The Benefits of WMS Software

This article is part 2 of 2 in our series, Why an Efficient Fulfillment Process Starts with WMS Software”. Read the first part here.

Missed Part 1? Check it out now to explore common obstacles to efficient warehouse management.

So manual systems or inventory management software simply won’t cut it for efficient warehouse management. The good thing is, there’s a great solution already at your fingertips: WMS software.

Particularly for businesses that already have inventory and order management softwares, WMS software is a natural extension to those systems that helps ensure your warehouses are run just as efficiently as the rest of the business — the benefits of WMS simply speak for themselves.

Level 3: Obtain Peak Efficiency with WMS Software

Level 3 in the hierarchy of fulfillment efficiency is warehouse management system software.

WMS software standardizes the entire chain of events from order received to order dispatched. It operates as the nervous system for your warehouse, organizing and managing your stock, optimizing your fulfillment process and creating order out of chaos. As a result, warehouse management software solves for fulfillment, drives operational efficiency and improves warehouse management across the board.

Top-tier warehouse management software works like this: it integrates with your other systems (order and inventory management), manages how orders are sent for fulfillment, stores all order details, automates the printing of shipping labels and checks the selected inventory to ensure an accurate pick. To ensure communication, warehouse workers carry a handheld device that’s connected to the system, as well as a barcode scanner that communicates scanned items back to the software. This provides data that’s updated to the minute, and it also reduces reliance on printing.

Operational Efficiencies

WMS software is a dedicated tool designed to solve all the operational issues created by manual or slapstick solutions.

Organizational Transparency & Insights

With its clear-cut systems and overview of the entire warehouse, software standardizes the entire fulfillment process from start to finish. Everyone involved — workers, managers, even those involved in order management — can have a clear understanding of the different stages required for fulfillment to succeed.

Clear tracking of every order, every piece of inventory, its location, its destination and even where workers are at a given time delivers an unprecedented level of insight into the warehouse’s operations. This is a dramatic contrast to paper-based systems, where transparency into existing processes is nonexistent. You’ll be able to identify areas that slow down fulfillment and ensure that all parts of your warehouse are speaking to one another.

This level of insight also enables WMS software to optimize existing systems. For instance, if new orders come in for inventory, those orders can be sent to a worker that’s already at that shelving unit. Because the software knows where all inventory is, orders can be sorted by the proximity of inventory so that workers don’t have to backtrack or wander across the whole warehouse. It can even run wave picks, organizing how and when workers do picks to ensure an efficient flow of traffic.

Error Reduction

The other side to that coin is error reduction. Transparency, combined with the extra checks baked into the software, ensure that human error is at a minimum. For instance, theft or mispicks are nearly impossible when each piece of inventory is scanned and automatically checked against an order. Duplicate orders and miships are a thing of the past, because the software maintains oversight of all orders and isn’t prone to errors like printing the same pick list twice. That results in enormous savings: the software pays for itself quickly simply with the reduction of costly errors, let alone efficiency improvements.

Improved Warehouse Management

Because it’s a specialized tool, WMS software also enables numerous warehouse-specific workflows designed to improve efficiency.

Advanced Fulfillment

Advanced fulfillment capabilities genuinely elevate the way your warehouse works. You can orchestrate every type of advanced pick, pack and ship system you need and react to each order in real time, instead of fulfilling orders one by one in a scattered order. That includes picks that simply aren’t possible without software, such as wave, bulk or time picks.

Integrations & Automation

WMS software works hand-in-hand with your existing systems, from sales to order management to inventory to invoicing. Top WMS software can integrate seamlessly to ensure a steady flow of communication across all your operations. This creates a system with immense interconnectivity, and all of it is accessible from each worker’s device.

At the same time, the software automates many of those integrated processes and eliminates manual work. There’s no need for someone to categorize orders or push updates to workers: WMS software takes care of that for you. It can even print shipping labels directly from the app, so that pick, pack and ship becomes one smooth process for fulfillment.

In other words: if you have a warehouse, you need WMS software.

WMS software comes with a myriad of benefits, and the right software will:

1. Improve transparency into the fulfillment process (who’s doing what, where, when and why)

2. Ensure organization as you scale

3. Generate data insights and recommendations to improve efficiency

4. Enable advanced management and fulfillment

5. Automate and eliminate time-consuming manual processes

6. Integrate with your existing systems

7. Solve for the majority of costly human error

By creating operational efficiency and enabling you to implement advanced warehouse management, WMS software ultimately saves you time and money. You can leverage a tool that is specialized for the intricacies of warehouses — and the crucial role they play in your product lifecycle.

Want to learn more about the integrations and features you should look for in WMS software? Check out the power of DEAR’s WMS software in this article.

Why an Efficient Fulfillment Process Starts with WMS Software

New Release 22-Jan-2017 – New Sale Module with multiple fulfilments/invoices and credit notes, lock periods, potential kit quantity calculations, WET Tax

What’s new?

New Sale Module allows multiple fulfilments/invoices and credit notes per single sale order.

The new sale module will run in parallel to existing functionality for some time and will allow creating multiple fulfilments (partial pick, pack and ship), invoices and credit notes per sale order. This means that you no longer have to use Split Order functionality when you are unable to ship the entire order due to insufficient stock and do not wish to create multiple invoices for the customer, simply create a partial shipment and complete the order once you have the required stock.

Product images shown in sale order drop downs and grids

Product images are now displayed both in drop downs and grid when selecting products in sale order (available in new sale module only)

New general setting: Show invoice before fulfilment.

New general setting to control the workflow of enhanced sale module allows selecting the order of tabs with ability to show invoice before order is fulfilled.

New general setting: Allow sale order no allocation.

When enabled, new option provides a way to authorise a sale order without allocating stock. Currently only available in new sale module.

New action for sale order: Mark as Fulfilled.

Marking the order as Fulfilled will remove stock allocation in cases where picked quantity is less than authorised quantity in order and you do not plan to ship the rest of the goods.

New action for sale order: Mark as Closed.

Same as Fulfilled but it also removes this sale from reports which show ordered but not invoiced sales (when ordered quantity exceeds invoiced).

Quantity field added to additional charges in purchases and sales

Quantities for service type products are now available in the general sale module (previously quantities for service type items were only available in Service Sale). Service product quantities can be viewed in various sale reports available in DEAR.

Accounting Lock period support added to all modules

DEAR now supports Account Period Lock date which can be set in General Settings to prevent transactions from being edited for closed accounting periods.

“I sell this product” attribute added to Product setup to allow hiding not sellable products in sale module.

Product list will now be filtered in Sale Module only by products which have been marked to sell. Scan and csv import function will still allow to add not sellable product to sales.
Reference field

Reference field has been added to Stock adjustment, Stocktake and Stock Transfer tasks, visible and searchable in View All.

Improvements

New mechanics for stock movements with cost update to keep information regarding historical cost changes

It is now possible to build stock on hand report for specific date, while cost change will inherit effective date of the transaction which caused inventory cost to update (date of manual journal in purchase). Cost update logic will comply with Lock Period and will not update any transactions in locked period.

Additional attribute fields will be added to product list view

Additional attributes assigned at the product level will now be visible in View All Products list.

Availability calculations performance improved throughout the system. Potential kit quantity calculations introduced

Stock availability calculations have been enhanced for better performance.
Potential available quantities for kits/assemblies (when Auto-assembly is enabled in Bill of Materials) is now automatically calculated per location in all relevant places and updates integrations when quantity of components changes.

Disassembly

Cost of components will now automatically update when cost of original disassembled product changes.

Tax management

Taxation rules have been reworked to allow any number of tax components per tax rule and correct support for compound tax (WET). In addition it supports mapping of different liability accounts per component.

Sale List view

View All Sales screen now allows 3 different views, General, Accounting and Fulfilment. Search has also been improved to allow to searching sales by tracking number.
Data readability improved by adjusting font size to fit in the cell if cell width is not sufficient.
Accounting view shows quotes, invoices and credit notes of the same sale task as separate lines.

Dashboard

Reorder section now shows all products paged with search.
Purchase/Sale tabs on dashboard only load data when opened, improving page opening performance and reducing page size.

Reports

All reports with date range as parameters now have a combo box with some common pre-set ranges for dates to simplify reporting.

DEAR API

ProductAvailability endpoint now has additional Available field providing info about normal and potential kits products.

New Release 12/10/2015 – Improved Magento and Shopify integration, Customer/Supplier/Product merging

Release Notes 12/10/2015

Latest DEAR Inventory release includes Shopify, Magento and Amazon integration enhancements, report updates and more.

Magento
We have made a number of enhancements to the Magento integration bringing it up to speed with the rest of our sales channels.

Payments are now imported with all new Magento sale orders and attached to the customer invoices. Sales/payments are automatically loaded every 5 minutes even if Magento extension is not installed.
Credit notes are now imported and support for refunds is available.
Control when order is captured: When Paid or Created.
Shopify
General performance of the integration has been improved, especially relating to bulk product listing.

New operations log provides details of your actions in relation to Shopify product publishing and historical order import.

When creating/updating variants in Shopify families, we now assign default images to variations (only when not assigned in Shopify and default flag is set on DEAR product).

Supplier and Customer merging
You now have the ability to merge customer and supplier records, you can access this functionality from the More drop down in respective View All screens for customers and suppliers.

Emails
“Include in Email” field added to customer and supplier contacts. Import/export templates extended with additional fields. This field controls if additional emails are to be included in CC field when sending emails from Purchase/Sale. Also this field is now properly synced with Xero contact and will preserve Xero settings.

Finished Goods
Finished Goods Picking improvement. New button Pick Line added to add additional lines to Pick table. Only visible in Authorised status.

Also Delete button added to the pick grid. Visible when Status is Authorised and In Progress. Product is now selectable on Pick grid with ability to choose from simple FIFO products as well as Special Costing products. FIFO and FEFO batch/serial numbered products can only be selected with auto-pick.

Added ability to specify total service value for finished goods.

New Combined printed documents
In View All Sales screen you are now able to combine various Sale Orders, Pick, Pack and Ship for printing in a single document. Accessible through the Print drop down.

Reports
Status field (Product Status) added to Product availability report.

Added Price Tier 1 to availability report.

“Component Unit” field added to Assembly/Disassembly analysis reports.

CSV Upload
Improved images upload via CSV. Added Default field to indicate default images

Improved Supplier/Customer address load from csv. Action column added allowing bulk deletion of existing addresses.

Settings
New General Settings parameter added which controls what Ship date to use by default: current date or invoice date.

Prepayment account mapping has been separated into Purchase prepayment and Sale prepayment.

New integrations page was made available as the integration list has grown considerably and no longer effectively stored the list of all the options.

Fix permissions in sale header for editing certain fields.

Other
Sale print has been fixed to use contact specified in Sale to get email/fax/website fields into the document. If no contact specified then default contact is used to populate these fields.

 

New Release 01/01/2015 – Partner Catalogue, Shopify Integration enhancements, Improvements to Job Costing module

Partner profile editing/publishing and Partner Catalogue

Some great news for registered DEAR partners who can now publish a profile in Partner Catalogue and get instant exposure to thousands of potential clients looking for experienced DEAR Inventory integrators. Partner portal contains a dedicated page where contact and business details can be set and updated.

Editing tax rules and account related data in purchases/sales invoices after authorisation

We always strive to improve usability of DEAR and now allow users to edit tax or chart of accounts related data in sale/purchase invoices even AFTER data was authorised and synced to your accounting software.

Improvements to Job Costing module usability

Users can initiate new sale quote, new expense without leaving job costing screen and have the expense automatically allocated to relevant Job account.
Users can also allocate job related expenses to existing sale quote.

Shopify integration gets new important features

Shopify taxation and payment method mapping can now be performed. If you allow multiple ways for your customers to make payments, you now have the ability to map those payments methods to relevant payment accounts in the Chart of Accounts, all with a few clicks of a mouse.
Tax rules mapping is now also available and caters to specific requirements of users operating in complicated tax environments.
Shopify refunds import is now available.

Other items

  • Added ItemWeight and TotalLineWeight columns to purchase print forms
  • Added AutoAssemble/AutoDisassemble columns to inventory list import/export.
  • Added “Delete unused archived accounts” button to Chart of accounts screen.

DEAR API (V 1.0)

First version of DEAR API is now available, you can get more info on the details here http://dearsystems.freshdesk.com/solution/categories/1000084084 .

New Release 26/10/2014 – NEW Look and Feel, Updated reporting module, Barcode scanning

NEW Look and Feel

Fonts, colour schemes and consistent layout changes to the User Interface have been implemented for better readability and more intuitive navigation.
Customisable table views have been added to most tables giving you the ability to control data on your screen.

New powerful scanning feature

Barcode scanning functionality has been enhanced and will now be available for stocktakes, purchases and sales. Use Barcode scanner in Automatic, Inventory and Manual modes.

Reports

New reports module allows for customised report views and provides info on all data headers available.

  • Search feature is now available for all reports.
  • Currency selection for certain reports has been added.
  • Added UOM, Family (hidden fields by default) and “Volume on hand” to Product Availability report.
  • Price List printing function now allows to filter products by Category and tags, as well as produce price lists grouped by category.
  • Improved export to PDF option for reports will auto-fit entire grid into landscape page layout.

New reports added

  • Finished Goods Analysis: Assembly #, Location, Assembled SKU, Assembled Product, Component SKU, Component, Type, Yield, Production Cost, Component Quantity, Component Cost, Date, Assembled Tags, Assembled Unit, Assembled Category, Assembled Family, Component Batch#.
  • Disassembly Analysis: Disassembly, Location, Assembled SKU, Assembled Product, Component SKU, Component, Type, Disassembled quantity, Disassembled Cost, Services Cost, Component Quantity, Component Cost, Date, Dissembled Tags, Dissembled Unit, Dissembled Category, Dissembled Family, Component Batch #
  • Find by Purchase Order: Supplier, PO #, PO Date, Invoice Date, Required By, Status, Order Total, Invoice Total, Paid Total, Due, Year, Quarter, Month, Currency, Invoice, PO Status, Invoice Status.
  • Job Costing Materials: Job, Customer, Date, Job, Status, SKU, Product, Unit, Quantity, Price, Tax, Total, Year, Quarter, Month, Tags, Category, Family, Address, Contact, Supplier.
  • Job Costing Profit & Loss: Job #, Customer, Job, Status, Milestone, Type, Date, Reference, Expense, Tax, Income, Profit, Tax, Address, Contact, Supplier, Start, Finish.
  • Profit & Loss by Product: Location, SKU, Product, COGS, Sale Proceeds, Production / Inventory / Transfer, Profit, Unit, Tags, Category, Family, Batch #, Expiry Date.
  • Outstanding Quotes: Order #, Customer, Sales Representative, SKU, Product, Unit, Quantity, Total, Date, Year, Quarter, Month, Location, Category, Product Tags, Family, Customer Tags, Currency.
  • Sale Overview: Order #, Customer, Sales Representative, SKU, Product, Unit, Quantity, Total, Date, Year, Quarter, Month, Location, Category, Product Tags, Family, Customer Tags, Currency.

Other

  • For Customers and Suppliers added Purchase/Sell history by document.
  • For Customers and Suppliers added SKU field for Purchase/Sell history by product.
  • New “Ready to Pick” filter for Sale List.
  • Additional general settings option to control when invoice number is assigned to sale task – on invoice authorisation or on sale creation.
  • Added Stock transfer effective date, Finished Goods Work in Progress date and Completion date, Issue to Production Effective Date.
  • Added validation on Purchase, when Invoice first method is selected, that will check whether quantity on Stock Received matches quantity on invoice.
  • Added import/export of Supplier-Product list from/to csv files. Allows to load fixed/latest supplier prices and additional supplier-related information about a product.
  • Now any account marked to receive payments in Xero can be used for payments in Dear (account can now be other than Asset type account)
  • Assembly cost estimation approach is now persisted on Product level.
  • Contacts import/export has been split now into two formats: for addresses and for contacts. You can specify address type in new address import format.
  • Unit cost field has been added to Finished Goods list.

New Release 10/06/2014 – Purchase order prepayments, Batch printing, Partial invoicing for drop shipping purchases

Purchase order prepayments.

Current implementation conforms to limitations of existing Xero API interface for prepayments. Since purchase order not available via API and draft invoice in Xero can’t accept any payments we just made first step in automating this process – add prepayment transactions to Xero.

You can create a purchase order with a prepayment in DEAR that would include deposit and show the outstanding balance. Prepayment must be done in base currency only (see note re Multi-currency here ) and option ‘Payments’ on Xero integration page should be set as ‘Pushed to Xero’. When invoice get synced to Xero usual prepayment allocation routine will be used to allocate prepayment to invoice.

Batch printing of Purchase and Sale documents

User can select documents he needs to print with a grid of checkboxes and click on the document to print. This will let user to save time a lot of time compare to previous method of opening each file and printing it individually.

Managing multiple Shopify stores is now possible.

You are now able to seamlessly integrate and manage inventory in multiple Shopify stores. Our simple-to-use interface allows you quickly add your stores, update and synchronise your catalogues (either by individually by product or in bulk) and start selling in no time.

Couple this feature with DEAR’s ability to auto complete Pick, Pack and Ship stages of a Sale Order and you have a completely automated order fulfilment system capable of saving time and eliminating human error.

New toggle in Shopify settings

This new feature allows switching the name used on Sale Orders from Shopify. You have the option of using the company name or the contact name of the person you deal with at that company.

Other items

Document names
When downloading a document the print file name is distinguishable now like Sales Order SO-12345 XYZ Corp.pdf. So if sending or storing these files it will be easier later on to find out what the file content is about.

Item Weight
Item weight have been added to Quote, Order, Pick, Pack and Invoice tables and can be printed on the corresponding documents.

Import contacts from Xero
Users can load contacts from Xero now even there are no any bills or invoices generated for this contact. User will have to tick checkbox “Treat all contacts as Customers” on Xero integration page

Partial invoicing for drop shipping purchases
Add Clone function for drop ship purchases to allow partial invoicing. If your drop shipper can’t fulfil purchase you can create another purchase order for all outstanding items.

New Release 14/05/2014 – Sale order auto-complete, Report customisation, Customer credit limit, BOM Import

Auto-completion of sale orders.

After listening to feedback from our users regarding the clicking required to complete the sale task we introduced fully configurable sale process steps. If your business doesn’t require Quote, Pick, Pack, Ship steps, they can all be set as optional.

For those who are selling online and using our Magento/Shopify integrations the entire sell process can be automatic. Once we get a sale order from Shopify it will be auto-completed and the only step remaining would be sending it to your accounting software.

Import payments from Shopify

We also added import payments from Shopify so our users can benefit from automatic order completion.

Report customisation

You can customise our report grids by adding/removing, swapping, resizing columns.
Now your customisations are saved and next time you open the same report they are restored and applied to the report.

Customer credit limit

We have introduced customer credit limit option.
You can specify now what maximum unpaid balance your customer can have. If new sale order is to exceed this balance, depending on your user account settings, you will either receive warning message or the system may even block the sale order.

BOM Import

If you use BOMs you will appreciate new Import/export of BOM details option.
Maintaining complex BOMs now is as simple as your inventory list.

New Release 20/03/2014 – Disassembly, Unit conversion, New csv format

Disassembly

We are introducing a new DEAR Inventory module: Disassembly. In the production environment there may be a need to break a product back down into its base components. The Disassembly module can help you do just that. To create a new Disassembly, just select New Disassembly from the Production menu.
You’ll find the user interface of the Disassembly module is similar to Finished Goods user interface. The only difference is that the process is flowing in reverse. Rather than using components to build an Item, we’re disassembling the Item into its original components. Using Bill of Materials Disassembly module will let you break one product into several products/components. As with Finished Goods, Disassembly allows you to do auto-disassembly when you receive goods when purchasing products. Auto disassembly is triggered when both purchase Invoice and Stock Received are Authorised. Each product received in stock and marked with auto-disassembly flag in bill of materials will be automatically converted into several products according to its BOM. The total cost of labour and overheads is distributed proportionally to the cost of each produced component.

Bill of Materials redesigned

We separated Components and Labour/Overheads on our BOM screen. Having them in one grid caused browsing difficulty for large BOMs. Stock items can only be added to Components and Service Items to Labour & Overheads section. We added a new column “Disassembly Cost %” to split the cost of the original product when performing automatic disassembly.

Unit Conversion

With introduction of disassembly module DEAR Inventory now can offer the solution for unit conversion between purchases, stock and sell units of measures. The conversion is implemented as chain conversion using auto-assembly and auto-disassembly functions. Let’s say you purchase wine in boxes of 12 bottles. You stock them as individual bottles and sell as boxes of 6 bottles. You create three products: Wine (Box of 12), Wine (individual bottle) and Wine (Box of 6). By adding Wine bottle to the BOM of Wine (Box of 12), with quantity of 12, and enabling auto-disassembly you instruct DEAR to automatically convert Wine (Box of 12) products that you use in Purchase into Wine Bottle products. Similarly you can use auto-assembly to perform a reverse conversion when you are selling boxes of 6. Wine (Box of 6) will have BOM with 6 Wine (individual bottle).

Sale Document sorting general setting

Recently we have received several requests to allow different sorting order in sale documents (Sale quote, order, pick, pack and invoice). We introduced new parameter in General Settings, which controls sorting order when printing quote, order, pick list, pack list and invoice. You have options to select “Screen order”, “Alphabetical order”, or “Stock locator and Screen order”.

– Screen order option will print documents exactly as they are displayed on the screen.
– Alphabetical order option will sort lines in documents by product name (product family).
– Stock locator sorts documents by Stock Locator product attribute, then by all additional attributes and then in screen order (if stock locator and additional attributes are empty).

Default value is “Screen order”

Sales download from eBay

Our integration with eBay now lets you import all historical sale orders made on this sale channel. System will also import and create products included in sale orders.

Bulk quantity update in Magento & Shopify

Generally DEAR Inventory automatically updates quantities in Magento and Shopify (if this option is switched on) when available quantity changes in DEAR. But in some scenarios if you connect your eCommerce shop to DEAR Inventory and DEAR was used for some time and contains non-zero stock it is required to update all quantities for all products listed in your eCommerce shop. We have now added “Update quantities” function for Magento and Shopify catalogue pages.

Bulk listing/updating products from DEAR to Magento & Shopify

To reduce the time and effort to make your products available for sale online we have introduced a bulk publishing feature. Now you can filter products you want to publish by product category, product tags or product family and it takes only one click to publish hundreds of products to your shop and start selling.

Delete deprecated Suppliers and Customers

If you want to get rid of some test records in your suppliers and customers database, you can do this with the new functions added to Suppliers and Customers lists. “Delete deprecated Suppliers/Customers” buttons will delete only suppliers or customers, with Deprecated status, and if not used in non-voided purchases or sales.

Emailing from DEAR

When emailing from DEAR two options are now available: sending email on behalf of currently logged-in user or using company’s “billing” contact. New configuration parameter is available on General Settings page.

Link to Settings page

Just to make DEAR Inventory more user-friendly link to main Settings page was added to all child setting pages

Total for Purchase Task Lines

DEAR Inventory now allows to specify Total in Purchase Order lines and Purchase Invoice lines. When Total field is manually changed, Price gets automatically recalculated given that quantity value is not zero. Due to Xero limitation of 2 decimal places on price field, this new feature is not available to Xero users. Only Quickbooks users and users without connection to accounting software can benefit from this change.

New csv file format for Customers and Suppliers

New csv file format was introduced to fully cover new features of DEAR Inventory. New format supports all fields available for supplier/customer except multiline comments field that can’t be safely imported or exported using csv format.
Existing Xero format for contacts exported from Xero is also supported.

Tax Calculation Method

To make our invoice totals compatible with accounting software and avoid rounding issues we have added an option to select a tax calculation method. Document total and line total options will now let you make tax calculations similar to Xero or Quickbooks. By selecting either of them you can avoid small discrepancies between tax and total amounts for documents in DEAR and accounting software.
You can choose between Document Total and Row Total tax calculation methods on General settings configuration page. This setting only applies to new documents. All existing documents will keep previously calculated tax/total amounts.

Minor changes & fixes

• Fixed update of Units of measure when product list imported from csv file
• Improved performance on import of customers/suppliers and products from csv files
• Performance of importing Customers/Suppliers from Xero during sync has been improved

New Release 10/02/2014 – Tax rules per document line, More reporting options, Shopify integration extension, Application usability improvements

Individual tax rules per invoice line

To make our invoice layout and underlying tax rules compatible with accounting software Xero and QBO we are introducing a tax calculation for each invoice line. Now users can include both taxable and not taxable items on the same invoice.

NOTE. If you don’t need to apply different taxation for different products there are no changes required for you.

To take advantage of this new feature you will need to specify individual tax rules for the products if these products require special tax treatment. Also if special tax rule is applied occasionally you can override it on the invoice.

Please see below the steps explaining how taxation rules are applied to the invoice items:

  1. When you select a Supplier or Customer DEAR loads default taxation rule assigned to Supplier or Customer. This rule will be the default rule for purchase or sale order. You can see it in the document header. It can be changed via user interface by selecting another rule. This rule’s Tax inclusive or exclusive flag will be applied to all items on the invoice including additional charges lines.
  2. When you start adding items to the document (for purchase it could be Order, Stock Received or Bill, for sale it is Quote or Order) default taxation rule from the document header will be copied to the newly added document line.
  3. When you are selecting the product DEAR checks if product has specific Purchase or Sale tax rule assigned to it (for Purchase or Sale task respectively). If product has the rule assigned, then this rule overrides default rule used previously.
  4. User can choose to manually override settings and select any of the available rules for any lines after that.
  5. When task progresses from the first step to the second and the following (like from Purchase order to Invoice) system copies lines from purchase order (when respective “Copy from Order” button is clicked on Invoice tab) keeping current taxation rules from Order into Invoice.
  6. Tax Rule, selected for the whole task in task header defines if prices are Inclusive or Exclusive of tax. DEAR will ignore Tax Inclusive/Exclusive flag if the rules selected for individual document items and additional charges are different.

New filtering option for reports

Filter button was added to all reports, allowing comprehensive data filtering. It was an anticipated feature to be able to filter data in DEAR Inventory reports. At last, it is possible with Filter button (located next to Apply button on all reports). Please check here how to use this feature in more details http://dearsystems.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/311507-how-to-filter-format-and-search-dear-reports-

Purchase and Sale screens now remember last selected option

We finally caught up with this usability flaw and DEAR Inventory now remembers your last selection in the Filter field on Purchase and Sale screens. Last value is stored in browser cookie, allowing our customers to have individual settings for each user on his/her computer.

Additional task statuses are now available on purchase and sale lists

We bet at times its hard to understand the status of a task by simply viewing the task status. It may be misleading sometimes due to different possible approaches (stock/invoice first) or still pending shipping. To make your life easier and eliminate the guess work we added intuitive and colourful icons next to each task in the list displaying detailed task statuses. This is how you can interpret them:

  • Grey – This task step is not available
  • Orange – This task  step is currently active
  • Green – This task step is completed

By hovering mouse cursor over these icons you will see popups explaining each icon in more detail. We hope you will no longer be lost in your task statuses.

Delete your deprecated products

People often ask about the way to completely remove products from DEAR Inventory. It was not possible until now. But instead of just having Delete button on individual product and going through your lengthy list deleting it one by one, why not to just let the system delete all products you no longer need. Start by exporting your products list to Excel, change status of the products you want to delete to DEPRECATED (if you haven’t done it already) and then upload the list back. After that, you are just one click away from clean product list you wanted. DEAR Inventory will go through all deprecated products you have and will check if a product could be completely deleted or not. If the product was used in any of the tasks it is not possible to completely delete this product without losing data integrity. After going through deprecated products list, DEAR will delete all products that could be deleted and will skip all those referenced somewhere. Once the procedure finishes you will see a report  of how many products were deleted and how many were skipped.

Download your orders from Shopify

DEAR Inventory downloads Shopify orders when it receives a notification from Shopify about a sale. But what if for some reason this notification was not received? You can now manually trigger an order download by specifying the start date from which you want your orders to be downloaded. This also allows you to download orders created even before you linked DEAR Inventory to Shopify. But do not worry, DEAR is clever enough to skip those orders already saved in the system so you won’t get duplicates. This feature is now fully compatible with behaviour we already have for Magento integration.

Bulk update for Product-Customer Discount Matrix

Thanks to our customers, we realised that to use our advanced discounting rules you need a way to manage Discount Matrix in bulk. This is exactly what we did. You can now download and upload special csv file containing full Discount Matrix for all active products. This feature is available from Product maintenance screen on Export and Import buttons (additional menu items were added).

Changes to Customer export/import file format

When you Export/Import customers list, you now have an option to change price tier and Sale Account in bulk.

Not fulfilled part of partially received stock now keeps ‘On Order’ status

Previous implementation didn’t allow to see outstanding quantities on cloned Purchase Tasks (Blind receipt option was enabled unconditionally) as well as there were no “On Order” quantities on your product availability report as well as reorder reports.
To address this issue we changed the way you see the result of partial stock receiving.  The main flow remains the same:

  1. You receive partial stock and authorise it.
  2. If you still expect to receive remaining quantities on partially received order, click on Clone with Keep PO option
  3. System will create new Purchase Task, with Blind Receipt disabled and new purchase order (this is the difference) containing outstanding product quantities. The purchase order is not editable to maintain consistency with original purchase order.
  4. Once new Purchase Task is created, you will see all outstanding quantities as On Order in product availability report as well as Reorder reports.
  5. Now all you have to do is wait for the remaining delivery and once you received another portion of goods, find open Purchase task and repeat the procedure if required.

Minor changes to sale channel setup

Due to introduction of tax rules on invoice lines, we had to change the way sales from eBay, Magento and Shopify are converted into sales in DEAR. To simplify and improve reliability of this conversion, we added two additional configuration parameters on each sale channel setup page. These parameters are mandatory for processing and you won’t create any new sales until these parameters have valid values.

Parameter “Invoice Lines Tax Rule” allows you to specify tax rule that is going to be assigned to all Sale orders and invoice lines in generated sale tasks. This rule is also going to be used for the task itself as a master rule. Parameter “Invoice Additional Charges Tax Rule” allows you to specify tax rule applicable to additional charges on sale invoice, such as Shipping and Handling costs.

If for some reason some of your sold items need special tax treatment (e.g. No Tax), you can always change tax rules in generated sale invoice as required before authorising.

Invoice and Credit Note printed documents can now include Batch and Serial Numbers

Want to have a list of serial numbers against each product on invoice printout? It is now possible with the new field “BatchOrSerialNumbers” added to Lines in Purchase Invoice, Purchase Return, Sale Invoice and Sale Credit Note.

Minor changes & fixes

  • Fixed bug causing duplication of customer/supplier when you change its name and then sync with Xero.
  • You can now clear Account-related fields in Product Maintenance. This will disable product-level account override and resume the use of account-level mapping for a product.
  • To open page in new tab hold Ctrl key and click on menu item.

New Release 11/11/2013 – Kitting, Auto assembly, Multi-level BOM, e-Commerce enhancements, Additional reporting options

Kitting / Auto assembly & Multi-level bill of materials.

Kitting/ Auto assembly feature now available in DEAR Inventory. Kitting or Auto assembly can be set for products with a Bill of Materials. At the time of sale these product will be automatically ‘assembled’ and will include all items that form the kit.
In a manufacturing scenario the bill of materials with auto-assembly flag will be used to create a ‘parts list’ for a work order. When you create a work order, you are preparing to produce a product. The ‘parts list’ indicates the material and quantity that you will need. Bill of materials may contain sub-assemblies that in turn have auto-assembly flag set and system will also let you expand sub-assemblies and see components they are made of.
Kit products can be sold online and the system will assemble them automatically given you have sufficient stock of components the kit consists of.
New report is coming to show BOM structures for not auto-assembled products.

Goods received tab

To cope with big number of rows in received grid we added enhancements to allow a high number of items. Testing has been done with 2ooo items.

e-Commerce integration

Option to disable stock update in your online shop was added to eBay, Magento and Shopify configuration pages. If you don’t need your stock updated just select this option.
In eBay catalog, new button was added – Download Products from eBay. This will let you load products from eBay store and avoid data entry.

Locate the products you are selling or manufacturing on the web.

Supplier Product URL was added to product maintenance form. Assembly Instruction URL was added to product maintenance and to finished goods task. Save time by finding required product on the web. Now you can keep your references in one place.

Improved import of payment records.

Payments are checked now on duplication. Users can create payments in DEAR for the purpose of printing an invoice and sending it to the customer. But when a payment is processed in Xero, the actual payment amount with correct dates and reference number will be copied, and if required, will override previous payment records.

Additional reporting

Product availability report was enhanced to include Category and Stock on hand columns. Also Export option has been added to allow exporting to excel.
Sales by product summary report now has Sales representative field that can be used to calculate profit at sales representative level.
Sale Order Pending report has been added. You can instantly see all orders and products you still need to deliver to your clients.