One of the best things about web based software is that we can listen to what users need, and react faster than traditional installed systems. Currently we’re releasing improvements about once every 3 months (see the recent post about the upcoming mods).

To have your say, click Help : Feedback from within your Pearl account to reach our Uservoice forums where you can suggest and vote on what you’d like to see.

Pearl on Uservoice

We’ve updated our uploader script – for your product and template images, website CSS files and media content.

If you don’t run your website in Pearl yet, have a look at the features here. We do everything from B2B portals through to event booking and ecommerce.

Upload images and CSS files

Cloud Computing (also known as Software as a Service) has heaps of benefits, one of which is cost. There is no need to buy expensive software or worry about keeping up to date with the latest version upgrades. All you need is a computer (PC or Mac), a web browser and an internet connection. There is nothing to install and you can be started in minutes.

Last week we launched a series of free online web seminars nicknamed the Pearl “Wednesday Webinar“.  They run at 11:00 (BST British Summer Time) every Wednesday and are aimed to give business owners/managers the chance to find out how cloud computing can save them time and money. The first one was a hit – read the reviews here – so make sure you see our events calendar to see what topics we are covering in the coming weeks.

To join the webinar, all you need to do is register, grab a coffee and sit back.

This week we are looking at how to take complete control over your products, purchasing & stock… all in the same system as you handle E-commerce, till-point and telephone sales.

Traditionally, a system that does all this would normally cost a small fortune. Cloud technology allows us to provide small businesses with the systems to compete with their bigger competitors and make a name for themselves. After all, it was during previous downturns that several household names appeared…

• Ryanair bought a fleet of jets during an aviation downturn.
• Apple Computers demonstrated to the world that it can innovate during downturn when it launched its iPod in 2002.
• Google who introduced cost-per-click (CPC) advertising in 2001

During tough times, most companies may stifle the innovation culture, but each of these successful companies adopted a ‘different’ approach.

There are a number of upcoming changes in the next release of Pearl. Have a read through the following topics. All the changes have already been made to the demo accounts at http://demo.thisispearl.com/admin so that you can have a play before they are rolled onto all client accounts on the evening of 16th July.

Accounting is no longer a licence

Access to the accounting areas of Pearl is no longer handled by a “licence”. You can allow or deny access to certain staff using the permissions screen – at Setup:Staff and permissions.

New rounding methods, and the new order edit screen

The new sales and purchase order screen

Many of our clients sell their products and services to both the end user at retail price, including tax, and trade/wholesale customers, excluding tax. This can often be a bit of a nightmare, due to differences in the way that rounding needs to occur when you’re showing row-by-row net or gross totals on an invoice. We’ve now given you the choice of setting any of your price lists to be “including tax” – which means that:

1. Website browsers using this price list will see prices inc tax (as before)
2. Sales orders viewed in the admin screens will show item and row totals including tax
3. Prices edited on products for these price lists will be including tax

Wherever you see an underlined price, remember it’s including tax. You can set up your price lists at Products:Setup:Price lists … if you’re on Pearl Express then you can’t change the default price lists.

New reports

We’ve listened to feedback from you all and have been working hard on a new report centre. The main differences are behind the scenes, which will allow us to load more reports on much more easily than before. Right now though, you have the ability to export all the new reports straight to Excel, or to a smart PDF. Most of the reports currently loaded are for accounting, and we’ll be adding more over the next few weeks.

Dashboard updates

Draggable configurable dashboards

We’re adding more configuration options to the dashboards – you can now choose which widgets appear on each dashboard, where they are positioned and also some paramters within them – such as timeframe and a choice of layers.

Improved handling of settlement discounts

We’ve introduced some new fields to the sales order and purchase order screens that allow to you manage settlement discounts and keep the reduced VAT amounts correct. If you offer settlement discount to customers or take settlement from suppliers then you should be calculating the VAT on the discounted Net total – which Pearl now handles with the on-screen maths.

Enter and clear quick invoices in one step

Handy. We’ve added a “clear down” feature to the bottom of the Accounts quick invoice screens so that you don’t have to find the invoice and allocate payment against it later. It’s a small feature, but awesome for saving you time when you’re entering lots of invoices.

The CRM Timeline

This is a really handy new feature. We’ve removed the tickets and orders tab from within the contact edit screen, and have created a new page called the Timeline. Here you can see everything going on with a contact (or their entire company) in one place.

Read more about it here

Contact search results cleaner, simpler and more powerful

You’ll notice that when you log in the familiar “menu” option at the right hand side of the screen has gone. You now need to click the company name to get all your actions for the contact – which is loaded on-demand, meaning that we can put more in it and the rest of the page will load faster.

CRM actions pop-out menu

New website features – URLs

We’ve altered the way in which URLs are presented on your website and sitemaps. Click here to read the full post.

Cost of Sales, Drop-ship Purchase Orders and stock

We’ve improved the way that Cost of Sales is handled. Each product can now have it’s own stock code (1000 to 1199) as well as it’s own cost of sales code (5000to 5999). Note that wherever you choose to ship a Purchase Order direct to customer, then it will be marked as “drop ship” – which means that no stock needs to be received, and items on that purchase order will not be included in “on order” figures.

Read all about Cost of Sales here

Bank reconciliation

Transactions are now marked as reconciled as soon as you save them in the statement. Closing the statement (previously “reconciling“) will simply mark everything as closed off. There is a bank reconciliation report (visit this from the bank accounts screen if you have unreconciled transactions) – and also an warning of unreconciled transactions in a closed statement date range, on the statements list screen.

I’ve had an interesting chat with one of our new clients that is moving their business across to Pearl today. They have 7 staff, about 4,000 contacts in Highrise, a load of accounting data in Sage, GoogleCalendar for diary management and yet other systems for billing, invoicing and quotes.

We’ve got the main migration work still to do, but importing their contacts from the Highrise export has been easy using our Highrise import tool. Simply export to Excel CSV option from within your Highrise account, open up your Pearl import screens and drop them in!

It's dead easy.

Pearl has skipped 120 duplicate contacts for this user, which is a step towards a clean database, but it’s apparent that the data coming out of Highrise is far from clean.

URLs allowed in telephone fields, line breaks in city names and so on, which surprises me a little. These guys have been around long enough and have enough clients to know the value of a clean database. In fact the “Getting real” book by 37 signals is on my recommended reads list – it’s good stuff.

The CRM dashboard

I ran a demo today and it was clear that we’re going to be making this company waaay more efficient. Everything all in the same place – faster slicker smoother easier – all leading to a better bottom line. They’ve mentioned that using Highrise has been a superb introduction to CRM, but have reached a ceiling where they can’t do enough with it. Tags for everything gets a little inelegant, for example. A move to statuses, lead sources, custom fields, and an integrated pipeline with dashboard level reporting is going to be great.

Bring it on!