, we will refer you to your hardware and networking technician.  If you do not have one, we can probably recommend one.  Ask us.

Online Support

If you have given us online access to your system, we should be able to resolve any AIMS software problem without ever having to go to your location.  If you are running AIMS on the Internet, or if you have enabled remote access for our technicians, we can log on to your system and often resolve the problem.  If that doesn't work, AIMS has a built in function enabling you to send an encrypted copy of your data files directly to our office where we can then use your data to try and duplicate the problem.  That does it almost every time.

When Is Technical Support Billable?

Each time you contact technical support we open a support incident. Customers with a support maintenance contract get the first 10 minutes of any support incident at no additional charge.  All of the time we spend to resolve your problem after that is billable to your account at $95 per hour. We never bill you without getting your approval first. There is never a charge for any technical support incident if it turns out that your problem was because of a bug in the AIMS software, no matter how much time we spend.

The definition of a bug is: "we had to make changes to the AIMS software to resolve your problem".  Generally speaking, you will be charged any time we are fixing problems with your data due to data corruption or user errors when entering information.

Who Should Contact Technical Support?

As a customer requesting technical support, you should have a basic working knowledge of Microsoft Windows.  That includes skills such as browsing, copying or moving files and folders on your hard drives, including the network. You should also be familiar with how to grant online remote access, and other similar tasks.  Let's face it, no matter how simple and user friendly anyone says it is, you still need some basic skills to operate a computer.  Please be sure that the person calling technical support has these qualifications because we cannot spend our time teaching them on the phone.