Since the last update
The big thing at the moment is the Rails 4 system upgrade and we are fairly confident that we will have all tests passed this month. It has taken a few months to get everything working on the new platform, but has been a lot faster than the last upgrade (r2 > r3) which took a year! Moving to R4 keeps us current and gives us access to exciting new technologies that will improve scalability, performance and functionality. Over and above this, system stability (which is very good at the moment), bug fixes and small improvements are what we are focusing on.
New Features
- A separate lay-by account schedule has been added to make it easier to find and add payments to lay-bys. Accounts > Aged Receivables > Lay-by Schedule (See Video 1:26).
- Setup wizard.
- Better support for Back to School processes has been added to the Backoffice.
Improvements
- Accounts
- The default account view has returned to 2 months and there is a ‘View Open Items’ tick option.
- Agency
- The Agency change list is now region specific as Agency is specific to each country. (Call each other if there is a difference of opinion on who an Agency should be for a given publisher).
- Email Statement
- The email statement now has a Banner and Customer Details are included.
- Inwards goods
- Amalgamated Publisher and Imprint in Inwards, like we have done in PO Search to give the Title more space.
- New Layout
- Customer facing invoices/accounts have been added to the new layout. This enables customers to see purchase history and account balances on your website.
- Ordering
- Add shortcuts after ordering to enable you to jump to all of the Supplier Carts or the Customer Order or Print Receipts.
- POS
- When staff select Account Sale & Special Order the POS no longer switches automatically to Cash Sale.
- Purchasing
- Extra sorts have been added to the Purchase Order search page and the PO cart. Title, price, availability and all time sales are now sortable.
- SEO
- Further changes to Google Analytics as part of an ongoing quest to find issues and grow online sales.
- Staff List
- When new sites are setup the business was being put into the staff list, we have stopped this.
- Title Page
- Changed the reference for ISBN to enable us to upload ONIX from TitlePage.
- Website
- Further optimisations to increase page speed.
Bug Fixes, Housekeeping and System Administration
- See www.twitter.com/circlesupport for all changes including bug fixes.
Should be completed in the coming month:
- Ability to pay invoices with Cr notes
Things we are working on that are likely to take longer:
- Ability to self-update prices and stock using ONIX and CSV
- Rails 4 upgrade
New things we want to make a start on:
- New billing system
- Customer order picking revamp
- Further SEO and website performance monitoring
Beyond the next month:
- New central site for groups using new Java Script (Vuejs) technology that will eventually turn into a new Backoffice for stores