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 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

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

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!