So, we’ve been looking at what’s been good and what’s not so good in Pearl and have been busy … Pearl Office is a new Pay Plan that replaces Pearl Starter, and is designed to be better suited to companies that don’t have any stock control needs. Office costs £20 per concurrent user per month, a total snip for a completely integrated CRM and accounting solution.

There’s a full list of extra features and changes at the bottom of this post. Want it sooner? Just send us an email and we’ll upgrade your account ahead of the crowd.

Full screen charts

Many of the dashboard widgets can get a bit crowded when you set them up to show a lot of stuff, so we’ve given you the option to view them in full screen mode. Click the grey link underneath the widget.

Project costing at all Pay Plans above Express

Now this is a really nice one. We’d been toying with the idea of bringing some of the top end project management tools into the rest of Pearl, and for starters we’ve let you choose from a list of projects when you create quotes, sales and accounting transactions, at every pay plan above Express.

To set up your projects, go to the accounting zone and click “setup->projects”.  Only open projects are shown in the drop down menus. You can pull up a full profit and loss report for projects, using the filters in the report centre.

Overhauled Email Marketing, with new templates

Long overdue, we’ve put a lot of effort into making the MailChimp email marketing integration neater and tighter. In addition to the open and bounce reporting we announced in September, you can now segment your lists using tags.

The whole process of sending a new campaign is a lot simpler too.

If you use MailChimp, you really need to read the updated documentation here.

Simple quotes and Estimates

Many of you don’t need full-blown stock control and order processing, so we’ve created a much lighter, simpler screen for service based companies.

Create, send and invoice quotes really quickly and easily.

Click here for a video overview

Managing your funnel : Contact Pipeline Stages

We have introduced 5 stages through which all contact leads will flow. This is in addition to the familiar contact “status”.

Suspect – Prospect – Lead – Customer – Failed

You can put all your statuses into one of these 5 stages, to make reporting simpler. Every time that a contact changes status, Pearl tracks this change. A number of reports are in progress that allow you to see the trending as contacts move down your sales funnel, and also reports that show you where on the funnel you are getting the most drop-off. We’ve been tracking all this data for you from day 1, so that soon everything will come burning out in full colour!

And also in the CRM space…

• You can now choose from the “email 2″ and “email 3″ as your from email address when sending out emails from the popup window. Edit yourself as a staff member and add them in. Very handy.
• Choose a short 11-character “from name” when sending SMS messages. Your company name is used and truncated to 11 characters otherwise.
• Marketing “lead sources” are now managed in the report centre, in conjunction with a popup edit screen… and remember if it’s in the report centre you can export to Excel or PDF too.

Forecast your upcoming revenue

We’ve got a great new widget in the Sales area where you can see at a glance what you’ve got due from customers in the next few months. This uses the “weighting” figure that you can edit on sales and orders:

In the Accounting …

• Upload OFX files from your online banking. No need to hassle with Excel any more – just wham bam and all your transactions are in Pearl, ready to be matched or quickly added to your accounts.

We’ve integrated with CreditCall for back-office credit card processing as well as SecureTrading. CreditCall do a great deal for just £30 a month which includes up to 300 transactions. One of the nicest things about the Creditcall integration is the ability to store the card information within the system to allow you to reprocess sales again without needing to capture card details a second time. This is how simple it is within Pearl:

Multi-stage payments now fully supported

Perhaps the biggest step forwards for many users is the ability for Pearl to handle multi stage payments, before and after the sale is invoiced. Whereas before you used to have to allocate payment to an invoice only after it had been raised, you can now record entries in your accounts as a Sales Receipt for an order or quote, at any date in time, with or without a matching invoice. As soon as the sale is invoiced, Pearl tidies up and allocates the prepayments to the correct invoice reference.

Full payment history is shown inline withe the sale status notes:

You’ve probably spotted the new buttons creeping in too. They will be spreading gradually around the system, as we can’t quite stretch to the man-hours required to blitz it in one go. The idea to to clean things up, make the UI nicer and also give us powerful features such as the hover-over “more” button in the sales quote screen:

Expense management is just around the corner

Not ready quite yet, but as a taster, here’s what it’s going to look like.