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