A while ago we let you know by email that Brightpearl 4 is nearly here. It’s just a case of days now! Exciting stuff. At the start of October we’ll be upgrading existing accounts. We’ll be communicating directly by email with those of you that already have accounts to give you an exact date. Have a look through the information below to see the awesome goodness that Brightpearl 4 brings you, and also check out the Brightpearl 4 video here.

New look-and-feel
The first thing you’ll notice when you log in is that everything is smarter, neater and easier to use. We’ve bumped up the font size a little bit, reduced the intensity of non essential colours, made buttons consistent in appearance and placement, removed icons from the menus (to speed up page load and reduce visual “noise”) and cleaned up the layouts.

“Getting started with …”
Every page has on-screen help shown in a blue box at the top; you’ll see it loaded the first time you visit a page. Click the “don’t show this again” link to get rid of it (you can always open it again later using Help:About this page).

Contact edit / timeline
The contact edit screen and timeline screen are now rolled into one, so you can see everything there is to know about the contact in the same place as adding notes, sending email, SMS and so on. Lovely.

Improved “company” management
It’s now easy to see from within a contact record if they are part of a company. You can click to get a company view of timeline entries, orders, tickets etc.

Main navigation
The main menu has been updated so that you can get from anywhere to anywhere with fewer clicks and faster page loads. There’s also a new “reports” menu which houses links to all the reporting screens.

Simpler, more powerful inventory management
We’ve combined Basic, Standard and Premium inventory into one, flexible and easy to use system. You can configure your account to activate only the features you need in the Setup:Products section.

Full menus in every new browser tab
You can open as many new browser tabs as you want and the main menu will be there for all of them! This lets you maximise the power of a browser based system; where you can have sales in one tab, customers in a second and products in another, for example. Multi-task to the max!

Use goods-notes for shipping sales
Goods-out notes (delivery notes) are the backbone of warehouse systems. Sales folk tell warehouse folk what to send to the customer by means of a delivery note. When a goods-out note is marked as “shipped”, the stock is removed from your system. Simple! These have always been created in the background (when you invoice a sale in Brightpearl 3; Basic and Standard plans) – now we’re letting you have more control over when the goods notes are created, and also letting you create multiple goods-out notes for a single sale if you want to part-ship. This may involve a slight-rethink of your processes, so have a look at the video on sales fulfilment. Goods-out notes are the perfect way to integrate your Brightpearl system with a 3rd party warehouse or fulfilment service – you can also access and update goods-out notes over our API.

Reminders and notifications
Notifications (such as those when you haven’t updated a sale in a while) appear on the left hand side rather than taking up a whole load of screen space on the right. When there’s something that Brightpearl wants to tell you, a little red warning icon appears.

Calendar + Tasks
Powerful new drag-and-drop calendar with day, week and month view. Click-and-drag to create events, all-day events and project view for project managers. Tasks and todos are now always handled in the pop-up window so you can check them whilst still working on something else below (like a contact).

Contacts, Customers and Suppliers
The main menu item “contacts” has been split into “customers” and “suppliers” (or clients, vendors, tenants depending on your own account settings). This makes it easier so get to the right information, and makes it quicker to filter by custom field.

Search boxes
The multiple search boxes along the top of the screen have been brought into one; much cleaner. Brightpearl still remembers your last search value for each search type when you’re searching backwards and forwards in different areas.

Personal setup
Personal information (like tasks, logout) are accessed from the menu under your name at the top of the screen.

Favourites
Favourites are accessed from the star icon on the left hand side. To add a page to your favourites, click the “add to favourites” link at the bottom of the screen.

Data maps
Working with data maps is now much simpler and intuitive. Just drag and drop fields into the editor to build a data map within seconds.

Permissions
We’ve simplified the permissions structure and added the ability to copy permissions from one user to another, to save time when adding new staff and to ensure that people have the same access within a team.

Sales teams / contact groups
If you want to restrict access to certain data to only certain people within your organisation, you now can! You can use this feature to handle sales teams, management and financial teams and even “personal data”.

Access EPOS / Point of Sale with a PIN number
We took on board feedback from our EPOS users, where it’s usual for shop floor staff not to need access to the full back-office system. There are now two different access types; go direct to EPOS from the login screen via a PIN, or else log in with email and password to access back-office. Set your staff PIN numbers on the staff settings screen.

Projects and Helpdesk are bundled in for everyone
We find that Brightpearl benefits business most if they use most of the system. We’re here to help you improve processes and information management all the way from quotes through to customer service and accounting – all in one system. Watch an introductory video to Helpdesk.

Custom column headers on all order and goods-note documentation
Previously you only had access to custom columns for quote, invoice, purchase and other order documentation. You can now also configure your packing note columns – to include things like barcode, weight, and even foreign language headers.

… so that’s a load of awesome stuff. If you’d like to have a look at the latest, then log into www.indopacific.biz/admin using the demo details “demo@thisispearl.com” and demo_user. If you’re already logged into your own Brightpearl account then use a different browser otherwise you’ll be logged out!

I’d love to get your feedback; add comments below or email design@brightpearl.com

Chris
Head of Product