Brightpearl Blog

Exciting Times for Brightpearl Users Posted on February 2nd, 2012 by Chris Tanner

Wow, what an exciting time for Brightpearl users! There’s something big on the horizon for next week. I can’t give you all the details just yet (read more here), but I do want to let you know about all the other excellent features coming to a screen near you soon.

Rather unusually for us, we’ve not pushed out a public release in over 6 weeks, which means that release 4.15 is jam-packed. The top level summary is below, but I’d recommend you have a good look through the full release notes.

Variant / options management

Most of you are dealing with hundreds of product lines each day, and in many cases this involves clothing or footwear; products that typically have many sizes and colours. Brightpearl handles inventory of the individual items well; and now we’ve made it even easier to work with options and variants. The crux of the new variants management is the “size/colour matrix” – although not restricted to sizes and colours at all. In fact you can have any attributes under the sun, and even up to four within one matrix. Navigate around the grid using arrow keys, add items to orders using the grid layout, lookup inventory using the grid to quickly see what other colours and sizes you have in stock… the list goes on. Have a look at the video here for a full overview – and have a look at the release notes for information around how we’ve upgraded your data to match the new system.

Product type

You can now specify the type of product you’re working with. At the moment this is useful for reports, and for streamlining the options management process. We’ll soon be adding more capabilities into the “product type” concept. Watch this space!

Faster interface

Every single release, we introduce something to speed up the system. Along with a number of deeper architectural changes that you don’t see, this release we’ve updated almost all the icons in the app to something called “sprites”. In essence, this means that your browser doesn’t need to be communicating with the Brightpearl servers more than is absolutely necessary.

Point of Sale

The Brightpearl EPOS module is going from strength to strength – and this release we introduce the ability to take deposits for a sale, look up products at the till (or on your store iPad) without needing a sale, and a way to quickly switch between staff simply by typing in a new PIN.

So – have a good read through the full release notes. When can you get all this goodness? We’ll be updating all accounts starting from the 8th Feb. We’ve already upgraded many of our user-panel; if you’d like to be part of the early takers, provide feedback on designs and features, then pop us an email: design@brightpearl.com

Chris

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Customer Focus: Lahloo Tea – EPOS for multichannel retail and wholesale Posted on January 23rd, 2012 by Penny Edwards

We recently caught up with Kate Gover managing director of Lahloo Tea, who uses Brightpearl to manage her small retail and wholesale business. Utilising Brightpearl’s powerful multichannel capabilities to sell in-store in their tea room, online on their website as well as to wholesale and trade customers, she talks to us about how Brightpearl helps them to overcome the seemingly impossible challenge of tying all these channels together. Take a look at the video below to get the full story on how Brightpearl helps Lahloo to manage their business better.

Video transcript

I started Lahloo Tea three and a half years ago. I spent most of my life disliking tea and still don’t really like normal – what people call ‘normal tea’. It wasn’t until about 10 years ago that I tasted a japanese green tea and was just blown away by the delicate flavour and also how much flavour there was, and it was really that that took me on this kind of random obsession with hunting out tea that I really liked.

For the first year it was predominantly farmers markets, food festivals and events like that, but with demand from trade customers we realised that there was an opportunity, and so we launched both that side of the business as well as an online shop two and a half years ago. The latest development in October 2011 was we opened our first store and tea rooms.

Brightpearl’s really helpful in integrating online, wholesale, trade, retail, the cafe, and tying it altogether would seem like it would be almost impossible. It’s rare to find an EPOS system that works with a wholesale system, so being able to use Brightpearl for every bit of it means that at any given time if we’re out of stock of a product, for example, it can’t be sold in the shop, or online, or to a wholesale customer. So from a customer service point of view, it’s brilliant.

Being able to just log on and tap in and see when that customer last placed an order, or was last invoiced, or if they haven’t paid is really important. It just facilitates and also enables us to keep in touch with customers much better.

It’s really exciting!

Do you have a retail or wholesale business? Check out how Brightpearl can integrate your systems and sales channels, from your stock control, EPOS, ecommerce, and more, to help you to become a truly multichannel business.

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Brightpearl December release Posted on December 1st, 2011 by Chris Tanner

This month we see a range of awesome updates to the Brightpearl system, covering performance improvements, bug fixes and new features. Brightpearl 4.10 will be deployed across all our data centres over the next few days.

As the Christmas rush approaches, usage of the system has sky rocketed. We’re now serving many tens of millions of page loads every month. Keeping your Brightpearl account fast and responsive is of utmost importance to us, and we are focussing development efforts appropriately. We have three full teams of developers; working on performance, application and integrations respectively; which allows us to keep new features coming and usability improving as well as working on the infrastructure that powers it all.

In the new year we’ll be launching eBay and Magento integrations – if you’re interested in either of these then please email us (design@brightpearl.com) and we’ll give you the scoop, and access to an early preview.

Product seasons

Spring turns to summer, summer to fall, fall to winter … and with the seasons come different ranges of products. If you’re dealing in apparel then you may be seeing thousands of new SKUs every year, which you want to keep in your system for historical reporting purposes. In fact any business whos product lines change will have a need to “archive” certain items when they are no longer available. This release of Brightpearl sees a handy feature called “seasons” which lets you filter and segment your database as well as report on previous season sales. For full information have a look at our documentation here.

Coupons, discounts and parking sales in Point-Of-Sale

Following feedback from a number of our EPOS users we’ve added a raft of new features to your point of sale software. We’ll be talking more about these shortly, so here’s just a summary.

Coupons now supported at point of sale

Create discount coupons and print barcodes onto marketing material which your customers can then redeem at checkout. Ideal for bringing in those extra sales before Christmas!

Park / hold sales for later

There are many occasions where you might want to hold a sale and then come back to it later; now you can! Not only does Point-of-sale in Brightpearl let you park sales, from the back office you can easily see which store has parked sales, who created them, when they were last updated, and even generate reports for stagnant parked sales that need to be removed. You can now also add a reference to each sale as you create it in order to distinguish between different sales for the walk-in anonymous customer.

Order based discounting

In addition to the row-based discounting, Point of Sale supports a discount across the whole order; this also respects the “customer discount” setting you may have added for a customer in the back office admin screens.

Product information at your fingertips

Just add an item to the sale and click the name to see image, description, current inventory levels across all your stores AND also when any new stock is due to arrive. Empower your salespeople!

Other features and fixes

Along with the above, we’ve also been super busy on the Magento and eBay integrations, bug fixes and other engineering work including a move towards full UTF-8 character encoding. Eh? UTF-what? UTF-8 is a different data storage mechanism from what we have used historically, and now is the time to bring everything up to date. Every cloud software company has to keep up with modern standards, and adopting UTF-8 across all of our interface and database tables means that we are now right at the leading edge. We’ll be able to support many more character sets (including Polish and other Eastern European languages), as well as interface more effectively with other software apps. Our engineers have spent a lot of time getting this right, and over the next few weeks we’ll be updating your databases. You don’t need to do anything; it’s all done automatically behind the scenes. Every now and then you’ll get a popup when you log in to let you know that we’re tackling more of your data set. Sexy? Not particularly, but it’s an awesome step forwards that I’m proud to be able to announce.

For a full run-down of what’s going into 4.10 – have a look at our release notes.

 

 

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An update to department management Posted on November 18th, 2011 by Chris Tanner

We’ve got some exciting new features being built at the moment, deep down in the Brightpearl development bunker; including the ability to connect your Brightpearl account to more sales channels automatically in order to synchronise products, inventory and orders. Channels including eBay, Magento and so on. In order for you to report and track sales from each of your “channels”, we need to let you work with channels within the system.

Now in many cases, Brightpearl users are already using “departments” to track sales revenue (and cost) across their different sales areas, so we made the decision to upgrade departments rather than complicate matters by introducing yet another set of options and filters for what’s essentially the same thing.

Over the next few weeks you’ll notice some changes to the way Brightpearl supports “departments”. If you use departments, then have a look at the updated documentation.

If you’re interested to know more about integration to eBay, Magento and other eCommerce stores, just email design@brightpearl.com

That’s all for now!

Chris

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What's in Pearl 1.86? Posted on April 13th, 2009 by Chris Tanner

Version 1.86, April 12th 2009

We’re charging on towards Pearl 2.0 … due to hit the virtual shelves on May the 1st. Everything is slotting into place nicely. The new user interface is really proving to be rather a hit, and we’re packing more features in while making it easier to use at the same time.  The biggest problem is that we may run out of 1.xx version numbers before we get to the start of May!

New payment plans
In a move towards easier billing, and a simpler growth for Pearl in the future, we have updated our payment plans (pricing structure). Most of our existing clients won’t see much of a difference, and in many cases your monthly fee now works out cheaper. 5 days before your next bill is due, a screen will pop open in your Pearl account offering you the option to confirm or change payment plans. If you have account terms with us you can put the bill on account, otherwise you will need to pop your credit card details into the screen before the next monthly bill is due. For more information on the new pricing structure, see here. The eagle eyed amongst you will notice that there is a FREE version. Sssh.

Web based accounting user interface from Pearl

Web based accounting from Pearl

Payment allocation screen
This screen in the accounting area will now prevent you from posting payments for invoices before the invoice date – which confuses the way that Pearl allocates invoices. To pre-pay an invoice, you should be using a “payment on account”.

Super administrator
You can set any of your staff to be “system administrators” – these people have access to change staff privileges, re-assign campaigns and affiliates once set, and generally have more administrative options. Visit Setup::Licences and Permissions to see who they are.

List contacts with no campaign or owner
There are now search options within the CRM to find those contacts that need to be assigned a campaign or an owner.

New PDF generator
You’ll all be glad to hear that we have ditched the previous company that was building your invoice and quote PDFs; we’ve installed our own top-of-the range PDF system onto one of our quieter servers. PDF generation is now reliable, faster, and also the page breaks are much neater. We have had to put one or two tiny style overrides in place (for example font size) – so if you notice that these are affecting your PDFs then get in touch with us via helpdesk.

Pearl CRM dashboard

Pearl CRM dashboard

New widget : _deliveryEmail_
If you want to include your customer’s delivery email address on a purchase order, for example.

Multi storefront product / domain managment
If you’re managing multiple storefronts from the one Pearl account with different products per domain, then you can now use the APM (Batch process) to add, remove and update domains in bulk.

Look-ahead search in Supplier and customer quick-invoice
You’ll notice if you’re using Pearl Accounts that the quick invoice screen now has a look-ahead search box – which means that it is now much easier to find your supplier (or customer). NOTE that the customer or supplier must be a primary contact to be found in the list.

PO status on fulfilment of sales order
If you are using order fulfilment, to create Purchase Orders for a sale, then you can see the status of each Purchase Order from within the “Cost” tab on the sales order. Handy.

Changes to Chart of Accounts
We have a number of users moving across to Pearl from other software such as MYOB, Sage and TAS books, and to make their life simpler, as well as the accountants that work with them, we are making a few changes to the way that you can configure your chart of accounts. Before version 1.86 you have the option of creating bank accounts only between codes 1200 and 1250. You can now assign any code between 1000 and 2000 to be a “bank account”. For those of you moving from an older version of Pearl, all your bank accounts will have been automatically assigned. We’re going to be introducing the ability to tie a Purchase code (5000s) to a matching sales code (4000s) for accurate cost-of-sales analysis in the near future.

Credit notes
Pearl has a new template – “Credit note” – this is used in place of the “Invoice” template to create PDFs where the value of a sales order is less than zero. Your credit note template has been created automatically from your Invoice template. Edit it if you like in the Setup area.

Email marketing
We’re nearly there … mass email marketing is disabled in this version as we put in the final tweaks and tests. We plan to have it rolled out by the end of this week, which will be Pearl version 1.88 or 1.89.

Secondary reference now available for Purchase Orders
The “customer reference” field in the “other” tab in orders was previously only available for Sales. It’s now available for Purchase Orders too – don’t forget you can type this reference into the orders quick search box to find the order too.

Purchase Orders attach as PDF
When emailing a PO out to your supplier, Pearl will now save a copy on the order in the attachments tab.

Web based EPOS

Web based EPOS

EPOS V2
The second version of the EPOS screen has now been launched – including the following updates:

  • Fewer clicks to create an order
  • Ability to require staff to log in with a PIN number rather than select from a menu
  • 60 second time-out: No need to re-identify yourself for each sale if it’s busy at the till
  • Customer quick-add is easier and more intuitive

We will be adding some more features to EPOS over the next week, too.

Accounting data import
You can now import a whole set of accounts into Pearl from Sage, TAS and MYOB, including Chart of Accounts, Trial Balance, Debtors and Creditors. This feature is available until you have entered 10 transactions into the accounting system. We’ll be running a full press release on this one soon – but if you need it nownow, then get in touch.

Secure Trading credit card payment console
This is a pretty big feature release – and we’ll also run a specific release on this one. It gives you the ability to take credit card payment directly from within your Pearl screens … the payment turns up in your bank account a few days later! Fees are competitive, and Secure Trading offer an excellent hand-holding setup service for new users. To see it in action, set a sale to payment method “Secure Trading”, save and use the “take payment” link.

… more coming soon!

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