Brightpearl Blog

Brightpearl November Release Posted on November 11th, 2011 by Chris Tanner

For many of you using Brightpearl, this week is your first experience of Brightpearl 4. On Tuesday evening we upgraded 4000+ accounts across both European and American data centers. I’m really pleased to say that we’ve had an incredible amount of glowing feedback;

“Brightpearl has sped up his processes massively compared to v3….this is just what it [my business] needed, cannot ask for anything more…”

“Loving the product batch processing, it takes me half the time now. Also the useful information you get when you look at a contact in accounts, helpdesk or orders is really handy.”

In addition to upgrading all our Brightpearl 3 users, we’ve added some extra features and fixes to the latest version of Brightpearl 4. The November release is jam packed with goodies; in this blog I’ll highlight a few key changes and additions – for the full release notes have a look at our forum.

Updated tax methodology for USA customers

To simplify processes for USA users, we have updated the taxation system such that you now just select “taxable” or “non taxable” when editing products. If a product is taxable, then it will inherit the tax code of the customer; which can be set up using common tax components. For full information on US tax, see our documentation.

Shipping quote in sales order screen

Brightpearl has always supported shipping price information in the database for the ecommerce module to use; and now the same information is available for your sales team on the phone to work with. We’re all about giving you a single master-system of centralised data; everyone and every system working from a one true copy of all your business information.

All you need to do is turn it on at Setup : Sales : Sales settings, and choose “show shipping quote in sales order”. Read more about setting up your shipping structure.

QR codes

You can print QR (Quick response) codes straight from Brightpearl! We blogged about this the other day; just click the little QR icon on the Product list, Smartform list or Lead source listing and voila!- a QR code to copy onto your computer and embed into your marketing material. I’d love to see how you’re using this handy new feature – send in your pics and videos to design@brightpearl.com and we’ll feature you in an upcoming blog/newsletter!

Margin calculator

Ever wondered what your most profitable products are? Now it’s dead simple to pull up a report that shows the exact margin and markup you’re making on any items. Just click Reports > Product margins and select two price lists!

Order “shipped status”, plus other fulfilment updates

Once you’ve fulfilled a sale for shipment later, it’s up to the warehouse team to ensure it leaves the door quickly and effectively. Up until now you’ve had to assume that if it’s been fulfilled, it’s been shipped – and therefore ready to invoice. This isn’t guaranteed however … the order may have got lost in your warehouse processes … but all is not lost! You now have a filter that lets you see the shipping status of sales; whether all stock items have been fulfilled and also been shipped. Using this filter in conjunction with the other filters on the sales list you’ll know exactly what’s going on.

So say you’re taking sales for goods that you don’t want to ship until another time, but you want to close the sale, invoice and move on. You can now also create future-dated goods out notes, that only appear on the goods-out screen on or after the date you chose when creating them. Handy for preparing for the Valentines day rush, or even if someone just wants to have a Birthday present delivered on the right day.

Pick, pack and ship from the goods-out note view

Now you can process your goods-out notes quickly and simply, one by one, straight from the print screen. At the top of the goods-out note you’ll see print, pick, pack and ship information and buttons – which also means thath your sales team now have 1-click access to the status and tracking reference when a customer calls to check the status of their order. We’re currently working on tight integration with the major couriers; in the new year we’ll be making some exciting announcements on this front, with the aim of bringing hyper-efficient warehouse processing to every small retail and wholesale business with minimal cost.

And much much more …

This is only a small taster of the new additions to the November release; for a full list, have a look at the release notes.

Over to you!

Once you’ve had a while to settle in to the new release, it would superb if you could feed back to our design team and let them know what you think. If there’s anything that is frustrating or awkward (which there quite possibly will be for some of you; we don’t always get it right first time) – or if there’s anything that you really love, then please let us know! Just email your thoughts to design@brightpearl.com – and also have a browse through our feedback channel at http://feedback.brightpearl.com

Until next time,

Chris, Med, Ananth + the design team @ Brightpearl

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Brightpearl 4 – more bang for your buck! Posted on September 15th, 2011 by Chris Tanner

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

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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 »

Mid-June release Posted on June 21st, 2011 by Chris Tanner

This week brings along a raft of features and improvements to the Brightpearl system;

eCommerce Special Offers have had a make-over; you now apply a discount percentage to the price list of your choice (previously special offers were only available on Retail price list), using the wee button at the top of the product listing screen (you’ll need to have Standard inventory module and eCommerce enabled). You can set start and end dates for the discount too:

Special offers in Brightpearl

And this is what it looks like on your Brightpearl eCommerce website (read more about Brightpearl eCommerce here):

We’ve introduced support for settlement discount on Purchase Orders. When your suppliers offer you say 2.5% off to pay early, you need to take the discount off just the tax amount, which can be a nightmare to handle manually. Now you don’t have to! Brightpearl does all the maths for you. Have a look at the YouTube video we’ve put together over here. If you’re interested in back order processing, then make sure you watch the separate video on the processes for handling back orders within Brightpearl. This release heralds yet another injection of goodness; you can maintain original order prices when splitting a sale to back-order. Watch the video on back orders.

Brightpearl currently supports TWO ways to create a new sale or purchase;

  1. Find your customer in CRM, then click to create a new order
  2. Go to the new order screen and then find a customer/supplier

The latter method doesn’t give you enough information about the contact before you create a sale / purchase, means you’re working on an unsaved order and doesn’t work properly when you’re working with foreign currency customers (since the currency value isn’t loaded). For those of you that have contacts set to foreign currency, we’ve automatically switched on a new method of creating orders to replace method (2) above; click “new sale” or “new purchase” to open a modal window where you can find the contact. You also get more information about them here, and we’ll start adding more in too – working with credit limits and “on hold” account status too. This is the way that all orders will be created in the new interface (coming later this summer – see here) – even if you’re not using foreign currencies we suggest you turn it on now at Setup : sales : “choose customer first” = yes.

Creating a new sale

One of the most requested features on our Feedback Forum is the ability to copy products – haleluja! You can now create a copy of a product simply by clicking “save as copy” in the product edit screen. Lovely. Don’t forget that if you’re wanting to create variants (eg size/colour – like the tape measure in the picture above) you should create copies of products using the “create options” link in the product list screen. Read more about product variants here.

Copy products

In this release we’ve also made changes so that tickets are excluded from the task list (they are different things, after all) – which also means that there’s a new quicksearch box at the top of your screen (if you’re using the helpdesk module) which does the same as the event search but looks in tickets. Closed tickets are hidden by default unless you search by ticket ID.

And last but certainly not least is the fact that Brightpearl does not send invoices automatically by email unless you want it to. Previously, if there was an email address in the “billing” column on an order, the customer received an email when you invoiced the sale – you can now choose whether this happens or not; at Setup : Options : Sales.

There are also a range of bug fixes and other tweaks – full information is on the forum over here.

It’s also worth mentioning again that if you’re keen to get involved with the Brightpearl development process; get early access to new features and let us know what you think; then please send us an email at design@brightpearl.com and we’ll keep you ahead of the curve.

 

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Brightpearl’s new look – webinar on Thursday Posted on June 21st, 2011 by Chris Tanner

So we’ve got some exciting things happening over the next few months, one of which is the all-new interface that we’ve been busying ourselves away on here at Brightpearl HQ. We sat back, took a good look at all things nice and all things nasty in the current design, merged the good stuff with a load of fresh HTML5 and CSS3, done a load of user testing, given everything a generous dose of modernisation – and are nearly ready to start rolling out the new design.

Faster, slicker, easier to use – lovely.

We’re running a sneak-peek webinar tomorrow (Thursday 23rd) at 5pm BST (UK time) or 12 Midday EST. It’s free to join, and we’d love to get your feedback too.

Register here!

Brightpearl's new look

 

Posted in Design, System & service news | 3 Comments »

Brightpearl May release Posted on May 6th, 2011 by Chris Tanner

Here in the UK we’re just coming out of a string of bank holidays; an opportunity for our tech team to get their heads down and add some great time-saving features to your system, as well as fix a stack of other issues. For the full list, have a look at our release notes. Here’s a summary;

Allocation status

Stock allocation is a very handy feature in Brightpearl that lets you “earmark” stock for a customer before actually updating it. You can allocate only some rows on the sale, or all of them… but how do you know which sales are not yet done? Now it’s easy – we’ve just introduced a way for you to filter your sales at the click of a mouse; to find sales that are not yet allocated, part allocated or fully allocated. Watch the video here.

Batch allocation

So say you’ve got a stack of sales on back order that can’t ship because you don’t have enough stock; a common scenario. When a Purchase Order arrives with a load of new stock, you need to allocate all this new inventory across your open sales, and then process those sales that are now fully allocated. We’ve introduced a new process that lets you auto-allocate inventory with one click! In conjunction with the allocation status, it’s now easy to see which orders are good to ship. Watch the video here.

Extra product identifier fields for Google

You can now hold values for EAN (European Article Number), UPC (Universal Product Number) and ISBN (International Standard Book Number). As of June 20th Google will be changing the way it handles Google Base feeds so you should start populating these fields if you make use of it. If you would like to read more about these changes please refer to the following blog post by Google http://googlemerchantblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/enforcement-of-our-unique-identifier_03.html

Over the coming months we will be working on lots of exciting features involving product management, selling online and collecting sales from various web channels … if you’re interested in Google Base and want to know more http://blog.thisispearl.com/2010/01/09/how-to-sell-more-online-with-googlebase-and-pearl/ will reveal all!

You can now clone a purchase order to another; either from the same supplier or from a different supplier. Have a look in the “more” menu when you’re in the Purchase Order.

Purchase orders and stock corrections

However hard you might try to keep inventory in check, there will always be the scenario where you need to correct mistakes. There are now two methods of correcting stock levels; the original method of adjustment, where items are still left as “received” on the original Purchase Order, and a new method to delete a goods-in entry which opens up the original Purchase Order for you to re-receive the stock (or else delete the purchase order if you really need to!). However if you’ve sold or allocated any of the items on the Purchase Order then you can’t delete the goods-in. For full details on stock corrections, read our documentation here.

“Fixed rate shipping” has been discontinued; in favour of support for distance-selling and international ecommerce. The system now follows the clear rule whereby the shipping tax rate adopts the tax rate of the most-used tax rate in the cart.

You can now batch update date custom fields from the contact and order listing screens. We’ve put together a video that walks you through custom fields on sales; the same principle applies for purchases, customers and suppliers. Watch the video.

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Brightpearl mid-April release Posted on April 15th, 2011 by Chris Tanner

Wow, someone must be putting something special into the water round here – the development team are trucking along! We’ve got even more new stuff to help you get your business running more smoothly on Brightpearl. Today heralds a new set of features and fixes on your system, all for free as part of your subscription!

Along with the features listed below, we are working with a few users to test the alpha release of our new public web services (API) – if you’re keen to get involved then please pop along to our API beta request form here. Highlights this release include:

You can now batch update custom fields on sales list; show a list of sales, select a few then from the drop-down menu select “update custom fields”.

Update custom fields from the sales list

Update custom fields from the sales list

We’ve removed the 10 character limit from the “reason” field on the stock correction process – you’re still prompted to add a reason but it’s no longer compulsory.

You can now batch update your domain/storefront settings from product list if you have more than one website running on Brightpearl; here we can see a typical example where, as a distributor, you have a retail website at www.website.com and a trade-only website at trade.website.com. Brightpearl lets you sell items on selected websites only, and at the relevant price. The trade site can easily be registration-only if you want, and you can even restrict access to different areas of the site using CRM tags. Now that’s powerful.

Batch update multi storefront settings

Batch update multi storefront settings

We’ve added a new “mode” to the CSV stock update screen – which means that you can load a single file to remove one item and add others; very handy if you are buying in one type of stock, assembling or disassembling it and turning it into another. Maybe you buy packs of 100 from a supplier but only sell in packs of 10. You’d create a CSV to remove 1 of the 100-pack and add 10 of the 10-pack. Of course all the accounting transactions are automatically done for you too.

Update stock via CSV files

Update stock via CSV files

Speaking of accounting being done for you – when adding inventory via the corrections method we’ve made sure that the cost price shown in the “cost” box is pulled from your default cost price list (a new setting in the Purchases zone).

You’ve now got the ability to de-activate email/print templates; some of users are adding rather a lot of templates; it’s such a handy feature; but it’s even handier being able to hide the ones you’re not using at the moment. Just use the toggle icon on the extra templates screen.

It’s been on our todo list for a while, and a number of you have been adding your weight to the suggestion over on our feedback forum; we’ve now added Quicknotes to the template email/print screen – so you can quickly add a note rather than typing an email out each time you send a quote or purchase order. Set up your quicknotes at Setup:Options:Other:Templates:Quicknote templates.

Last release we added the “paid to date” value on sales quotes and invoices – a pretty handy feature but a number of you have requested that we make it optional. It’s now opt-in; so if you want to see this on your documents then turn it on at Setup:Options:Sales.

There’s a lot more too including a number of bug fixes – so pop on over to our forum to see the full release notes. All accounts are being updated within the next 24 hours so you’ll be able to make use of these goodies right away. It’s all in v3.15 for those of you that watch that kind of thing :)

If you have any questions, then don’t hesitate to get in touch with our support team by phone or ticket!

Chris

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We're moving! Posted on April 14th, 2011 by Chris Tanner

It’s a pretty exciting week for us here at Brightpearl HQ. It’s time for a new office! Over the past 12 months we’ve grown the team more than 5 times over, and we are literally busting at the seams. We’re still staying in Bristol – it’s only a move across the centre of town to a larger, more modern space.

We’ll be shutting the phones down slightly earlier this afternoon, then everything goes into boxes for the move over the weekend, ready for business again on Monday (same number). If you’re nearby, then make sure you drop in for a brew… see you on the other side!

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Brightpearl April release Posted on April 5th, 2011 by Chris Tanner

It’s time for another round of new features and fixes! Over the next couple of days we’ll be upgrading accounts to the latest release 3.14, which includes some pretty handy stuff for sales processing. The full release notes are here on our forums; here’s a summary:

Paid to date is now shown on your quotes and invoices

Paid to date information on Quotes and Invoices

Paid to date information on Quotes and Invoices

Bundles on Purchase Orders

We’ve updated the way that product bundles are handled on Purchase Orders. When you add a bundle to a Purchase Order, the components are also added too however they are not connected to the bundle itself, as they are when you’re working with Sales Orders. This lets you edit the prices of the components individually (which is the “cost price” – or asset value – of the stock). However it’s likely that you want the supplier to just see the bundle itself, so you can turn off the display of bundle components on the Purchase Order template at Setup : Options : Purchases. Read more about bundles on POs.

eCommerce images displayed from CDN

New product images added to your website are now displayed from the Brightpearl CDN. What’s a CDN? … you may well ask! A Content Delivery Network allows us to place your images in multiple locations on the internet whilst keeping them all up to date, so that when a visitor views your website they get the fastest load speeds possible. When someone views a list of products on your eCommerce site, the servers need to send each image across to the user’s browser, which takes processor cycles. If the images are coming from many servers, more of them can be delivered at once, letting the main processors get on with the rest of the page display. I’ll be posting more information on how this works over the next couple of weeks; there’s nothing you need to do however since we’re doing everything automatically behind the scenes.

Custom Quote and Invoice headers

You can choose your own column headers on Quotes and Invoices, on a per template basis, which means that you can have some quotes with discount, some quotes without, packing notes with barcodes, foreign language invoices and so on. Pretty powerful stuff. Read more about setting up custom columns.

Custom column configuration on templates

Custom column configuration on templates

Easy access to accurate cost of sale information

We’ve added a new tab to the order edit screen that shows the cost information. This means that you can negotiate right down to the wire whilst still on the phone to a customer to ensure you clinch the deal. It’s the same data that shows on your sales listing screen in the “profit at a glance” section. You need to turn it on at Setup : Options : Sales.

Cost prices tab on order edit screen

Cost prices tab on order edit screen

New report for sending to warehouse / suppliers

There’s a new Purchase Order (Detailed) report which also includes information from the originating sale, if the PO has been cloned from a sale. This is designed so that you can export your drop-ship Purchase Orders to Excel with full product and delivery information.

Other good stuff

You can now filter your sales by delivery country from the “advanced options” section.

If you’re dealing with large Sales Orders and Purchase Orders, it’s nice to be able to find the item quickly. In addition to supporting custom row sorting (drag-and-drop), we also support sorting by SKU, Time added, Name or Price; which works both in the order edit screen and on any paperwork that you produce from the order. Choose your sorting method at Setup : Options : Sales.

Your website will show a “trial mode” banner along the top until you set the domain as “live”. You’ll need to request a go-live from our support team so that we can set up the domain name on our servers. Some of you may have noticed that you can also edit some of the website content from the website itself; if you log in as a staff member then you can edit snippets and pages by hovering over them and clicking the pencil icon; more about this soon.

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Brightpearl – putting more information at your fingertips Posted on March 1st, 2011 by Chris Tanner

This week we’re rolling out a new release which contains a couple of really handy features to make your order processing better. I’d also like to give a warm welcome to Ananth and Penny; Ananth is joining us in the product management team and will be taking a good look at the whole system from end to end to see where we can make it easier and faster to use as well as adding the right features at the right time. As always, if you want to get involved with testing out new ideas before they go live, fire an email to design@brightpearl.com and we’ll keep you in the loop. Penny is joining us to pick up the marketing baton; you’ll be seeing her on Twitter (@brightpearlhq), our Facebook page and in our newsletters.

Stock levels at-a-glance with automated order row colouring

Coloured rows for easy stock control

Coloured rows for easy stock control

When you’re on the phone to a customer, building an order, it’s really handy to see how much you have in stock of any particular item. What’s really needed however is the answer to the question; “Have I got enough for this customer’s order?” When you’re working in a sales order, you no longer need to run through the list of items, check how many are in stock, see how many the customer wants and then come up with the answer; the rows in the order automatically turn pink or green depending on whether there’s enough in stock or not.

The same goes for Purchase Orders; you want to see whether all items have been received, and quickly identify those items that have not yet been received. “All ok” = green, and “still to receive” = pink. Simple, yet very handy!

Support for percentage discounts

Percentage discounting

Percentage discounting

Brightpearl supports powerful multi-price list customer and supplier pricing, but there’s always the situation where you might want to give a particular customer (or supplier) a slight variation across every item on a regular price list. A typical example may be a 10% student discount off a Retail price list. These discounts apply automatically when the customer logs into your eCommerce store; and now they also apply when adding items to an order in the back-office!

If you want to override the customer discount, you can. You can also choose to show the discount on quotes and invoices to show what a very special merchant you are. We’ve put a video together to show you how the discounting works; watch the video here.

Other updates

We’ve also been chasing some gremlins out of the system, the full release notes are available over here on our forums. As well as all this, we’ve been building up a new European data centre using the latest version of PHP which contains a number of improvements, not least to the speed of the system. We’ve squirted a little magic juice into the new data centre which should mean that it will be running significantly faster than the existing infrastructure. We’re planning to migrate all our UK users over to the new data centre over the next month or so. Our US users are also getting some of the magic juice at the same time. You won’t have to do anything at all; like everything else we’re doing, it’s included in the monthly subscription!

That’s all for now, catch you next time …

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

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