• F12 check stock availability : recent changes to Kawasaki website broke Kawasaki stock check. Now fixed
• Spares : merge parts onto an existing order with additional deposit.  The deposit payment method was not being recorded throwing out cash till report.
• Spares return : select invoice by customer only allows you to select an account customer. Now allows you to select either cash or account customer.
• Print receive order
• Useful details for organising received orders are now printed more prominently.
• You can now configure c9 to print related parts on receive sheet, parts related to the original customer order or to the customer themselves but parts not necessarily  associated with the parts just received. In main setup screen under orders are options:
  

• Bugfix with statement.  New transaction type "Refunded payment" would appear in wrong column on the report.  Now fixed
• Tweak to spares point of sale needed because of recent changes to accounts.  When you pickup parts on account where original invoice took a deposit c9 adds a transaction onto the account to move deposit from invoice to the account.  Previously it would add it as a 'deposit' transaction.  But it is more appropriate to add it as a payment. Changed c9 behaviour to this.  Previously didn't really matter but now c9 strictly separates depositor from debtor balances it is more important to ensure most appropriate txn type are employed.

Includes database changes. You'll need to log all terminals out to during update

• bugfix: Recent changes to ordering to allow ordering of parts from alternative suppliers broke behaviour of generate all. Now fixed
• Standard Estimates : screen was running too slow.  Added some database indexes to speed things up
• Import spares quote : if original quote was GST exempt the quote would not import correctly. Now fixed

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.