Erply Cloud ERP 2014 Update 2 Released

We are happy to announce a major update to ERPLY users — ERPLY 2014 Update 2!

This release brings new reports and data export features. We have also incorporated a lot of customer feedback: there are improvements in Invoices module, user rights, cost management and a lot more.

These are the most important features in updated ERPLY:

• Reward Point Balance Report.
• Customer Balance Report.
• Unfulfillable Sales Orders Report.
• New user rights settings — configure separate rights for Sales Orders module, or limit cashiers’ access to POS only.
• Customer Export — download your customer list as an Excel spreadsheet.
• Product Export Improvements — export cost and price lists.
• Changing Customer on Invoice — you can now choose whether to reload item prices or not.
• Adjusting costs on confirmed Inventory Registrations.

By the way — do you want to try out what future ERPLY will look like? Check out the Salesman app in iTunes App Store or in Google Play.

Here are the major features explained in more detail.

1. Reward Point Balance Report

New Reward Point Balance Report lists all customers with outstanding reward points — and the point balance for each customer.

The report can be opened from CUSTOMERS → Reward Point Balance Report.

2. Customer Balance Report

Another new report is the Customer Balance Report.

It lists all customers with an outstanding balance and the due/prepaid amount (or in retail terminology: store credit amount) for each customer.

The report is located in REPORTS → Sales → link “Balance Report”.

3. Unfulfillable Sales Orders Report

This new report is a complement to “Fulfillable Sales Orders” that has been available since Erply 2014. “Unfulfillable Sales Orders” lists those sales orders that cannot be fulfilled due to insufficient inventory.

To compare the two reports:

• “Fulfillable Sales Orders” is primarily intended as a printout for warehouse personnel, for preparing shipments.
• “Unfulfillable Sales Orders” provides feedback to sales and purchase managers, informing them of resupply needs and order fulfillment issues

See SALES → Fulfillable / unfulfillable orders:

A reminder: before using these reports, you should configure whether orders are shipped only in full, or is partial fulfillment (with multiple shipments) allowed as well. See SETTINGS → Configuration → Invoices and Sales:

4. Separate User Rights for Sales Orders

Sales Orders now have a separate set of user rights. (Formerly, user rights for Sales Orders were the same as for Invoices.

If needed, user groups can now be granted the right to edit or delete only Sales Orders — without giving any access to Invoices module.

5. User Group Access Restrictions

An additional security setting for user groups: access can now be limited by the application.

There are four new checkboxes on User Group card:

Erply back office. If you enable this check box, the user will be able to log in into Erply back office environment.

POS: This checkbox allows the group to use Touch POS, Windows POS, and iPhone / iPad POS apps.

Other apps: This covers a wide variety of plug-ins or applications, mostly those provided by ERPLY or its partners. If “Erply back office” access is enabled, you will most likely need “Other apps”, too. Therefore, as a rule of thumb, we recommend keeping it enabled.

This list includes:

• “Product pictures” module on the product card
• ERPLY Accounting (Margin)
• Salesman app
• CRM plug-in
• Shopify plug-in
• New import wizard plug-in (beta)

API: This checkbox allows a user group to make API calls. This setting may be needed for all user groups in case your ERPLY account has some custom-developed modules, plug-ins or integrations. (Users may have to log into the custom module with their credentials, and the module, in turn, must have API access, to communicate with ERPLY).

Regardless of which checkboxes are enabled and which not, module-based access restrictions still apply. For example: if user rights for “Invoices” module are turned off, users cannot access that module in the back-end, nor make sales in POS, nor synchronize data in ERPLY Accounting, nor make API “getSalesDocuments” / “saveSalesDocument” calls.

Some recommended use cases:

• Retail: If cashiers do not need back office access, you may leave only “POS” enabled and disable others. Clicking the “Inventory” button in Touch POS, for example, will then display an “Access Denied” error message.
• Developers/subcontractors: if they do not need back office access (ie. they are building some modules that work wholly separately from Erply, or are integrating a webshop), you may leave only “API” enabled and disable others.

6. New York and Massachusetts Sales Taxes

The following two different tiered sales taxes are now supported in ERPLY:

1. “New York” tax: items with a sales price over $110 are taxed at a different rate.

You can set this up on location card, under “Multi-tier tax”. Specify the tier thresholds (eg $0 and $110), and the corresponding tax rates.

If you need to set up three tiers (two tiers do not suffice), you should specify the baseline tax on register card and second and third tier on location card.

2. “Massachusetts” tax: first $150 of item’s price is tax-free; the amount exceeding $150 is taxed.

For this, you need to create a special tax that incorporates both of the rates and also specifies the threshold above which the rate changes. Once the special tax rate has been created, you may use it as usual: set it as register default, or associate it with a specific product group in a specific location.

7. Go Automatically To Last Viewed Page

When you log in, ERPLY will now open the page you were viewing last time — instead of always opening the dashboard.

This way, you can continue your work directly where you left off. If your dashboard tends to be slow to load, your log-in will now be faster, too.

8. Customer Export

The customer database can now be exported to Excel. See CUSTOMERS → Export customers.

• Export file will contain up to 3 addresses and up to 3 contact persons for each customer.
• If you do not see this menu option, you may need to enable it from user group rights. For security reasons, it is disabled by default.
• We have removed the “Print View” feature from Customers module. New export should fulfill the same role, and output is not limited to an arbitrary number of records, as it was with Print View.

9. Product Export Improvements

Product export can now output:

• Price list prices;
• Costs.

This new feature can be useful for making bulk changes to a price list. Select which price list you want to edit, mark the checkbox “Export only items in this price list”, download the file and open it in Excel.

When you are done with editing the prices, save it in “Unicode TXT” format, go to INVENTORY → “Import products from TXT” and re-upload the file. That will apply your changes to the price list.

“Export” and “Import” buttons have also been added to price list form.

10. Cost of Returned Items

Until now, Erply took a returned item back into inventory at current average cost value. (Erply calculated the average cost over all the items currently in inventory — or if there were none, used the most recent cost value — and applied the same cost to the returned item.)

This algorithm has been improved. If Erply is able to find out the original cost at which the item was originally sold, it will return the item at the same cost. If the original cost is not available, then current cost applies (as described above).

Erply can look up the original cost only if Credit Invoice has a reference to the original Sales Invoice. However, if you create a Credit Invoice from scratch (without referring to the original sale), the original cost cannot be used.

11. Customer Field on Invoices

On an invoice, there have historically been “Customer” and “Payer” fields. This setup has proven to be rather complicated, especially when users need to track balances by the payer. On new accounts, we have now simplified the setup:

• “Customer” now IS the payer. On “Customer” field, you should specify the name of the company or division that is expected to pay the invoice.
• In addition: if needed, you can specify “Receiver of goods”, which may be different from Customer. This field is not compulsory.

The receiver of goods does not play any role in accounts payable. All payments should be associated with the Customer only and will be reflected on Customer’s balance.

This setup has been turned on for new sign-ups only. Upon request, we can apply it to an existing account; for this, we need to apply some changes to the database and convert existing data.

12. Changing Customer on Invoice

When you change the Customer, Location, or Project field on an invoice, ERPLY will now pop up a dialog box, asking whether prices should be updated or not.

• For different customers or locations, different price lists may apply. The “Update” option is for when you want to ensure that the invoice contains up-to-date list prices, appropriate for the just-selected customer.
• However, if you have created a Quote with custom pricing and want to keep the prices intact (replacing just the customer name at the top), the “No Update” option may be more desirable.

Formerly, the prices were always updated automatically.

13. Adjust Costs on Confirmed Inventory Registrations

A confirmed Inventory Registration now lets you adjust or correct costs; the fields are no longer greyed out.

Cost adjustment afterward was formerly available on Purchase Invoices only; now the same can be done on Inventory Registrations.

14. Matrix Grid Displays Quantities in Stock

Matrix Grid (the pop-up window on sales and purchase invoices) now displays the current quantity of each variation in stock.

15. Actual Reports

Actual Reports is an easy-to-use template designer, for designing and printing custom product labels, invoice printouts, PO printouts and more. Actual Reports is available to all ERPLY customers for free.

In this release, we have added a number of improvements:

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On an invoice printout, you can display:

• a list of payments that have been made so far,
• final balance,
• total quantity
• total discount ($ and %),
• and tax breakdown by tax rate:

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Using AR’s “Composite” field, you can now extend invoice rows with product descriptions, pictures, and other information.

Add a “Composite field”. The rectangle that appears will represent one invoice row and will be repeated on the final printout as many times as there are rows. Associate composite field with “documentRows”. Into that rectangle, add fields with the “Insert sub-component” command.

A resulting printout may be something like this:

A similar printout can also be created for a selected list of products — if you would like to create a product catalog, for example. Formerly, it was only possible to print products as labels. However, a product catalog needs a header and a footer; a sheet of labels does not have that

To print products as a catalog, select the items in Inventory module, click “Print labels with Actual Reports” and mark checkbox “Print products as a product catalog”

Create the product catalog template as instructed above. If you already have a similar invoice, you might be able to use that as a basis, although fields need to be re-associated with correct variables. A resulting product catalog may look something like this:

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If you use shipping with waybills, you can now build an invoice printout that is tailored for that specific use case.

Let us assume that you ship items often and create a waybill for each shipment. At the end of the month, the customer receives an aggregate invoice that lists all items that have been shipped over the month. The customer makes a payment according to the invoice.

In that case, you might want the printout to be grouped by shipments — so that it would be easier for the customer to verify the invoice.

First, make sure this setting in SETTINGS → Configuration → Sales Document printouts has been enabled:

To design a template, first, add a composite field and associate with data element “waybills”. Within that composite field, add general information about that waybill (number, date, delivery address, total) and a table to contain waybill rows. The final printout will look like this:

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Product labels, invoice printouts and purchase documents all now support custom attributes. Product labels and invoice printouts can also display custom product parameters (if your ERPLY account has that extra module enabled). Color and size fields are available for matrix products. Product labels can show available package sizes.

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Inventory Registrations, Write-Offs, and Transfers can now be printed with Actual Reports.

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After designing a new template, you can now refresh the template list in ERPLY — if you do not see the new option listed automatically:

16. Minor features

Invoices and Sales

In price lists, it is now possible to set an item’s list price to 0.00 (or a 100% discount). Previously, price list did not recognize a zero price.

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EE customers only: The Z Report, and “Payments Summary (Cash Audit)” report no longer show card payments separately by card type. EE card terminals can report a wide array of different card names, and due to that, the Z report was very long, and with a lot of subsections. Now all card payments are listed together in one list.

This option can also be turned on manually by ERPLY Customer support.

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New sales report variants have been added:

• “Sales By Matrix Product” — shows the same information as “Sales By Product”, but with matrix items shown at style level (ie. individual sizes aggregated into one sales total)
• “By Category, Level 1”
• “By Category, Level 2”

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For new customers, there is no “Discounts” module on customer card anymore. Price lists should be used instead.

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There is a new promotion type: a promotion that applies only to a customer’s birthday.

It can be configured as a manual promotion that cashier must apply — or it can be an automatic promotion. In either case, the promotion only gives the customer a discount if it is the customer’s birthday, and does not have any effect otherwise.

Birthday must be set on a customer card.

Furthermore, you can configure whether the promotion may apply only once on each birthday (ie., once every year), or can customer return later that day and use it again.

There are also some associated configuration options. If you are interested, please contact ERPLY customer support to apply these settings:

• Touch POS can pop up a notification if it is customer’s birthday.
• The promotion can be extended to apply not only to an exact birthday but also a fixed number of days before/after the date.

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Promotions and price lists now have a “Starting Date and Time” and “Ending Date and Time” — you can specify at what time the price list (promotion) becomes active on the specified date. By default, promotions and price lists begin and expire at midnight.

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Prepayment Report is now available for use, on all accounts.

In some countries, the law requires prepayments to be declared as sales revenue, and businesses have to pay VAT/sales tax on prepayments. ERPLY sales reports do not include these automatically, so the Prepayments Report should be consulted in that case.

Here are instructions on how to correctly calculate sales revenue, with prepayments included:

1. Pull Sales Report for the period you want to report (eg. September);
2. Add all prepayments that were received in September. Pull Prepayments Report, using the “Prepayment Date” filter.
3. Subtract prepayments that were taken for September’s sales. This step is important because otherwise that part of revenue would be accounted double. Pull Prepayments Report, using the “Invoice Date” filter.

See REPORTS → Prepayments.

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Customer groups can now have up to 5 price lists.

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In Customers module, it is now possible to assign a webshop username and password for companies; this is no longer limited to contact persons only.

However, you should first make sure that your webshop supports this (that you can successfully log in with the company’s credentials and make orders). Not all web shop integrations may support it.

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Touch POS can now print Gift Receipts (receipts without price).

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Sales and Purchase reports now have a Brand filter.

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Laybys created in Touch POS now display Expiry Date on the printout.

Previously, it was possible to set an expiry date, but it did not get printed on the customer’s receipt.

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Sales By Day report now displays columns ‘# of Sales’ / ‘Average value sold’ / ‘Average units per transaction’, similarly to the “Sales By Cashier” report.

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EE accounts: support for LHV payment file has been added, payments can now be imported from LHV Bank.

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“Tax exempt” field on customer card has been enabled for Canadian accounts.

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For Australia and New Zealand, sales documents now have new standard names. The word “Invoice” has been replaced with “Tax Invoice” (“Tax Invoice-Waybill”, “Receipt / Tax Invoice” etc.). The changes have been applied to new customers.

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New Zealand: “VAT” has been renamed to “GST”.

Inventory and Products

In the “Quantity View” of matrix products, “warehouse price” and “cost” are now displayed separately. “Warehouse price” is the FIFO cost that ERPLY calculates automatically; “Cost” is the informative value that you manually specify on product card.

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The Type filter in Purchase documents module no longer has filtering options “fulfilled” and “unfulfilled”. These filtering options did not work as intended.

You should rather use the sub-views “Confirmed purchase orders” and “Fulfilled purchase orders”, instead, as shown on the screenshot below.

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“Status” filter in INVENTORY module can now list both archived and non-archived items in the same view:

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Additional filter options have been added to purchase reports.

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We have added a new report: Matrix Inventory Report + Period Purchase and Sales:

It is an enhancement of Matrix Inventory Report; it lists start and end inventory quantity for a selected time period — and also the quantities that have been sold, purchased etc. during that period.

• At a size level, the report provides Sales, Purchases and End Quantity.
• At style level, the report provides Start Quantity, End Quantity, Total Sales, Purchases, Registrations, Write-Offs, and Transfers.

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Assembly products are now marked with an ‘A’ in product list — in the same way, bundles are marked ‘B’ and matrix products ‘M+’.

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“Export CSV” button in REPORTS → Products has been removed. This was a duplicated feature; the same information can be retrieved with ERPLY’s standard product export.

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If the 500-row limit in product’s transaction history (“Warehouse Report” button on product card) has been an issue, you can now export a product’s full transaction history to Excel. We have added a new button “Download product history” to product card:

Please note, however, that the export can be very slow if the product has thousands of lines of transaction history.

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Locations can no longer be deleted. Removing a location with some remaining stock would throw off inventory levels.

Better availability of product images and files

To make your product data more easily accessible, we are upgrading the way we store product pictures and related files. If you have recently built a webshop or developed custom API applications, you might have noticed that we do not make product images by default accessible over the API; you have had to file an access request for that.

After the upgrade, this will no longer be the case.

The upgrade will be gradually rolled out to accounts, one-by-one. The upgrade will slightly change the appearance of “Pictures” and “Related files” tabs on product card; functionality will, however, remain basically the same.

On new accounts, this upgrade is enabled by default.

Please also note that we are deprecating API saveProductPicture and saveProductFile calls. For uploading pictures, there will be a new, separate API. Documentation of that API will be published on ERPLY website soon.

Pulling pictures, however, will work just as usual, with getProducts / getProductPictures / getProductFiles API calls. Naturally, hotlinking the images (ie., serving them to website visitors directly from ERPLY-provided URLs) is not allowed; you still need to download images to your website server and serve from there.

Other

Erply now displays a warning when you try to e-mail invoice to an invalid e-mail address.

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In SETTINGS → Configuration → Sending invoices by e-mail, there is a new setting: “Invoices are e-mailed: from employee’s e-mail address / from the store or corporate e-mail address”. This setting not only changes the sender’s address but also e-mail footer: if you select the second option, the footer will display store contact information, instead of sender’s name and personal contacts.

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In the report generator, it is now possible to arrange report columns in desired order, by prefixing column titles with numbers: eg. “1 – Test”.

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Expected Transfer report (formerly located in REPORTS → Z Report) has been removed from ERPLY. It provided basically the same information as “Payments by Date” and it did not have enough options to be useful for bank reconciliation.

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In German, Austrian and Swiss accounts, all addresses (customer, supplier addresses) now have 2 additional fields: “Address line 2” and “State”.

Bug Fixes

Gift Cards Report (REPORTS → Coupons, gift cards) has been improved. Among other changes, gift cards are now ordered chronologically.

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Product import did not allow to update product code from “1234” to “01234” (add or remove zeros). This has been fixed.

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In Matrix Grid (the pop-up dialog on Invoices and Purchase Invoices), variations were not always listed incorrect size/color order. This has been fixed.

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Features

• “Stock products cannot be sold if the product is out of stock” and
• “Stock products cannot be sold if there is not enough available (non-reserved) stock”

have been improved. In some cases, ERPLY incorrectly did not allow the user to confirm a Sales Invoice if it was made from an Assignment or a Sales Order.

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In Inventory Report, setting the “Product Category” filter will now also include all products from sub-categories (similarly to the Product Group filter).

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Receipt printout can now display multiple card payments.

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Sorting order in sales reports has been fixed.

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Tracking of fulfilled and partially fulfilled POs have been improved in Late Deliveries Report, PO Report and the “Product Information” pop-up (which can be opened from the Inventory list, or from an invoice row)

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Previously it was not possible to delete attributes from the product card, customer card, invoice etc. This has been fixed now.

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Payment splitting (which may be needed when a sales order has been paid in full, and it is partially invoiced) has been improved.

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When changing the domestic/EU/outside-EU status of an invoice, tax rates are now automatically changed when necessary.

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When making an invoice from an “EU” or “Outside EU” sales order, the invoice was still by default set to “Domestic”. This has been fixed.

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For “EU” and “Outside EU” invoices, ERPLY now checks that VAT is set to 0% (and warns if necessary).

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When an Assignment to an EU customer is completed and invoice created, ERPLY now automatically set invoice rows to correct 0% VAT.

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When changing invoice type from/to “Export Invoice”, ERPLY no longer automatically switches currency.

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When a sales order is in non-default currency, and an invoice is made from it, ERPLY will no longer set invoice type to “Export Invoice” by default.

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“Employee” drop-down filters in Invoices and Quotes modules were not ordered correctly.

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When store credit was added over API, ERPLY sometimes did not automatically associate it with available unpaid invoices (ie. it had to be done manually). This has been fixed now.

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In Purchase Reports, and in Inventory Registrations / Write-Offs / Transfers reports, Product Group filter could not be used in conjunction with other filters. This has been fixed.

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Central Purchasing Report no longer recommends ordering bundles.

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“Product” filter in Inventory Reports and Sales Reports no longer lists archived items.

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Various improvements in report generator.

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A user can no longer delete himself/herself from the Users module.

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When adding a batch of products to a price list (all items in a specific group, category or brand), Erply now skips archived items.

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There were cases where a product’s status was changed, but its timestamp did not get updated. As a result, product synchronization scripts were not able to pick up that change. This has been fixed. Additionally, a product’s timestamp now also gets updated when you add or edit any replacement products, related products or upload product files.

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Previously, Purchase Returns did not have a “Discount” field on each document row. This field has now been added — so that a Purchase Return form would look exactly like a Purchase Invoice, and there would not be any discrepancies when returning a Purchase Invoice with discounts.

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On a Purchase Return, quantities should be negative. ERPLY now displays an error if you have any positive quantities on a Purchase Return and try to save the document.

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Report generation: field linking has been improved. If your report has a column “Invoice #”, for example, all invoice numbers in that column are automatically turned into links (clicking on a link would open respective invoice). In some cases, the links did not appear. These cases should be fixed.

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EE accounts only: if a payment had been imported from a bank file and then deleted, it was not possible to re-import it again. This has been resolved (payment can now be re-imported).

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Editing the “Customer Code” field on ERPLY’s log-in form did not formerly have any effect; if changing customer code from “A” to “B”, ERPLY still logged user into account “A”. (Naturally, the user credentials had to be valid for account “A”, or else a log-in error was returned.). The log-in form now behaves as expected; Customer Code is taken into account.

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‘Print labels for selected products’ on Price List form is now visible for everybody.

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If you upload an invoice/receipt logo, ERPLY now checks that it is in the correct format, and displays a warning otherwise.