• Some more obscure GL related failures, with unit deals
  • Was not handling convert deal to sale using deposit on customer account.  Fixed
  • Was not using correct GL code when converting deal to sale and using external unit deposit. Fixed
• Manual backups were complaining about sequences on newly added journal tables

A number of bug fixes related to recent release

• General Ledger fixes
  • Was failing to write no cash collected type sales under some circumstances now.
  • Following invoice scenario would not write/save.  Refunded spares + an order + deposits on order where total deposited > refund
  • Changing instrument on existing activity record
  • Taking payment on previous no cash collected activity item
• Very serious problem with receive order if you select to receive an order with no parts (i.e. freight only) the system would potentially SMS a huge number of unrelated customers based on parts ordered years previously.

• Receive order. Recent changes affected how receive backorder would work. Resulting report would include absolutely everything on back order, where previously c9 would only list things where there has been an actual notable change.  Reverted to prior behaviour.  (Note : this did not impact sms/email notifications to customers, merely the receive report, so was merely wasting paper and wasting records in the database)
• Import KTM fiche : allow window to be resized so you can see long description items
• General Ledger bugfix on pickup workshop job being partially paid for using  deposit on customer record

Requires database changes. You will need to log all terminals out during upgrade

This version includes two major additions.

General Ledger

C9 is now backed with an internal general ledger.  The Ledger only covers sales related items at this time. CoGs is mostly complete except for spares CoGs (to be added at a later date).

This change will hopefully make your accountants jobs much simpler through newly included ledger reports.  Making it easier to extract information on sales, GST inputs and liabilities, assets and performing tasks such as reconciling income, cash assets etc.  The Ledger stuff is completely invisible, nothing has been changed in how c9 behaves so for users of c9 they don't need to worry about the ledger or need to learn how to work with it. Under Business is a new section General Ledger which provides all this info.  Note that this change is not retrospective, only sales made after upgrade will appear in the GL.

The chart of accounts is fairly straight forward. For specific questions from accountants about GL structure in c9, contact c9 support.

Selling ordered parts before receiving them into c9

C9 now includes the ability to sell a part put on order before you actually receive it into c9.  Consider, the courier has just dropped off a stack of parts, and one of your customers has at the same time come into pickup some of those parts. Previously c9 would not let you do this until you receive these parts in.

Some dealers have requested c9 include negative qty on hand, we have stridently refused to do this because we believe this 'solution' doesn't model the business problem correctly and creates more problems than it solves. -ve quantities is a mainframe 1980's approach to this problem; modern IT solutions should and can do much better than this!  The problem with -ve is that you don't know why it is negative, how that -ve figure is mixed with actual stocked items and items supplied but not received, and quickly stock levels become a complete mess, we know this from converting other dealer systems to c9 which permit -ves.  This is especially prevalent for shops where inventory management discipline is poor where orders are not received promptly, in such environments, providing tools that create greater opportunity for inventory tracking errors can only increase inventory tracking woes.

Our solution flags parts on order as having being supplied already. So there is a carefully tracked and itemised list of items supplied before being received.  You still need to receive orders into c9, but c9 knows which ones have already been provided and which ones should stil physically be present.  A number of screens and reports around ordering have changed to display quantities already handled.

The solution allows you to sell parts ordered for stock in this way too, as well as supply parts destined for customer prior to receiving the order.

In point of sale, you keyin a part to supply. Normal parts already on order screen appears, pick the customer.  It will import order with part quantities preset to what c9 thinks has been supplied. You can then modify quantities to force supply the item, c9 will interprete  this to mean that parts have physically arrived but not yet received and will flag items on your order book accordingly.

For parts ordered for stock, on forget/order/sell screen if you pick sell c9 will ask you if you are supplying from parts on order but not yet received into c9 and will take appropriate action.

Tweaks to edit web content for image gallery.

• Preset selection on first gallery item when editing
• Increase size of allowed URLs/hyperlinks

Bugfix : DB scanner on stock and master broken by recent changes to improve text based searching/indexing of these tables.  Functionality in scanner now restored.

• Local backup : do not backup images sourced from supplier websites as these can be readily reconstructed
• Import parts images
  • Do not import images which cannot be reprocessed/resized, such as exotically encoded, CYMK type images.
  • Improve image renaming logic to filter out non ascii and better handle URL encoding
• Website mapping : only create structure based on stocked items was busted. Now fixed

Includes database changes. You will need to log c9 out during upgrade

• Added notion of locations into c9.  Very early stages for this functionality.  Can be used to track locations of jobs.
  • Different terminals can be configured with different locations via Setup -> General
  • When creating a job you can set a location. Defaults to terminal location
  • Can modify location
  • In main workshop job screen you can filter jobs by location. either show all jobs or show only jobs that below to a specified location
• Paypal integration : on select instrument structure it so user has to work hard to select a payment method other than paypal, it is still possible, incase it is ever needed but requires user to unlock other options
• Unit invoice : fit more on a single page to minimise page overflow
• New workshop report : todays jobs. Shows jobs expected to be received or jobs starting today
• Create customer from web order.  Now sets customer contact correctly
• Browse fiche : behaviour of preset franchise on browse diagram was a bit haywire. Hopefully new logic is both intuitive and useful

Fiddling around with Raspberry Pi for something unrelated to c9, I put c9 onto the Raspberry Pi just to see how it would go.

C9, which is based on Java will run on pretty much anything. Although all bike shops run windows, c9 is equally at home on Mac or Linux.  All software development done within c9 is on linux workstations actually.  C9's database, PostgreSQL is also able to run on most anything too.

So $50 computer the size of a wallet, running linux and drawing less than 2 Watts.  Got c9 up and running in about 30 minutes.  Doesn't run terribly fast compared to a basic office workstation (Key problem is SQL databases are not at all optimised to run off SD cards, an external SSD or HDD would be the go here, or maybe something better than the cheapest SD card in the shop). Still pretty cool I think.

Bugfix tweak with paypal integration. Was not detecting parts still on order correctly for closing out paypal based sales with parts on order.

Added new system monitor/reminders for workshop

• When jobs in progress are still inprogress after their promise date
• When jobs scheduled to be received have not yet been received
• For jobs with parts on order where parts are on order for longer than X # of days

4.476 : a bugfix tweak with importing parts images where part image filename contained spaces.

Includes database changes. You need to log all terminals out during upgrade

• Receive stock : check invoice number as soon as it is typed in for duplicates. Not when user presses F10 continue
• Internal tweaks to how price file items are mapped onto websites (no functional change)
• Magican backorder availability : remember if a magician category is cancelled and stop nagging user everytime try to lookup a part of that same franchise
• Browse active orders : show order item created date, not created order date. Also optimised things so it runs really quickly, even when scanning historical data.
• Work on price files
  • Track/Use pack qty data
  • Track attributes
  • Greatly Improved fast search options. See a bit more below
  • Tracking attributes on price files, things like size/colour etc. Importable from generic price files.
• Web image/meta data import
  • import from KTM Dealer Net. Also import Dealer Net's web order descriptions too
  • Import attributes from Monza/Cassons/Mcleods
• Mapping parts onto website - provide tools to quickly map a structure and parts onto a website based on part attributes
  • Create structure based on part attributes. i.e. automatically create menu tree for type, brand for say, Monza
  • Map parts onto that structure.

Improved text search.

In previous versions of c9, if you searched for '300/275/21' , usually would return nothing.  Text search indexing is now optimised to better handle descriptions we get in price file so rapid searches like this are now possible:

Bonus: the order you type it in doesn't matter. '300/275/21' is the same as '21/300/275' is the same as '300 275 21'.