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.