A brave new world of retailing is upon us and things have moved very quickly in Motorcycle retail in the past year.  Many dealers are now aggressively pursuing online shopping solutions.  Some suppliers are mandating utilising of their own web solutions.  Seems like everyone is getting on the band wagon.

C9 has been working away on aligning our technology to help fulfil this need for over 12 months now.  We are positioning with a comprehensive approach that will give you peace of mind that your strategy for embracing Internet retailing will not be hindered by technology limitations stemming from your dealer system.  C9 has expanded to embrace 'Cloud' capability, and done so in such a way that we can offer simple to understand solutions that have sensible pricing.  Yet we have not compromised flexibility or capability in doing so.  Nor are we compromising our core business focus; building and expanding Australia's best Motorcycle DMS.

The broad goals and outcomes of our strategy is that we can offer:

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Over the weekend we have upgraded our server infrastructure into order to facilitate rapidly growing demand for hosting. We now have 10 times the storage capacity and significantly improved performance available for serving web pages etc.

Almost all services are now migrated.  Email and domain names will migrate over the next few days.

We will be decommissioning our backup server in the united states; because of cost practicalities it is unable to gracefully scale up to larger volumes at a reasonable price.  To compensate for this we have two additional backup services in place:

• New server infrastructure uses mirrored RAID
• New server infrastructure uses CDP technology (continuous data protection) to replicate to a physically separate backup store.

So backup profile is as follows:

• Total unique near realtime data copies:  4
• Total unique disaster recovery copies: 2

All our primary web service infrastructure is provided by an Aussie company: web 24.  I recommend them highly, professional, helpful and competent.

• Bugfix with messenger sending SMS and email.  C9 would report that message was not sent.  Messages were being sent but c9 was not recognizing this. Fixed now.

Includes database changes. System will force you to log all terminals out as part of upgrade

• Franchise - track order types supported by franchise. i.e. most Honda dealers these days do not bother with daily orders.  Configured via utilities, add/edit franchise. Setup on a per franchise basis.
• Print barcodes, UI tweak after selecting franchise
• Online stock taking support. Stock take using your mobile phone or tablet device.  New remote online stock taking feature requires upgrade to this version of c9 in order for it to work (you also require online backup service to be installed)
• To access this feature, goto http://c8software.com.au/remote/
• Bug in Point of sale : if you complete a transaction that takes tendered amount  (i.e. receipt txn), but back out at the last minute and instead change the sale to one that does not take tendered amount (i.e. invoice), the system would still record tender amount.  System was not resetting tender value in such circumstances.  In the case of switching to an invoice, it would record payment against the account. Payment methods (i.e. cash/EFT/Cheque) would be reset although, so the tender amount would not record on the cash till report; the recorded payment would effectively be a No Cash payment.  This defect in terms of switching from receipt to invoice would only manifest itself on sites where customers had configured c9 so that they tendered receipts but not tender invoices. If tender invoices was also set, then c9 would indeed correctly reset tender amount in these circumstances.
• Spares Profit and Profit Summary mismatch resolved
• Profit summary was not utilising recent additions of new discounting methods and was miscalculating discount offset for such sales
• Both reports did not handle situation where cost price is recorded at 0.00 same way. c9 assumes this is an error and it picks a different cost price.  Consolidated on using current daily buy price for this purpose
• Modified way workshop delivered by is stored in the database internally.  Was not causing any functional problems, but strictly speaking was incorrect.

• Stock additional groups : provide ability to set this when adding a new part into stock

• Usability Tweaks to recently added find part function.
• Export dead stock, consider parts not sold since a given date to be dead. Same as the report itself
• View account - show summary information on parts on order; retail value of parts, less anticipated discount to be awarded; deposits on invoice held etc.

This version requires database updates and will force you to log all terminals out as part of upgrade

• Point of sale : F2 part lookup completely redesigned to be more powerful and flexible.
• Stock parts : make ability to organise parts into 'additional groups' more prominent on F6 modify part.  Above F2 changes permit filtering based on these additional groups
• Visual tweak to displaying of dates in modify workshop job; so date can completely fit in the visible space in the field

• Fix layout of items on pickup job. Some graphics controls were overlapping others
• Under some rare circumstances, receive order would misprint number of parts required for a given invoice
• modify workshop spares item. Allow user to override spares line item price. Recent changes to make adjusting qty automatically update line item price inadvertently damaged this facility
• Print customer code on units and spares invoice (already printed on workshop invoice)
• Print received barcodes, flush any existing items on barcode list first

• Web and Email
• Fixed anti-aliasing method used for rescaled images in HTML emails and web content. Look much nicer now.
• Improved ability to import HTML source from other HTML generators for HTML bulk email
• Bulk Email : include ability to attach files
• Bug fixes
• Adjust qty of spares items on workshop job. Does not update price of the line item. Now fixed.
• Pass workshop costs onto unit sale;  should not work for deleted jobs.
• Workshop dashboard would allow you to 'modify' a job even if no job was selected. Fixed
• Auto restart of messenger can crash C9 (rare situation, only affects Bolton's because they run 3 separate copies of c9 simultaneously).
• Tweaks
• Select part from master file franchise. Display stock description over price file descrption. Also optimised performance of the list.

• Messenger network connect is now more resilient in the face of intermittent network connectivity
• Printing large notes such as workshop description on workshop invoice. If the length of the notes exceeded a single page, then c9 would previously only print first page of notes.  New version i more intelligent and is able to break up notes across multiple pages. The change also permits printing of notes where there is substantial space on a page, but not quite enough to print the entire notes. It will also break notes into multiple chunks in such cases
• Miner : memorize list widths and use adjusted widths when printing miner reports
• HTML mail merge:  size limit was too small. Increase capacity for HTML emails by x8
• Javaw.exe is still running errors : recent update of java for windows would mean c9 would 'hang' during windows shutdown on some computers.  Added a workaround.