Customers

The taxman says he’s coming for eBay sellers: how to be ready Posted on February 10th, 2012 by James Marchant

This is a guest blog by James Marchant, one of the founders and CEO of Marchant Dice, a manufacturer and distributor of CNC equipment based in the UK with customers around the world. James has been selling on eBay since 2003 and his own webstore since 2006, he has been a Brightpearl customer since early 2011.

An article posted in the Daily Mail on Wednesday covers the latest announcement by UK HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) that it has used ‘new technology’ to identify parts of the UK economy that are likely to have a high number of missing tax returns. eBay and other ‘e-marketplaces’ have been identified as one part of the economy where this is indeed the case, which is particularly interesting for us for obvious reasons!

The HMRC reaffirmed plans to launch campaigns specifically targeted at those who trade on eBay – to ensure that VAT returns are being produced regularly and accurately. The intention is to launch these before the end of next month.

If you’re an eBay seller, you’re provided with a number of online tools to help you sell, and then help you ship, however it’s then a manual case of dealing with the accounting and tax implications of that sale. This means that it often takes second place in your priorities, leading to late, rushed and inaccurate VAT returns.

But not any more! The HMRC announcement this week is timed perfectly with the launch of the Brightpearl eBay integration, which lets you handle your eBay accounting automatically, accurately and immediately.

My own research from talking to companies we deal with as well as other local business people has indicated that people and companies legally trading on eBay as well as other marketplaces can and really do struggle to maintain their accounts in order to fulfil these requirements by HMRC. Our own company Marchant Dice Ltd manufactures and distributes CNC milling machines and components worldwide through multiple sales channels including eBay as well as our own website, telephone and cash sales as well as listing on Amazon in the near future. Selling over multiple channels is required more than ever in the current economic environment but it brings about its own headaches which we have suffered with for the last 9 years before discovering Brightpearl and the latest eBay integration.

Before the Brightpearl eBay integration was launched we had to run at least 2 separate sales order systems with an accounting package over the top in order to bring these sales channels together. This meant for us two excel workbooks for sales order processing and a third excel workbook for import into our accounting package which recorded the invoices generated to track sales values, tax and produce consecutive invoice numbers.

Needless to say stock control was a near impossibility and even with the best efforts, it quickly became out of sync over the various channels leading to customer service issues as well as a lot of wasted time and resources.

The Solution

Brightpearl has totally transformed the way we run our business in a whole host of ways. It has meant for the first time we have been able to bring all our sales from all sales channels together into one system. This means no wasted time fiddling between excel workbooks which looking back ….well I’d rather not!

The Brightpearl eBay integration is the single biggest breakthrough in terms of how we run our business that we have ever had.

To have eBay sales automatically appear inside Brightpearl without any need to be copying and pasting from eBay or PayPal emails is a massive relief and saves an enormous amount of time. The eBay buyer details that are automatically brought in to the system allows us to tie orders to a particular customer together over multiple sales channels often saving the customer shipping costs. It also allows us to target specific customers with marketing material based on their sales history as well as providing a great service.

As well as this the Brightpearl eBay integration has FINALLY allowed us to implement a stock control system that is always up to date across all sales channels and provides a real time accounting system so we can track everything from profit to TAX!

This new crackdown on eBay sellers is most certainly not a problem for us and there is no reason it should be for you either!

Find out more about how the Brightpearl eBay integration works.

Tags: ebay, eBay integration, Marchant Dice, multichannel, stock control, tax return, VAT return
Posted in Customers | No Comments »

Customer Focus: Lahloo Tea – EPOS for multichannel retail and wholesale Posted on January 23rd, 2012 by Penny Edwards

We recently caught up with Kate Gover managing director of Lahloo Tea, who uses Brightpearl to manage her small retail and wholesale business. Utilising Brightpearl’s powerful multichannel capabilities to sell in-store in their tea room, online on their website as well as to wholesale and trade customers, she talks to us about how Brightpearl helps them to overcome the seemingly impossible challenge of tying all these channels together. Take a look at the video below to get the full story on how Brightpearl helps Lahloo to manage their business better.

Video transcript

I started Lahloo Tea three and a half years ago. I spent most of my life disliking tea and still don’t really like normal – what people call ‘normal tea’. It wasn’t until about 10 years ago that I tasted a japanese green tea and was just blown away by the delicate flavour and also how much flavour there was, and it was really that that took me on this kind of random obsession with hunting out tea that I really liked.

For the first year it was predominantly farmers markets, food festivals and events like that, but with demand from trade customers we realised that there was an opportunity, and so we launched both that side of the business as well as an online shop two and a half years ago. The latest development in October 2011 was we opened our first store and tea rooms.

Brightpearl’s really helpful in integrating online, wholesale, trade, retail, the cafe, and tying it altogether would seem like it would be almost impossible. It’s rare to find an EPOS system that works with a wholesale system, so being able to use Brightpearl for every bit of it means that at any given time if we’re out of stock of a product, for example, it can’t be sold in the shop, or online, or to a wholesale customer. So from a customer service point of view, it’s brilliant.

Being able to just log on and tap in and see when that customer last placed an order, or was last invoiced, or if they haven’t paid is really important. It just facilitates and also enables us to keep in touch with customers much better.

It’s really exciting!

Do you have a retail or wholesale business? Check out how Brightpearl can integrate your systems and sales channels, from your stock control, EPOS, ecommerce, and more, to help you to become a truly multichannel business.

Tags: EPOS, Lahloo tea, multichannel, retail, software, wholesale
Posted in Customers | 1 Comment »

Brightpearl in Action Posted on November 18th, 2011 by Harriet Fletcher

Down on the Farm with Wiggly Wigglers

On Wednesday a group of pearly wearly’s (as we’re affectionately called) visited long time and loyal customer Wiggly Wigglers to see our software in action.

Set up in 1991, Wiggly Wigglers is owned and run by Heather, and is a successful business that sells wormery’s, composting products, bird food, gardening products, flowers, goat socks and much more! And yes, some of their products definitely do wiggle! Wiggly Wigglers resides on her husband Phil’s Great Blakemere Farm in Hereford, who is a supplier to the business.

We arrived at Wiggly’s to be welcomed by Office manager San and Farmer Phil as well as their dogs Toast and Jam (who enjoyed several enthusiastic pats!). After being show around the farm, and seeing some of their produce (grass seed, beef cattle and Boksahi) we got into the running of Wiggly Wigglers and how Brightpearl software helps them.

The site is split between an office and warehouse. The office is based on the farm where they take orders and deal with enquiries, process orders, run the accounting and general admin. The warehouse is 4 miles down the road, housing over 2,000 products.

How it all Works at Wiggly Wigglers

The Wiggly Office

San heads up the office at Wiggly Wigglers, and her team includes Nicole, Gareth, Tanya, Ginny and Heidi. When a customer buys a product/s via their website or over the phone, the customer service team in the office pick up the orders in Brightpearl. Wiggly Wigglers don’t use the Brightpearl website element, but orders are still integrated over API to feed into the Brightpearl system.

Each day the team look at every new order coming in and check for issues or discrepancies with orders and payments. They look at stock levels and may need to split the order if it’s not all in stock, releasing the item at a later date for shipment when it then comes into stock – all using the Brightpearl system. Nicole or Gareth allocate the stock that is available for the order and set the dispatch date for the warehouse to meet the customers requested delivery date. They then process the order through the system.

If an order comes in via phone or mail, the order details will need to be inputted manually, existing customers can easily be found by using the postcode look up function in the CRM or for new customers a new client record will need to be created. It’s much easier for web orders, whose order details will automatically be in the system, as they can skip straight to raising an invoice against their record. On saving the invoice an email copy is sent to the customer, and a goods out note is created, forming the queue of orders for the warehouse.

Wiggly Wigglers office team also use the Mailchimp integration with Brightpearl to email their customers and subscribers with the latest offers. In fact the day we visited they were still seeing the impact of an e-shot over the weekend meaning the phones were ringing and web orders coming in thick and fast!

Tanya, the mistress of money, looks after invoicing, and using her favourites in Brightpearl she was able to get to her main tasks quickly and easily e.g. listing orders due to invoice. Using the notifications feature, Tanya could see overdue sales invoices to follow up on. Tanya would then receipt payments in Brightpearl on receiving payment either via a customer remittance notice or bank statement. Whilst we were there our trainer, Jen, was able to show Tanya a handy little tip using the bank matching process in Brightpearl to speed up the process.

Tanya said she benefited from Brightpearl as she had “learnt so much more about accounting through using the system, plus I’ve saved 2 days a month from not having to manually raise invoices for every order!”

The Wiggly Warehouse

Rach heads up the Warehouse end of the outfit at Wiggly’s where there are 4 stations set up each with a computer (with Brightpearl open of course), printers, lots of boxes and tape! Each station is manned by a member of staff (either Wendy, Silv, Sooty & Mary) who go through the orders to pick, pack and ship them. Using Brightpearl they can see those that need to be sent out each day (as set up & prioritised by the office), and print off each shipment and labels. They have set up favourites in Brightpearl so they can organise who does which shipment, for example, post using royal mail vs packages going via courier. Even down to non live vs live products e.g. mealworms which need to go out on next day delivery!

With who’s doing what sorted, they can get to work, everything they need is on the order summary, printed from Brightpearl, including the warehouse location for each product and the label for the package.

The warehouse is setup in aisles alphabetically e.g. A, B, C, D etc. Each aisle is set up in numbered bays e.g. Bay 1, 2, 3, etc. Each bay has numbered shelves e.g. 01, 02, 03, 04, with numbered boxes e.g. 01, 02, 03, 04 etc. The packing note lists the specific warehouse location so Silv, Sooty, Wendy and Mary know where to find it e.g. B.1.03.02 = Isle B, Bay 1, Shelf 3, Box 2.

Brightpearl enables them to be more efficient to know where to find the items organised in alphabetical rows, by rack, shelf and place. They can go through the printed orders, and collate based on common items so they can pick out several similar orders at the same time, again saving time. It also enables Rach to staff according to demand, depending on how many orders are coming through she may need to bring in additional help when things get really busy.

Rach uses Brightpearl to manage stock levels – at the end of everyday she can complete all the shipments that have gone out that day (all those that have been picked, packed and shipped) which will adjust her stock levels. Crucial when she has 100’s of products going out each day. Rach can then pull a report in Brightpearl on low stock items, which she can then run through and re-order those that are running low directly through Brightpearl.

But how does Rach benefit from Brightpearl the most? In a nutshell she tells us “Stock was a nightmare before Brightpearl, its essential that you know what’s in stock and Brightpearl helps us hugely with that. Plus using Brightpearl means every product has a location, it’s helped us to become more efficient by being able to locate products.”

We thoroughly enjoyed our day with Wiggly Wigglers, it’s a great company with fantastic products, many of which would make the perfect Chrismas gift, check them out for yourself at www.wigglywigglers.co.uk. Thanks to Heather and the team for showing us around, and it’s great to see Brightpearl in Action!

Tags: sales order processing, stock control, Warehouse manager, Wiggly Wigglers
Posted in Customers | 1 Comment »

Brightpearl Open Day: The Roundup Posted on August 5th, 2011 by Penny Edwards

We organised a Customer Open Day (read more about other events) in response to an increasing number of clients asking if they could meet the people behind the software, and wanting to swap tips on running their businesses. But more than that, we also felt we had a lot to learn from our customers. We wanted to understand from them what really makes them tick; what their priorities were, and how we could help them to grow their businesses even more.

We decided an Open Day would give us the chance to experience in full the energy of people’s feedback, provide some useful tips on how to use our product, give people a sneak preview of the new features coming up and have the opportunity to catch up with them over a glass of wine.

Interestingly for a software company, Brightpearl started out making skateboards… As some of you might know Brightpearl founders Chris & Andy met at university where Chris started an online retail and wholesale business with help from Andy called Lush Longboards. Brightpearl was born out of the frustration Chris felt in getting 6 different pieces of business software to work together– Sage for accounting, Act for customer contacts, an open source ecommerce website that Chris was unable to integrate. Alternative software like Netsuite was too expensive, complicated, and provided awful customer service. Brightpearl solved the problems, dramatically streamlining the company’s processes and helping it become one of the top 3 brands globally in its sector.

Brightpearl itself then grew as a business into the thriving and still-expanding organisation it is today. Founders Chris and Andy have first-hand experience of growing businesses so we wanted to try to impart some of our knowledge to the companies who use our product. People tell us they choose Brightpearl because they want to work with people who they trust: people who understand their industry first hand because they have “been there, done that”.

What happened

Well, first things first, we had a great a time! It’s was brilliant to meet so many people that were as passionate about their businesses as we are about ours. In the morning our CEO, Salman, gave an inspiring intro to the day which was followed by some Q&A with Chris, our co-founder, and Ben, our CTO around Brightpearl’s past, present and future. Chris also gave the attendees an exclusive sneak preview to Brightpearl’s upcoming new interface design.

Once we’d all filled up on a tasty lunch, four product workshops were held that gave the customers a chance to learn more about the product from each other as well as to give feedback directly to the product development team. It really was fantastic to hear people talk about their businesses and the way they use Brightpearl with such ardour. It certainly gave us something to think about and we hope it gave all the businesses who attended insight into how other companies are using our system.

There was of course plenty of networking time as well with coffee breaks between the various workshops, and then a wine tasting in the evening, thanks to the terrific Hourlier Wines.

The day far exceeded our expectations and we got some great feedback from the attendees as well…

What you said

The response from the attendees was overwhelmingly positive. 100% said that the day improved their understanding of Brightpearl, 94% said that it had increased their ability to use Brightpearl effectively and 82% said that it had increased their confidence in the product.

In the video above Ed and Phil from Ed&Phil Active gave us some feedback about the Open Day. We also asked people what the best thing they learned was, what was one thing they had expected but didn’t get and what was one thing they would change. Here is some of what they said:

The best thing I learned was -

“Grounding and understanding about the broad user base accessible to this system. I think it’s very exciting.”

“The potential of Brightpearl in improving my business”

“The full opportunity of the features”

“Where Brightpearl is heading and putting faces to names of staff”

“All of it”

(Oh and we couldn’t leave out our personal favourite: “Ed Massey is huge!”)

One thing I expected but didn’t get -

“Hard sell (not having that was good)”

“Specific workshop on particular area eg stocking & purchase””

“A load of sales waffle – instead was given great info ”

“Nothing. It was extremely useful day, interesting to meet other users”

“No hard sell – well presented event!”

We were extremely pleased that so many people noted we did not want this day to be about sales. This is something we intend to continue in the future, we think our product speaks for itself, and our real aim is to help the people using it to make their businesses more successful. Ultimately the more successful our customers are the more successful we are, so for us it’s really not about pushing the product but instead we want to make sure Brightpearl is the right fit for a company and that they are able to use it to it’s full potential.

It was great as well that people were so excited about getting a better understanding of the capabilities of Brightpearl and what it could do for their business. The fact that 100% of the attendees went away feeling that they understood the product better really made the day worthwhile for us.

What we’re going to do next

Since the day was such a success we have decided that Brightpearl Open Days are to become a regular fixture in our calendar. To start things out we are also going to do a Brightpearl Open Day roadshow travelling to number of locations around the country so we can meet those people who might not be able to make it as far as our HQ.

The schedule is:

Wed 7th Sept – Derby Roadshow
Thurs 15th Sept – London Roadshow
Thurs 25th Oct – Another Bristol Open Day (for those who might have missed the last one)
Thurs 3 Nov – Manchester Roadshow

If you would like to come along to any of the following please go to our events page and submit a contact us form letting us know which event you’d like to attend..

Posted in Customers, General posts, Products | 4 Comments »

Are you satisfied with our software? Posted on June 10th, 2011 by Penny Edwards

Brightpearl has been nominated in the Accounting and Finance category for a Software Satisfaction Award. These awards do exactly what they say on the tin – awards are presented on the basis of how satisfied customers (that’s you) are with the software. Sift Media who run the awards have put together a short survey for people to anonymously give feedback about their experience of our product. They will then use the responses to this survey to determine whether our software should be given an award.

Of course awards are pretty awesome, glitzy ceremonies, black tie, champagne, funky little logo for our homepage – but you’d be right to ask: “and how does this help me?”. Well what is great about these particular awards is it gives us a chance to get real feedback from people who use our system. Meaning we can actually learn from the voting process to make our software even better for you.

Sure we’d love to get an award (who wouldn’t!) but what is really important to us is getting an accurate understanding of how you feel about Brightpearl. The information we can get from participating far out weighs the kudos of actually winning an award. So please do let us know what your think. It will only take a few minutes (a mere six questions), is completely anonymous and will help us to make our product even better for you.

Fill out the software satisfaction survey

Posted in Customers, General posts, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

FREE business cards brought to you by Brightpearl and Moo.com Posted on March 25th, 2011 by Penny Edwards

Business cards are essential for any company looking to drum up fresh business. And with the events season fast approaching, conferences and exhibitions are a great way of picking up new leads and customers. Tailoring your business cards to the event you’re attending will help you stand out from the crowd so we’ve teamed up with MOO, an award winning online print business, to bring you a fantastic offer.

MOO are offering Brightpearl blog readers 50 business cards – absolutely free! You can choose up to 50 different photos or images to display on the back of your cards and use your own logo and text with a range of MOO’s free business card templates. What’s more, this offer of free business cards is open to our blog readers from anywhere in the world. You can get more info and start making your business cards online by visiting the Brightpearl page on the MOO website.

Tags: free business card templates, free business cards, MOO
Posted in Customers, E-commerce, General posts | No Comments »

Add an Olark chat widget to your website Posted on March 22nd, 2011 by Chris Tanner

Listening to your customers is Good Thing. Providing them with ways to access your support team is also a Good Thing, which is why we love Olark. It’s a service that lets you put a live chat box onto your website and communicate with your users as soon as they have problems. You can be talking with lots of customers all at once, which means you can multi-task too.

Here you can see one in operation on a website powered by Brightpearl;

Add an Olark widget to your website

Adding the widget to your own website

The widget is javascript, which means that you can’t paste it directly into the page or template content. You’ll need to put the code into a snippet, then add that snippet into your template.

Sign up for an olark account, and install your chosen chat client (eg Google Talk)
Create a new snippet, using any code you like, but something like “FOOTER” would be good.
Add the olark javascript code into the snippet and save.
Open your index.html template and add the snippet code [{FOOTER}] at the very bottom.
Do the same for your home.html template
Job done! You should now see the chat window on all your pages.

Posted in Customers, E-commerce, Tips & Tricks | No Comments »

Latest updates from Brightpearl Posted on February 20th, 2011 by Chris Tanner

The past couple of weeks have been pretty busy here at HQ! We’ve taken on two new Quality Analysts (software testers); Matt and Wesley, a new Product manager; Ananth, and Penelope has joined us to run online marketing.

This week, we’re releasing the following features and fixes:

Prior to this version, items only showed on your website if they had a non blank price for the selected price list. This was confusing a number of users – the website can now be set to show items with blank price (ie ALL items). There’s a setting in the website setup screens, and it’s OFF for existing users, which means that items won’t suddenly appear on your site with no price!

Brightpearl comes with a handy supplier portal, where your suppliers can log in and acknowledge Purchase Orders, print packing notes and let you know shipping information. There’s now a message on the PO edit screen to show if it’s been acknowledged.

The Purchase Credit process requires that you write off/send back specific stock items, rather than send back the oldest item using a FIFO method. We’re now preventing users from adding stock items to Purchase Credits to prevent confusion. The process for handling Purchase credits is outlined here.

If you’re selling items with multiple options on a Brightpearl website, then it’s important to prevent customers from checking out unless they have selected an option. The “Add to cart” button is now disabled when no options are selected, and the text is replaced by “Choose an option”.

We’ve fixed a bug where sister products with more than 1 option were causing duplicates to be reported in the stock audit trail.

You can now display the weight in order edit screen. This is a really handy feature that helps you judge how much shipping to charge. We’re working on connecting this weight up to the ecommerce shipping price matrix so that the system can tell you exactly what shipping is going to cost.

Rows in order edit screen change colour depending on stock levels – again another handy feature to let you know what’s going on as you make a sale.

You can now search for contacts in the “create quote/order” screen by postcode. This also applies to suppliers in the Purchase Order screen.

Reset prices button in order edit screen has been introduced – this is a handy feature when you are cloning sales to Purchases, or if you need to regenerate prices from the database after changing price lists on a sale.

The Statement import routine has been updated to use CSV only. We’ve been having no end of tickets raised due to Excel playing funny games with the date format, especially Excel on a Mac. OFX isn’t reliable enough either; almost every bank seems to interpret the “standard” in their own way … so it’s back to good old CSV – now you can’t go wrong!

Fulfilment for non stock items is now allowed – if you’re using Premium stock plan then you have the ability to part-ship a sales order from stock or supplier; you can now do this for items where you’re not tracking stock; just make sure that the item has a price on the supplier’s price list and it will appear in the options on the Goods-Out screen.

The Low stock report no longer shows “on order” items on drop-ship Purchse Orders. Stock on drop ship Purchase Orders is never going to arrive in your warehouse so it’s not on order! Read more about the drop ship processes here.

The product detail screen of your online shop now allows only configured permutations of sisters. Try experimenting with the different option display types.

The error when trying to reset all orders (and stock levels) has been fixed. If you are in your trial period, you can quickly reset all data to take you back to a clean slate.

We’ve tweaked the code slightly to support a new rounding algorithm across the whole system, following a situation where you couldn’t hit a gross value of 3.69 at 20% tax rate. We use the half-up rounding method, where 3.075 always rounds to 3.08 … other rounding methods are in the pipeline for those users in countries where this is not what you want.

Importing contacts from Excel using the Data Manager is no longer updating staff records, to prevent you from locking yourself out or amending your colleagues’s data. Read more about using the data manager here.

When adding expenses, you can choose to recharge the expense to a client; select the client and then Brightpearl will create a quote that you can turn into an invoice. The clients list was only showing the first 100 contacts; it’s now been updated to autosearch to handle tens of thousands of clients quickly and easily.

The main order search now includes street address, great for those of you dealing with subcontractors and staff out on the road who want to find a job for a site.

We’ve added a department widget and project widget to use on templates that relate to orders: _departmentName_ and _projectName_.

You can choose to show items and notes on the order listing screen; handy for at-a-glance reference before having to dig deeper, or if you want to jump straight to a cloned or parent order. There’s a setting in Setup:Options:Sales setup where you can turn this on.

The order search now also looks in the parent order ID, so by typing the parent ID into the order quicksearch box, you’ll get both the original and the clone.

Posted in Customers, E-commerce, General posts, New features, System & service news | No Comments »

Brightpearl 3.7 – an overview of what's new Posted on January 9th, 2011 by Chris Tanner

Welcome to the new year!

With 2011 comes a host of new features and a number of bugfixes. If you’re familiar with Brightpearl version2, then some of these won’t be new to you; we’ve brought many additional features across from version 2 in a cleaner, better fashion. To start with, you’ll see that you can now filter your sales and purchase lists by custom fields. One of the nice things you can do with this is to create an “issues” custom field; type textarea; then search for all orders where “issues” is not equal to blank, ie there are issues. You can save this filter as a favourite and return to it any time later.

: Custom field filters

Bugfix: sometimes the euro symbol was being displayed in a strange format. We’ve now fixed that.

Ecommerce checkout: When there’s only one shipping method or one payment method, it’s selected by default.

Price list importer: We’ve changed this to use semi-colon rather than colon since Excel was playing funny games and re-formatting price breaks such as 1:2 into 01:02:00 which is not valid for Brightpearl.

If you’re a US user you’ll see that you’ve now got “vendors” rather than “suppliers”. Bear with us whilst we get round to the other Anglicisms!

Being able to send email statements from the debtors screen is great, we’ve now also added the ability to batch print any letter you like from the debtors list. You’d often be sending reminder letters from this screen, and of course you can create a new template to send any other letter you wish:

: Statements and letters from Aged debtors

Batch updating of delivery dates on sales orders; from the sales list you can now select a number of orders and set the delivery date for them all in one go.

One of the great things about Brightpearl ecommerce is that it supports both b2b and b2c pricing models; which means that you can display prices ex tax for your wholesale customers and including tax for your retail/end user customers. We’ve now extended price-mode to the back-office order edit screen too. If you’re a long-time user of Brightpearl, this won’t be new to you, but it’s new for those of you joining us more recently. The order has a “price mode”, which is inherited from the price list, which in turn is inherited from the customer settings. Whenever you’re dealing with tax-inclusive figures, the price is underlined. I’ll be posting a video and more information shortly on this awesome feature.

: Gross price mode in order edit screen

Since price lists play such a large part of the back office processing, we’ve made it much easier to see who’s set to each of your price lists. The setup price lists screen gives you links which take you to the contact list, filtered by price list. You can also batch update customers’ price lists from the contact screen; select them and choose the relevant option from the drop-down menu. In addition, you can set a price list to be a “cost price list”, and Brightpearl will check to see if you have any suppliers that are not assigned to a cost price list, and likewise to see if you have any non-suppliers assigned to a cost price list. Brightpearl helps you keep things ship-shape and Bristol-fashion!

: Price lists showing contacts in use

Bugfix : Products created from Excel import did not have a default nominal code set, which meant that you had to manually update the code when adding items to purchase orders. The default codes on 4000, 5000 and 1001 are now given to products that are imported and your file does not have the codes specified. We’ve also patched up all your previously imported products with missing codes.

Modification : Order search was automatically limited to +2 months, it now looks for orders all the way to the end of time, up to 31 Dec 9999. Hopefully you won’t be planning any forward orders beyond that…

Whilst we’re on the subject of the sales list screen, the sales list now respects the column settings as per Home:My preferences. You can also choose to display custom fields as columns on the sales list. We know it’s not 100% comprehensive, and that there are still data points that you can’t show on screen, but we’re working on a solution for this that lets you choose any column for any listing screen, and save the view for later. In the meantime, it’s worth looking at the Sales list (detailed) report which allows you to use a data map to display columns of your choice.

Bugfix : A few weeks ago the “clear down now” feature for customer and supplier quick invoices stopped entering data. Thanks to those of you that brought this to our attention; it’s now fully operational again, which means that you can enter a paid invoice and mark it as paid all on the same screen.

Addition : We’ve added the delivery date into the default columns displayed on the Purchases list, so that your warehouse staff can quickly see when a PO is due to arrive. The work we’re doing on column configuration will also apply to the Purchase order list.

As many of you are aware we’ve spent the past few months redesigning the way that stock is handled internally at the database level. One of the upshots of this is that the stock audit trail is now 100% comprehensive; showing you every single movement in or out, with date, price and sale or purchase order reference.

: Stock audit trail

If you are tracking stock of items and selling them online, you’ll probably want to prevent customers from buying more than you have of certain items. We’ve now re-introduced the feature whereby stock can be automatically allocated to sales that occur on your ecommerce site, assuming of course that you have the items in stock. If you set “allow checkout” to “yes”, then customers can still buy the items even when your inventory is zero. The website system uses the “on hand” figure, which means that as stock is allocated, less becomes available for the next website customer.

Many of our users sell products business-to-business, where a customer may typically order multiple items from a single product category, or else order multiple sizes of the same garment. We’ve just built a fast new way to add items to an order in bulk. From the order edit screen, click “add price list items” which opens the modal window where you can search by name or category. Products are shown with both tax-exclusive and tax-inclusive prices, and you can choose to add lots of rows to the order all at once. Lovely.

Add items to order from search list

We’ve switched on the Premium inventory control module for our US users; you folks are running on different server hardware from our customers in the UK, and it’s taken a little longer than expected to get all the services up and running. You’re now good to go! See here for the additional features available in the Premium inventory pay plan.

You can now select a stack of products and delete them all in one go. Very handy if you’ve imported them in error. Don’t forget you can’t delete products that are on sales or purchase orders, or if you have any in stock. We’ve been asked a few times about adding the ability to “archive” products from previous seasons that you can’t delete. If this is something that you’d like, then get involved on our feedback forums and add your vote!

Batch delete of products

Bugfix : There was a period of a few hours where the expense entry module wasn’t letting you add expenses. We jumped on this one sharp and resolved the issue immediately.

Bugfix : The “new financial period” form was not respecting US date format; we’ve now fixed this.

We’ve re-introduced the v2 feature of “Profit-at-a-glance”; whereby at the bottom of the Sales list you can see the cost of goods on all the sales vs the revenue taken to get a seat-of-the-pants view on your profitability. Note that this shouldn’t be used for tax reporting since many of the sales in your view won’t yet be invoiced and the figures won’t be final; however it’s a dead handy view; you can even filter the sales list by customer to see how much profit each of your customers is generating. Note that this figure is really only relevant for those of you that handle stock items, since professional services and non stock-tracked line items in orders won’t have a “cost of sale” associated with them. We’re working on a solution for you!

I was going to talk about what’s coming up in the next few months, but I think this post has gone on long enough. Well done for reading this far! Some of you have been asking for a public view of what else we’re working on, and a list of known issues. We’ve launched a forum – head on over to http://discuss.brightpearl.com and join in!

Watch this space, I’ll be posting again in a few days.

Posted in Customers, General posts, New features, System & service news | 2 Comments »

New features in Brightpearl version 3 Posted on October 19th, 2010 by Chris Tanner

So, what’s in Brightpearl version 3?

We’ve been working hard to bring you a host of new features, and also make existing features much easier to use. We’re going to be updating the whole user interface over the next few months; this is just a taster of what’s to come. Drag and drop re-ordering, nice soft buttons, new colour pickers and more. We hope you like the changes

If you’ve got any feedback that would help us to make Brightpearl blend into your work day more smoothly, either by process or by changes to the user interface, we’d love it if you could get involved with our user panel. Just send an email to design@brightpearl.com for more information.

So, here’s a summary. We’ll be revisiting many of the new features for a closer look over the next few weeks, so watch your inbox (and if you’re not signed up for our newsletter, then join us now).

We’ve updated sales edit screen. There’s a lot of stuff going on in your business, so we’ve had to squeeze a lot of stuff in here too. Various things will appear as you add modules to your Brightpearl system (like inventory management). We used to have half our userbase on one interface with gazillions of options, and the other half on another interface that was lean, mean and fast, but didn’t support all of our features. Everyone now uses the same page to edit orders, which means we can focus our full efforts on making it really sing.

Update sales/purchase order edit screen

Add items straight from your price list using the quick-add box, re-order rows, calculate total on-the-fly, add sales codes mid-flow, edit custom fields and more.

If you’re using our ecommerce module, then you’ll be glad to know that shipping costs now come through to the back-office as a line item on the bottom of the order, and the shipping method is selected correctly by default, which means that you can filter your new orders by shipping method when you come into the office after a busy night of website sales, and ship the most urgent ones first. Splendid.

At the end of the day, you can export your sales list including delivery columns – which now also include the shipping method, which allows you drop the file straight into a packing system such as Metapack.

We now support multi-tier Sales tax, 4 US timezones and US date format. This opens up Brightpearl to users across North America, which is great news for those of you who’ve been wanting Brightpearl in your own timezone. Welcome on board!

date

You can now make your web portal (which comes included with every single Brightpearl account) look just like the rest of your branding. Change colours, add a logo and add if you know your way around spans, divs and moz-border-radius, you can add custom CSS too. Set up your portal at Setup : Options : Other : Web portal. Of course if you already run your website on Brightpearl (like these folk) then the portal comes as part of your website. It’s where your customers have self-service access to their quotes, invoices, tickets and personal information, and can also pay for quotes online if you’ve got the right payment methods set up.

Web portal

If you want to be able to process credit cards from within your admin system, then you’re going to love this. We’ve added an integration with Sagepay, so that card payments are authorised from within Brightpearl, with the payment allocated automatically into your accounting system. No hassles and really easy to set up. Read more here. We’re planning to add Authorize.net for our US customers shortly.

Process credit cards in Brightpearl with Sagepay

If you’re using departments for your accounting reports, you’ll be glad to hear that you can now filter your General Ledger to show all transactions without a department, and also code up part-journals to different departments (great for wages allocation)

Allocate a transaction across multiple departments

Management of your contact tags is easy. Drag-and-drop re-ordering, simpler screens, and a move to use the “modal” window. Using the modal window means that you don’t need to leave the screen below – so you’ll soon have the ability to add Tags mid-flow whilst working with contacts rather than have to set all your Tags up first.

Edit contact Tag

So you’ve got a list of contacts in your CRM – perhaps you’ve filtered the list to show everyone that has filled in a Smartform on your website, or perhaps it’s a list of contacts imported from an Eventbrite event that you ran. You want to print personalised letters to all of them. This is a simple case of 1-2-3 in Brightpearl; just set up your template, select the contacts and click the “letters” button. Lovely. We’re also working on a library of templates that you can use – watch this space

A letter as displayed on screen, including your logo and personalised text. Just hit "print"!

Easy printing of letters from CRM

For those of you with lots of product options, you’ll appreciate the small tweaks we’ve made to the option edit screen. Don’t forget you can manage products by Excel too – great if you have hundreds or thousands of SKUs.

Clear screen to update item options

Sales Credits and Purchase Credits

So this is a pretty major change for version 3.0 – there are two new types of orders; Sales Credits and Purchase Credits. You can create statuses for these separately to fit your own workflow. Of course there’s the new drag-and-drop reordering and colour selector too, so you can get set up in a jiffy. Here we can see 3 Sales Credit statuses, with the first set so that Brightpearl reminds us if the order has not been updated after 3 days.

Simple and powerful edit of order statuses

You’ll hopefully be using the powerful batch processing that comes on many screens in Brightpearl – saving you lots of time every day. We’ve made the whole process much slicker and easier to use. As an example in the screen shot below, you can send a (personalised) SMS off to each customer when we update their sale to “sent” at the end of the day.

Send email and SMS when batch updating orders

Just like the other areas of batch processing, printing a list of orders is a breeze. You can print one of the default templates (like a Quote) – or set up your own document templates for complete flexibility. Your imagination really is the only limit!

Easy printing of orders using any template you like

Do you ever find yourself typing the same bit of information into a field over and over again? We’ve got that covered. Just select a Quicknote from the drop-down list below most text entry boxes in Brightpearl and move on to your next job If you’re using a quicknote in a field that knows which contact you’re dealing with, then you can use contact merge fields. Same goes for orders and order merge fields.

Clear, crisp editing of quicknotes

Now for some really juicy stuff. Brightpearl integrates your sales and order processes with your contact database and CRM, which means that if you want to update your contact information from your sales screens, it’s a simple case of selecting the sales and choosing a function! If it’s more than just sending an email or SMS – use a Tag. Once you’ve added a Tag to contacts, you can bring them up in the CRM screens and do whatever you need from there.

Add tags to contacts from Sales lists

New SMS provider – Clickatell

Along with all the other screens we’ve made simpler, adding SMS templates is wonderfully straightforward. You’ve got a choice of a few “merge fields” to make the message more personal. To send SMS messages, you’ll need to sign up for an account with Clickatell and then just pop your API details (essentially login information for the Brightpearl servers) into Brightpearl. Read the full documentation here.

Easy, personalised SMS templates

Say you want to send a message to all your customers who’ve bought a computer fan from you in the last month. If you don’t sell computer fans, it doesn’t matter – you can search for anything you sell by name or SKU, and then filter the list by a whole load of other options too. You can send an email or SMS directly from this list, or feed it into CRM by adding a Tag (don’t forget you can also connect your Tags to Mailchimp email marketing)

Add Tag to contacts buying certain items from the sales detail report

In much the same kind of way, you can use your Top customers list to generate more re-orders, or else just keep your customers in touch. Communication Is Good – Brightpearl is the system to help you do all of this faster and more easily.

Easily send an email to your top customers

The “list contacts (beta)” screen is now handling all contact search results and listings in Brightpearl. This means easier batch processing of search results, direct export to Excel and a much cleaner, more consistent layout. Over the next few weeks we’ll be adding advanced custom search filtering in (which was on the old screen) – in the meantime those of you with older Brightpearl accounts can still access the old search screen from the “Browse…” menu. You can also change the columns displayed in this list using the options at Home:My preferences.

Contact search direct to export

In a similar fashion, the Sales List is now all handled by the new interface, which also allows much easier batch processing and direct export to Excel or PDF. Many of our users have only ever used this screen and won’t notice a difference. You’ll notice a change if you’re on Standard or Premium stock control. Some of you will be disappointed to see that the order contents are not shown by default, so you do need to open the orders to see what’s in them. We will be adding a “quick preview” very soon so that you can have a glance at what’s in the order without needing to open it up.

Updated Sales list screen

We’ve also improved the way that you can work with your customer debt. Send an email or SMS, add a note or even a contact Tag directly from the accounting screens. One report that you might find particularly useful is the Accounts:Customers:Reports:Invoices (unpaid and overdue) – from where you can easily send a reminder letter that contains details of the invoice and a link to your web portal so that your customers can pay you online!

CRM features from within your accounting screens. Lovely.

When sending emails from the pop-up window (just click on any red email link in the system) you can now pull in email addresses from your database.

Type-ahead search when sending emails

Also in version 3.0:

- Multiple calendars no longer supported : add events for people
- We’ve removed event ticketing. You can still have people on events, but you can’t connect events to orders
- We’ve discontinued Wufoo connection for our Smartforms. It wasn’t being used, sorry!
- Mailchimp : opt-in emails can now be sent when you add Mailer Tags to contacts if you wish. See Setup:Options:Contacts.

… and last but not least, we’re now listed on Google Apps Marketplace, which means that you can set up a new Brightpearl account with Single-Sign-On from your Google Apps Universal navigation menu. This is currently for new users only, we’re going to support Single Sign On for existing users in the very near future.

Brightpearl available from Google Apps

Posted in Customers, Design, E-commerce, General posts, New features, Products, Quotes & Invoices, System & service news | 11 Comments »

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