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!

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