Changes to spare parts refunding to better cope with line discounting. Previously line discounting functionality was not added into refunding b refunding under most circumstances would hack out the correct result. There are some situations though that did not work.  Especially refunding an invoice which mixed line discounted and group discounted items.  New change allows view/modification of line discounts on refund and correctly handles refunding of a mix of discounting schemes.

Account portrait statement : print word 'STATEMENT' on the statement.

Bugfixes relating to converting estimate into workshop job

• Make sure parts are added to job in same order they are on the estimate
• Subtle bug on import estimate means parts will be added with wrong retail price but will have discount set to compensate.  Consider two parts:  Part a $100. PArt b$20.  Part A would be added correctly. But Part B would be added at $100 less $80 discount.  Now fixed.

Requires database changes. This upgrade will force you to log all terminals out during upgrade

• Line discounting on spares invoices was not calculating GST correctly. Now fixed
• Layby
• View layby: show balance remaining
• Take initial payment on layby : was not being recorded in cash till report
• Take initial payment on layby : may not of been opening the till.  Should now be working
• Layby invoice :  print balance outstanding on invoice (a4 and docket)
• Disallow layby to an account customer
• Spare parts invoices - printing line item discount. Also print unit price (retail - discount) and unit extension
• Spare parts : more options to restrict heavy discounting
• Optional constraint to limit maximum % discount that a clerk is allowed to offer: global and uses stock/price file retail price not modified retail price.
• Option to not apply test for items with very small margins where no discount has been offered. (i.e. only apply test if there is discount)
• Account - option to flag an account as requiring detailed invoiced. Will print line item discount + unit figures on spares invoices; even for retail discounting
• Workshop estimate : option to compliment recent 'discount parts to supplier RRP' button : reset line item discounts back to zero
• Spare parts on workshop : make it easier to modify retail price parts are sold onto customers for. Previously system would lock onto spares RRP and not allow you to adjust retail price below this; it would instead adjust discount to arrive at final price.  System is now more flexible, you can set either discount or retail to whatever you like irrespective of RRP.

Bugfixes

• Last two versions did not ship with files required for manual backup.  Manual backups were failing, now fixed.
• View unit would display formula error in some circumstances. Specifically : view a unit on the floor where a formula cost like Stamp Duty was already added to sale cost.  Click view rebate and then close and go back to view unit window would trigger the bug.  Now fixed.  Cause:  formula functions are actually recursive under some circumstances and need to track whether or not they have already been called to avoid prematurely releasing resources required for formula calculation.

Changes to estimates & workshop

• Print estimate changes
• Fix line that runs through estimate only header when export to PDF
• Print parts in order they were added to estimate
• Print more unit details : Full VIN, Colour, compliance date and Odo
• Was not printing line discount totals correctly. Fixed
• Estimate changes - freeform spares items (you should use other/ws parts over freeform. Though some bug fixes anyway)
• Freeform descriptions and prices where not being carried onto job when converting estimate to job
• Freeform part number : would restart at **1 each time you added more parts onto an estimate
• Convert estimate to job
• Was not preserving discounted value on conversion
• Estimate
• Include a button to discount spare parts to their supplier recommended retail (list + GST).
• Sell parts to job
• If you modify retail price downwards: c9 will now write the job item at it's original price and add a discount figure for the difference
• Print job in progress. Remove words "It is for the dealership's personal reference only." : in case dealer wants to show job in pogress printout to the customer.

Unit sales : previously c9 always treated on road costs as being paid by the purchaser.  It is now possible to  flag on road costs as being explicitly paid by the dealership. For example, current Yamaha Scooter deal at the moment where Yamaha provide rebate to cover on road costs.  Dealer pays the on road costs and Yamaha rebate the dealer for the sale.

Arguably, c9 could achieve this already: all you'd do is set final price which reduces the sale cost of the unit.  Although the bottom of the invoice line total is correct and solves the ultimate business need of providing purchasers a discounted sale price ; how this figure comes about is different from the actual business intent.  Now c9 can accurately model either or: discounting the unit sale price or not passing on road costs onto the customer.

C9 behaviour is mostly unchanged by this addition.  When you add on road costs they default to assumption cost is being passed onto customer. when you modify an on road cost you can change this via a new radio button.

Any on road cost that is flagged as being paid by the dealer will be considered as a unit cost for purposes of unit profit reporting.  Normally on road costs are ignored when reporting unit profit on assumption customer pays them; but if they are flagged as being paid by the dealer than they affect the stated cost of the unit.

• Xero changes
• Originally xero would try to sync records in bulk.  There are technically good reasons for wanting to do this (Xero has strict limits on # of requests per month and syncing in bulk substantially circumvents these limits) but there are technically good reasons for not wanting to do this: if a single operation in a bulk fails then the overall sync is problematic and the nature of the OAuth libraries c9 uses to access Xero means we are unable to pinpoint specific invoices that failed.  To deal with this c9 syncing works in two modes.  Normally it runs in bulk but if during bulk sync it encounters an error it flags that the next run will be done in single step mode.  In single step mode user gets information on failed sync operations and has option to abort/retry/skip individual items.  Once a successful run in single step mode is completed Xero will revert again to the more efficient but more error prone bulk mode.
• Sync received items : originally would use the invoice number keyed in. This can be a problem if there are duplicate invoice numbers. To cope with this a unique number generated by c9 is also added to the invoice number.
• Xero integration now contains the ability to sync entire business  activity/cash till report into c9.  This functionality is experimental and beyond the ability of a non-programmer to manage the configurations of this: as every different shop will have different information they want to sync, in different aggregate forms into different chart of accounts.  In coming weeks I will include some additional website posts that explain how to setup a basic archetypical configuration.
• Label printing:  added further changes to now hopefully get Dymo printer working.  Originally thought this was working but only tested it under Linux.  Now confirmed it can work under Windows 7 as well.
• Profit summary report : include entry for unit sale line margins.

• Tweak unit invoice so 6 digit invoice number prints without overlapping
• Receive orders : display list price, list*qty, daily and stock discount.  Useful for receiving Kawasaki orders, as invoices from Kawasaki show list price on line items
• Receive Order : view part. From here you can now access price file record; so you can tweak incorrect discount/list price values for example.  Again to help out with receiving Kawasaki orders

The following page describes how to setup c9 to work with zero.

Firstly in c9, goto:

• business
• synchronize

Select the option Xero, and click Synchronize.  (Also note that on completion this will cause last 30 days of invoices to sync to xero so you may want to adjust this)

Read more...

Includes notion of laybys for spare parts point of sale.  They behave almost the same as reserve, though are treated as separate from reserves.  Differences in behaviour:

• You cannot order parts on layby. Only stocked items can go on layby
• There is a new menu option in c9 that lists all open laybys. Looks similar to reprint invoice. From here you can finalize,cancel or add more deposit onto active laybys.

Other tweaks and fixes:

• Account tax exempt flag: would be ignored on invoice spares sales; but work correctly for all other sale types. Now fixed
• HTML email from miner can crash. Relates to recent changes where c9 will try to analyse <style> blocks in HTML content and apply them inline to actual html body items. Reason for doing this is that some email clients, like gmail ignore <style> blocks but majority of email clients work with inlined style="" statements.  Recent versions of c9 added intelligence to deal with this. But it fails under following circumstances:
• system is configured to route email via dealer's ISP's mail server; not C9's
• HTML contains style blocks
• Those style blocks contain comment blocks.