C9 SMS delivery has now fully transitioned to a new SMS gateway provider.  Based on testing and trialing for the past month we expect SMS notification reliability to me substantially improved.

• Some tweaks to view order that should hopefully suppress reget failed error messages one dealer is getting when deleting parts off an order
• Point of Sale Complete profit summary : did not work correctly for quotes which involve parts that would normally need to be ordered. Now fixed to cope with this scenario
• Franchise markups : permit -ve markups
• Added support for MOTO transactions to PC-EFTPOS
• Web orders will automatically preset card details into MOTO option in PC-EFTPOS
• MinQty Re-order : check franchise order configuration: if franchise only permits stock orders then make sure minqty reorder goes onto the stock order

Fixes and tweaks

• Honda inventory check stopped working because of changes Honda made to their website. Now working again.
• A number of changes to internal logic for handling PC-EFTPOS operations to make the interaction with PC-EFTPOS more resilient.  It appears that sometimes PC-EFTPOS closes the link C9 establishes to it for no apparent reason.  Changes are concerned with ensuring that c9 is better able to cope with these situations
• On one dealer for some reason line margin was calculating line margin on formula costs (stamp duty) when it never should do any such thing. Added changes to c9 to explicitly prevent this from happening.

• New setup option that can suppress opening order details window when adding a part to order onto point of sale.  The order details screen can instead be accessed by selecting the part and pressing F11 to allow you to manage the exceptions to default ordering rules.  The setup change allows you to revert to much older c9 point of sale behaviour in which is good for keyboard power users as it reduces key strokes on ordered parts.
• Spelling typo in newly designed payments screen
• Orderbook : was not rendered backorder flag correctly. Now fixed.

This release does not include any actual functional changes or fixes but it does fix a bug in the database upgrade scripts for upgrading to or past version 4.402 which would prevent the upgrade from completing and would mean c9 could not run.

If you are already running version 4.402 or later then this upgrade will do nothing for you.  If you have not yet upgraded v4.402 this update may affect you.  4.402 was a very complex update, probably the most complex to date where it reorganises customer account records to better separate debtor and depositor trial balances.    If there is any erroneous transaction records in the database which are dated before 1800 then the upgrade fails. This version of c9 deals with this possible situation.  Generally there should not be bad dates in c9 database like this and I am not aware of any way such data can get into latest version of c9 as c9 will not let yet input a date before 1800, though I have now seen it a couple of times now where there are dates in the database prior to 1800. To investigate further.  Possibly, most likely, database migration error from initial upgrade from c8 to c9 or when migrating data from non c9 systems for dealers switching to c9.

Based on analysis of online backup files (which most c9 users now subscribe to) I expect that this bug has and will only affect one c9 customer who we have helped fixed manually already.  This version has been created anyway for completeness and just in case, although unlikely, there is another c9 dealer out there who does not subscribe to online backup service who also may have bad dates in their transaction records.

We will be trialing a new SMS partner during the coming weeks.  C9's technical systems have now been modified so it can route SMS to two different providers. We will run them head to head and measure performance of them both.  There have been some lingering concerns that reliability of SMS delivery for our existing provider is not where it should be. This trial will allow us to see if this is indeed the case and if we can improve upon reliability.

It is expected that a percentage of SMS messages will fail : because of wrong/invalid number.  Also it is expected at a percentage of SMS will not be receipted because although the number is valid the phone is switched off or out of service range for an extended duration.  The figures for our deliveries in past 12 months seems typical for delivery rates, though it never hurts to try and improve.

Figures around 96/97% seem fairly typical based on my prior professional experience in mobile telephony.  December is low possibly because lots of dealers did SMS based compaigns to their customer database.  Campaigns are expected to to yield lower success rates compared to say workshop service/parts order notifications as you'd expect the quality/accuracy of your phone number database for active customers waiting for notification to be much higher than a database that include old customer contact details.

Also 2013 figures are quite good compared to previous years figures suggesting that our existing SMS provider has made steady improvements to their infrastructure, particularly with unreceipted messages. We also made changes to our own systems to more thoroughly search for delivery receipts for messages which have not been properly receipted to help bring unknown % rate down.

Still we will try and see if a new provider improves things for us and work with the best.  We can now retain two different providers for redundancy.

Note that c9 only bills for successful SMS deliveries. A successful SMS is an SMS that is receipted by the mobile phone. A receipt is a signal/notification sent from the mobile handset back to us where the phone acknowledges receipt of the SMS. It is possible that a handset will receive an SMS correctly but the receipt does not make it back to us.  For these SMS's  c9 errs on the assumption the phone did not receive the SMS and dealers are not billed for these.

Small bugfix introduced with prior version and some general tidy up around a confusing aspect of configuring orders.

Previously you could move a part from daily order to stock order via orderbook/view order.  New version disabled this functionality if following option was not set in main setup : "Allow user to select daily or stock ordering at POS".   Fixed so that you can move parts in orderbook/view order onto a stock order irrespective of this setting.

I've also tweaked point of sale to ignore this traditionally problematic setting altogether.  The setting now should have no influence in c9 (though I've left it in the setu pscreen for now).  When you go into orders in point of sale you now will always have the option to assign it to either daily or stock.  If franchise is configured to only support daily/stock then in point of sale this is respected and relevant option is disabled.  The franchise setting is not respected in orderbook though, so you can always force a part onto a stock or daily order if you wish after point of sale.

Requires database changes. You need to log all terminals out first.

More flexible ordering : feature growth in c9 that allows you to easily track down alternative sources for parts via F12 magician lookup has exposed a growing weakness in c9's order management model which is now fixed in this version.  The ability to manage ordering of parts from alternative suppliers.  Consider a point of sale experience where you are ordering Suzuki parts.  Say you are a Suzuki dealer, or you normally order from a dealer such as D&R Motorcycles,  but the part you want is currently not available from your regular supplier. After pressing F12 magician lookup you notice Mick Hone can supply it.  C9 now allows you to modify in point of sale where you intend to get parts from.  The design allows you, in point of sale indicate some parts will come from your normal supplier and others from someone else.  In point of sale you can modify these too.  Illustrating:

The first part is supplied, the second will be placed on a daily order for normal franchise order.  The 3rd on a stock order for normal franchise order.  The 4th though will be put on an order to be sent to Mick Hone.

MICKHONE is added as an accessory supplier in c9.  This new version of c9 allows you to add parts from any franchise onto the order for an accessory supplier. The system even allows you to order parts of different franchises onto the same order.  i.e. on an accessory order to BOLTONMC for example, you could mix KTM and Honda parts.

A near future version of c9 will allow you to easily place a part on order from an alternative supplier from F12 magician lookup, for c9 dealers that come up in magician as being able to supply the part you do a lookup on.  The near future version will also permit automatic transmission of the order to the dealer if the dealer has a c9 based  online shopping website when the point of sale process is completed.

This change introduces a few minor/ancillary  tweaks

• In point of sale the type of order for each individual part (daily,stock, other) is now displayed
• In point of sale, when you put a part on order you now have the option indicating whether the part should be put on a new/existing sent order as opposed to putting it on an active order.  This is to be used, like ad-hoc orders, to cope with the situation where you manually order the part over the phone but wish to have c9 track the part on order after the initial manual order
• Point of sale forget/order/sell screen now removes ability to order on daily/stock.  When you select order a new screen opens up where you select daily/stock and now new option to order from alternate supplier
• Point of sale again : if you highlight a part and press F11 you can now modify order specifics for the highlighted part. Previously F11 in this mode would open up screen to add a new ad-hoc order item
• In orderbook/view order you can similarly modify a parts order status. Moving it from daily/stock order to a accessory supplier 3rd part order and also toggle status of item from active to sent.

Manual backups : a significant bug with manual backups has been fixed in this version.  If you rely on online backups no need to worry, these are fine and not affected by this bug.  For manual backups the system does not generate correct backup files for dates where year  is  than 4 digits, i.e anything before 1000 AD.  The backup files save the date in a recognizable format, but on restore the database will reject the restore because it sees the date as ambiguous. For example Nov 4 2013 is written as '2013-11-4',  Nov 4 13 AD should be written as '0013-11-4', but old version of c9 wrote it as '13-11-4' : postgreSQL database could not interpret this unambiguously so it would fail on restore.  Old backup files can be reconstructed and repaired but the process is time consuming and tedious.  New backup files created after this update will work fine.  Again problem only manifests if you rely on manual backups and only if your c9 database contains crap data, there is no reason why you should be keying in any date prior to 1900 or so.  Not even entirely sure how dealer in question got 13 AD in their database : I cannot make it happen on my system no matter how hard I try.

Minor tweak:

• Fix width of website discount % entry field in view/change part
• Print statement : ignore creditor/debtor flag on account.

Requires database changes, you will need to log all terminals out during upgrade

• Account balance limit : was based on merged trial balance. Tweaked to work on debtor trial balance only. (omission in prior changes to trial balance separation, forgot to separate balances in this business rule)
• Part kits with custom pricing would sometimes not land on the kit price manually entered and be a few cents out due to rounding errors. Now fixed.  System now arrives at custom pricing by jiggling line discounts.  This also factors in kit discount giving on web orders.
• Print open deal : was not printing customer details correctly
• Part/Buy Sell  :  buttons to view invoice/customer on lower order panel would actually open view on selected item in upper invoice panel.  Now fixed
• Cancel order : don't allow user to cancel parts on order for customer/workshop etc.  Too many people making mistakes cancelling the wrong order. Force users to cancel parts/invoices manually in this instance
• Cancel part on order : detect if last part on an invoice and if so check if there is deposit to be refunded and take appropriate action
• Mail merge : allow windows to be resized and fill text area out to the resized window
• Supplier Warranty management : distinguish between lodged claims and finished claims to make it easier t o manage claims in progress
• Customer notification : when reviewing SMS notifications for received parts the wrong invoice number would be recorded in notification.  Notification's work perfectly, but the recorded invoice is incorrect. Happens on receives dealing with multiple invoices.  Should now be fixed.

Requires database changes, you will need to log all terminals out during upgrade

This version significantly changes how the system manages customer balances.  It explicitly separates out balances into debtor and depositor balances which result in more robust trial balance figures for accounting reporting.  A number of other related changes/benefits flow from this

• A number of customer related operations are now faster. Balance retrieval calculations will be faster (though was already quick so unlike to be noticed).  Printing statements very much noticeably faster.
• Adding transactions is now simpler and easier.  Adding all different types of transactions is now done from the one screen. Previously there were two separate screens.  The new single screen is easier to use.  Stronger visual clues as to what is happening. No longer a requirement to fill in, tab through, aged trail adjustments as c9 now calculates this automatically (you can override if you like).
• Print statement screen redesigned for easier use
• System now explicitly tracks recording of refunded invoices and refunded debtor payments : so there should no longer be a need to use credit/debit notes (these are still in place)
• Balance on deposit and balance on debit now kept separate so easier to handle debtor customers who have put down deposit at the same time.

Also includes tweaks to check/constrain sizing of images and attachments.  Recent activities with people sending bulk Christmassy mailouts with attached movie files or images which are 12MB and CMYK encoded has been playing havoc with our storage and bandwidth constraints. So added some further sanity checks for size and encoding to keep things sensible.