Ostendo Update 18 January 2010 – What’s New

Item Sizes – Enhancement

We have enhanced the use of Item Size tracking, so that the size can now be used as a variable unit of measure. What we mean by this is that you are able now to treat the size value as a conversion factor, thereby allowing the tracking of dual variable unit of measure. To help explain this, imagine the following scenario:

You are stocking and selling 2.5kg Hams, and although the weight is close to 2.5 kg’s there can be reasonable variability. Now lets also assume that you’re charged by the supplier for actual weight of each ham; you would therefore like to make sure that the customer buying the ham is also charged for the actual weight. To add to the complexity, you wish to stock and to price by each ham, because that’s how the customer orders them. This new feature achieves the objective by tracking the sizes of the hams (in actual Kg’s), displaying in Inventory Availability both the quantity of hams and the total actual weight, and then calculating the Invoice unit Price based on which sizes were picked and the standard conversion factor the ham pricing was set by.

Customer Deposits entered in Sales & Job Orders

We have added the ability to enter Deposits from within the Sales and Job Order screens. This effectively creates a Customer Deposit allocating it to the specific order number. We have also added 2 extra fields to the Order table showing the total amount and un-applied amounts of all deposits linked to that order.

Catalogue Codes in Job Templates & Task Bills

We have added the ability to now add Catalogue codes when setting up Job Templates and Task Bill Codes. The facility has always been available to use catalogue codes when within Jobs; this enhances their use.

Lists – Enhancement

We have added the ability to dynamically create Lists based on previous Order History. In other words, you can now define against an Inventory List that it is created from Order History, looking back a maximum number of days or number of orders. This feature works within Sales, Jobs and Purchase Orders, not only pre-filling the List with the order lines, but displaying the order date and the order number for each line.

Add to this, the ability to link a List Code to a Customer, and this becomes a very fast way of creating orders where the customer typically orders similar products.

Jobs – Alter Mark-ups Enhancement

We have enhanced the Alter Mark-ups screen in Job Orders. You now have the ability to base the mark-up, margin and unit price calculation of either the planned or actual cost, previously only planned cost was used. This is a useful feature for companies that invoice out based on the actual costs and products used in the Job.

POS – Optionally Displaying Costs, Margins & GP

We have added the ability to display Costs, Margins and Profit within the POS screen. This feature is only available if the option held against the POS operator is turned on. The activation of this is actioned in the Employee screen.

Additional Fields Displayed in Line Grids

We are now dynamically displaying any additional fields added to Order Lines in the Lines grid within each Order screen.

New Email Scripting Function for IMAP

We have added a new function into scripting for receiving emails via IMAP (used as the protocol for MS Exchange and Windows Server 2008). There is still the existing function that uses POP3, but the new one provides the ability to link to an MS Exchange server without having to set-up POP3 connection.

Speed Improvements

You may notice some improvements in speed of operation, more likely to be noticeable in the Jobs module, particularly where large templates are used.

Various Small Fixes & Improvements

Various other smaller issues and enhancements that have been reported to us have also been fixed in this update.

What’s Coming in future Ostendo Updates:

What to expect:

(1) Progress Claim Approvals and Retentions Screen

(2) Predictive Service Maintenance and Useage Billing

(3) Additional Advanced Manufacturing Features

(4) DRP Distribution Requirements Planning

(5) Budgeting