Brightpearl Blog

Improved bank matching, inventory valuation report and more Posted on July 6th, 2011 by Chris Tanner

This week we’re pleased to announce some pretty cool improvements to the Brightpearl bank matching process – you can now match a single bank receipt (or payment) against multiple invoices or sales receipts that already exist in your accounts! This is really handy for those of you that work with cheques and paying in slips. It’s also a great way to allocate receipts against multiple open invoices.

Not used this feature before?

The bank matching process uses an import from your online banking, in conjunction with a simple yet powerful selection and matching process, to vastly speed up the time it takes to reconcile your bank account with what your Brightpearl system says for that bank account. The full documentation is here.

But that’s not all!

There are a few other goodies we’ve released this week; more on those later on.

The best way to see how bank matching works is to watch the video we’ve put up on our YouTube channel:

Importing and matching bank transactions

Also in this release (which will be live on your account right now if you’re a v3 user) :

You can now merge Purchase Orders for a single supplier as long as no stock or accounting transactions have taken place on them. This is dead handy if you’re racking up a stack of small POs for a supplier that you then want to combine into one before sending it off. We’ll take a closer look at this feature in the next couple of weeks.

In brief:
- Show all POs for the warehouse of your choice
- Filter the PO list by clicking on the supplier name
- Select the POs and click “merge Purchase Orders”

A new report : Inventory valuation : this groups all your inventory by product to give you a total value of asset in stock.

The ability to edit the inventory value directly from the stock detail report means you can make corrections to inventory if you’ve made a mistake, want to revalue or depreciate your stock. All the accounting is handled for you. Lovely.

Edit inventory value

Edit inventory value

We’ve tweaked the stock import CSV routine so that you choose either product ID or SKU as the match reference when importing stock levels; which makes it much easier to create the files if you’re just working with SKUs.

If you import orders from your eCommerce store, Amazon, eBay (or any other sales channel) via spreadsheet then you now have the ability to record a payment allocation in the accounting system at the same time - just add the payment columns into your data map. The Brightpearl order import routine is pretty handy. You can import sales or purchase orders, with a custom column configuration. Read all about importing sales on our documentation site.

We’ve been busy building new web services for our API users, fixing bugs and a stack of other goodness too … full release notes are over on our forum.

Posted in General posts, Money, New features, System & service news | 4 Comments »

Handling the January VAT increase with Pearl Posted on December 6th, 2009 by Chris Tanner

As you’re probably aware, VAT in the UK will be going up to 17.5% on the 1st January 2010.  This means that you’re going to need to change the way you do things, so that your invoices will show the correct tax amounts.

Fortunately for our Pearl users, the following will be done for you:

If your company default tax rate is set to T5 (15%), then on January 1st we will update this to T1 (17.5%). We will not change the rates on any open sales or purchase orders, since the tax amount relates to the tax date  on each invoice.

We’re not going to change the tax rate on your products unless you tell us. This is because your products are stored as net price plus tax, and changing the tax rate will affect the price that your customers see. You will need to change the tax code on your T5 products to T1, so that all future invoices are created correctly.

To make this nice and simple, we have a little magic elf that will update your prices for you at midnight on December 31st. Just make sure that you’ve told us using the option on your setup screen!

vat_change

What we’ll do if you choose “yes”:

  1. Work out the gross price including 15% of all your taxable items
  2. Adjust the net price so that when the VAT is updated, the gross price remains the same
  3. Update all T5 (15%) items to T1 (17.5%)

Just to remind you, we won’t be changing any tax rates on any open sales or purchases.

If you want to handle this manually, then you can choose what to do for each product separately, or by using the powerful batch processing tools in Pearl.

There’s a good bit of background reading over on AccountingWeb, by Debra Dougal.

Posted in Money, System & service news | 1 Comment »

Recently added features Posted on May 5th, 2009 by Chris Tanner

The eagle eyed amongst you all will have noticed a number of handy new features in your Pearl account. Here’s a summary of what’s new:

Contacts

The default credit limit and credit terms for new contacts is now defined by the settings in your main company contact. To edit this, visit Setup – Options – Defaults, and click the blue link.

Import all your contacts from Outlook with the import wizard. Outlook has some funny characteristics that has meant that we’ve had to put a lot of work into this feature – if your data throws up a hiccup, let us know. Always tag imported contacts so that you can identify them later!

You’ll have spotted that Groups are now Tags – expect to see the Tag concept rolled across the rest of Pearl in the near future. You can batch add and remove tags using the options in the left hand side of the CRM screen.

Batch email – to send an email out to a number of contacts, use the batch email feature in the left hand side of the CRM screen. This does use email credits, from 0.6 pence each. You can also use the more powerful email marketing features, which will soon have full stats and analysis in place.

Batch process for large numbers of contacts – gone is the threshold of 750 contacts … you can now choose to perform an action on a much larger group of contacts without having to display them all on screen first. There’s a handy little “display/perform” menu in the advanced search filter on the CRM screen

Sales and Invoicing

We’re pleased to say that the new PDF system that we put in place a few weeks ago is proving much better, and has resolved the issue of failing PDFs. All PDFs now go out with a “view online” link – which will introduce your customers to your web portal, which will mean that they (hopefully!) go to get information themselves rather than hassle you for re-prints, statements and so on.

If you want to give your customers the ability to pay their invoices online, you need to set up one of the following payment methods: PayPal, Protx (now SagePay), Secure Trading.

Credit card payment – you can take card payments from customers from within your Pearl account – visit the Setup – Payment screens in your admin area for a full walk through on setting up the Secure Trading console.

Accounting

Whilst entering quick invoices, you can quickly add a new customer or supplier without leaving the invoice entry screen – look for the link on the right hand side of the screen.

Any of your nominal codes can now be set as a “bank account” – change your settings in the Chart of accounts setup screens.

You can export your Chart of Accounts by using the Export Trial Balance, with “include zero balance” ticked. Handy if you are setting up multiple Pearl accounts and want each of them to have the same chart of accounts.

Lock accounts to one user – very handy for your accountant to lock the accounts for their exclusive access whilst you continue to enter transactions on a day to day basis. Have a look at the Accounts – Setup – Year end screen.

Products

You can now add up to 15 sub products in a bundle – it was just 6 before.

If you want, you can edit the value of stock in your stock table, using the Products – Stock – Stock report screen.

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Posted in Customers, Money, New features, Products, Quotes & Invoices, System & service news | No Comments »

Good news for MYOB users Posted on May 5th, 2009 by Chris Tanner

The good news for MYOB users is that you can now import all your accounts, customers, suppliers and balances directly into Pearl. Now this isn’t just a chart of accounts, it’s a complete business snapshot – including full Debtors and Creditors analysis down to the invoice level.

Import accounts from MYOB

We’re working on the products (items) import too.

What’s even better is that you can map all your MYOB ledger codes onto the Pearl system so that you don’t have to learn anything new. You can even set Pearl up with familiar tax codes such as “S”, “NT”, “A” and so on – which means that there’s less likelihood for data entry errors.

For a full low-down on the procedure – click here.

Posted in General posts, Money, New features, System & service news | No Comments »

Time to market for web ERP? Posted on April 14th, 2009 by Chris Tanner

Sage signed up for a Pearl account today. Welcome Greg, have a look around! It makes me wonder what’s up the sleevies of the Big Green Giant, and how they are going to catch up. After an initial foray into the web based accounting market, we’ve not seen much progression from them (other than ex Sage staff applying for our developers job openings!).

How fast can you develop a mature web ERP app is the question? What’s the time to market from ground zero? At what point do you launch your product in “beta” version, if you do at all? We’re where we are after more than 8 years of development, experience and mistakes. We’ve been putting 200% effort into the product rather than pre-launch hype, which is why you may not have heard much about us yet. Admittedly, we’ve really ramped it up in the last 24 months, but even so – 24 months is a fair while, but look carefully at what Pearl can do and you’ll see why.

Replicating an offline system is one way to get out there fast, and that looks like what Sage were planning at the start of ’09 – but we’re seeing plenty of users ditching Sage for lighter, more basic systems. Software like Sage Line 50 has a huge number of superb features, but because it’s been around for ages and ages, it’s also got lots going on that can intimidate a less exprienced user. One of the reasons that the web based apps out there are picking up users two-a-penny is because they are SIMPLE.

Now simple is good because it’s easy to learn, looks clean and feels great to use. But try and pack in a load of features that are pretty essential to a larger SME (eg decent stock control, batch product management, full ecommerce integration) – and it gets pretty tricky to keep it simple… so the challenge is to keep it simple whilst powerful.

Pearl has tackled this problem in a number of ways-

1/ User Interface
We’ve released the new Pearl UI, in preparation for the launch of Pearl Express at the start of May. It’s colour coded, clear and gives you access to every page on the system within two clicks whilst not baffling the user with too many options. Everyone loves it! What do you think?

Colours in Pearl

Colours in Pearl

2/ Colours
Throughout Pearl you’ll see the ability to colour code things like order statuses, customer labels, and events. At a glance you can get a good feel for what the screen is trying to tell you without needing to actually read it. It’s also handy for preventing errors – for example if your order is in red (“ready to ship”, perhaps), then you’re not going to inadvertently send off another quote.

3/ Multiple subscription levels
Pearl Express – the free version of Pearl – is a reduced functionality package with a fraction of what Pearl can offer, yet it still has more features than many other apps out there. Users can get used to Pearl without being overwhelmed, and then move up to our other price plans as their company grows, all the way up to the higher end of SME, with 50+ staff and £10m+ turnover, all managed in the same application: no data transfer, no learning curve – just the same system from day one.

4/ Configuration options
So you don’t need stock control? Just turn it off. Same for time billing – there’s no need to clutter the screens with features that you don’t need. The inline configuration screen allows the user to make these choices and set their system up exactly as needed.

So where does this take us? We’ve got experience with multi user, multi departmental, multi site clients in a huge variety of sectors, and clients that have more than 1.5 million product lines, as well as Mr. Bob who’s running his building company using Pearl just for book keeping. If you can make it simple for Bob, then with a bit of sneaky design, Mr. Corporation is simply 100 Mr. Bobs all tapping away happily at the same Web2.0 web based app.

It’s taken us the best part of a decade, and we’ve still got a fair way to go in some areas. My punt is that it’s not going to be an easy task for Xero, Kashflow and some of the others to move from the “accounting” space into the “business management” space. A number of companies have gone for the merge (Tactile and Freshbooks for example) … but with web based apps moving so fast I have a feeling that’s only going to end up being another systems fragmentation dead end. That’s why we built Pearl. One system. No limits. (hey, isn’t that someone else’s tagline?)

Posted in Customers, General posts, Money | No Comments »