Two new Dimension have been added to the Sales and Commission as well as the Sales Summary Analysis cubes in Data Analysis.  Dimensions in Data Analysis allow the User to pivot the analysis cubes in different ways to extract more meaningful data.  The addition of these two new fields further the Users' ability to inspect sales and/or commission numbers for greater meaning.

Business Country

In addition to the already existing State, City, and Zip code Dimensions, the Business Country Dimension allows Users to see where their international sales are coming from.  Drag the Business Country Dimension to the left side to get a view of all the Countries that are producing sales; expand a country to see the Customers within that area that are being sold to.

Issued

The Issued checkbox appears on the Invoices in Invoice Entry.  The intended use of the Issued checkbox is to differentiate Orders that have not been shipped by the Manufacturer from Invoices that have been sent.  Using Search Invoices, it is easy to pull up a list of un-Issued Invoices; likewise Users can filter on the Issued column in the Invoice listing.

In Data Analysis, the Issued Dimension allows for a similar reporting mechanism.  Drag the Issued Dimension to the lefthand-area to see the "True" (Issued) and "False" (not Issued) values in the grid to the right.  Filtering out the True values will give you accounting for all of the Orders that are pending, while looking at the True (filtering out the False) will show you just sales and/or commissions for Invoices that have been sent out by the Manufacturer.

The Order Printout report shows the details of an Invoice, Order, Purchase Order, or Quote in the system.  Now an additional piece of information can be optionally shown over the Vendor and Sales Rep section of the report, the Payment Date(s).

When a Payment is entered into the system, a Date is selected for that Payment.  Typically this date is either the check date or the deposit date, depending on how your agency recognizes revenue.  The dates shown on the report are this Issued Date of the Payment(s) on which the Invoice appeared.  For partially paid invoices this will be more than one date, the date of each of the partial payments; if all commissions were paid on one Payment Entry, then there will just be the one date.

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To show these fields, check the box on the Parameters dialog when you run the report, "Show Payment Date(s)?".

​If you don't make Payment Entries in your system, this addition doesn't effect you.  If you don't want to show the Payment information, leave the box unchecked.

The addition to the report allows one to find when a particular invoice was paid; or that it was not paid yet.

With the new year upon us, a common activity is to send out year end summaries to our customers.  In this light, we have made some updates to the ever-popular Customer Snapshot report.

First, and most importantly, we greatly improved the speed of the report when running it for a full year-to-year comparison.  In other words, when you select those 1/1/2017 - 12/31/2017 dates, the report will now much more efficiently and speedily do those calculations for year-to-year percentage growth numbers.

We've also updated the By Month section of the report so that it gets rid of what would have shown a blank year, as most agencies have not started entering data for the new year yet.  Instead we now see a recap of 2017 and percentage growth versus 2016, using those same 1/1/2017-12/31/2017 dates.

A couple of cosmetic changes were also made, specifically for those of you who might be sending or sharing these Customer Snapshot reports with your key accounts: 

1. We've added the "Report Title" parameter (commonly seen on some of our other reports), which allows you to add your own title or summary to the report.  For example, you might put something like "Thank you for a great year.  Here is a recap of how your business with the Manufacturers we represent has grown over the last year.". 

2. We have put your Agency's name in the header, so that is now reads "Your Company Name - Customer Snapshot".  As these reports get passed around, why not have your agency highlighted as much as possible.

Feedback and enhancement requests are always welcome.  Happy New Year.

We have released (and been using internall for quite some time) a new version of our webmail offering.  Webmail allows Users to login to their MRSware Mailboxes without having to set anything up ahead of time -- this is handy when using a shared computer at a convention or hotel, or for everyday use in place of Outlook or MRSware Desktop mail.

Note that we have changed two things in the website address:

1. https, for secure access to your Mailbox.  Using encryption in the connection will prevent eavesdropping when connecting to the website over public wifi.
2. webmail.eyond.net domain, to allow users to continue to access the old webmail site at http://webmail.mrsware.com for the time-being...  Eventually we will redirect the old site to the new service, but wanted to give everyone a chance to login before making the change permanent.

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With the transition from social.MRSware.com to our www.MRSware.com site, one of the features that was missing was the live chat.  The chat on the social site does get some use and is a great way to get a quick answer to a simple question -- due to the short-answer nature of the tool, a quick yes or no, link to an article with more details, or just checking in on an update is easy and quick.

We wanted something to enable the same interaction and immediacy here on www.MRSware.com.  We are pleased to have found just the thing.

We are in the process of updating all licenses.  This should be done by tomorrow, 12/28/2016.  Along with the update is a holiday surprise for all our MRSware Users -- keep an eye on your email for our year-end announcements.

Updates

• Update to thread synchronization, particularly to accommodate a change in Windows 10's threading model and increase MRSware screen transition speed and loading times.  This update elevates some delays seen by some users while rapidly clicking between email folders while the list of messages is still loading.

We've been looking at a steep rise in ransomware -- the type of malware that infects computers and encrypts the user's personal documents, so that they cannot be accessed without first paying a ransom to the malware distributor.  We've increased the scanning effectiveness and options around attachment files through the Spam Filter Portal to help combat these spammers.  Even so, I am sure everyone knows at least one person that has opened that file attachment in and email and then realized that they should not have.

The Spam Filter Portal has some default handling of email attachments that are designed to keep our Users safe from malware, virus, and other type of attachments that are commonly sent by the bad guys.  It is good to be aware of these filters in case you do have a legitimate sender trying to send you an attachment that matches any of these criteria:


Unsafe attachments
Quarantine emails that have potentially unsafe attachment files that end with any of the following extensions: exe, cab, msi, app, bat, dll, hta, inf', js, jse, lnk, ocx, pif, reg, scr, url, vbs, ws, wsc, wsf
This filter is strongly recommended!

Unsafe attachments inside of archive files
Quarantine emails that have a zip, rar or 7z attachment that contains a single potentially unsafe file inside.  Potentially unsafe attachments include files with the following extenions: exe, cab, msi, app, bat, dll, hta, inf, js, jse, lnk, ocx, pif, reg, scr, url, vbs, ws, wsc, wsf
This filter is strongly recommended!

Updates

• layout change to Commission Payment Reconciliation report
• added new columns Order # and PO # to Commission Payment Reconciliation report
• added Parameter to Order Printout report that allows User to select whether the Discount column for a Line Item should show as Percent or Dollar.

Updates

• Home page menus changed, moved to right-side.
• New buttons added to right-side.  Create New items directly from the Home page.
• Birthdays no longer show by default in the Calendar.  Turn them back on as desired by using the Filter button.

Fixes

• Sales & Commissions chart on Home page correctly calculating date ranges.
• Company pages sales history charts fill in the previous year's time range.

New

• New Order fields are available in Invoice Entry to enable more tracking scenarios and entry of fuller Purchase Order and Order information prior to the receipt of the Invoice.
  • Quote #, PO #, Quote Date, PO Date
  • Shipping Method, Tracking #, Shipping Total $, Ship Anticipated Date
  • Terms and Notes, each featuring up to 8000 characters in details that can be added to the Order / Invoice.
• New fields in the Line Items
  • Ship By date is available to set a per-item shipping requirement
  • A Discount $ / Discount % can be noted per line item
  • The Description field length is greatly expanded, now supporting up to 1200 character descriptions
• New Save buttons have been added
  • Save is to save the changes made without closing the Edit Invoice dialog
  • Save & Close will save changes and close the Edit dialog
  • Save & New now has a new option "Duplicate Order" that creates a copy of the existing Order with some of the fields filled in.  This is an easier way to split and Order into multiple Invoices, or repeat a previous Order that is being placed again.
• Multiple Splits have been added using the "Sales Rep", "Specifier", and "Territory" fields along with their Split % fields.  Internally split the commissions for an Invoice between multiple reps, or note external Agency splits.
• The Invoice Listing has been updated to show the new fields added to the Order/Invoice dialog.

Updates

• The Search -> Invoices dialog has been updated to enable searching by the various new fields added to the Invoice.

Fixes

• When selecting Companies to Bulk Mail to, the Recipients Panel now shows a Contact Name if it is a match to the selected email address, instead of just a blank Name.

There has been a lot of discussion on data security these last few months, ever since the release of classified documents describing national security and foreign espionage efforts.  I thought this might be a good time to remind people about the Encrypt function in File Share.


It is pretty simple: right-click on a file, select "Encrypt", punch in a password.  That is it, the file will be encrypted using the secret password you entered.  Don't forget the password, since that is the only thing that will be able to get your file back for you (we cannot recover files that you encrypt without the secret password).

The News feature works like spam filtering -- just instead of placing the filtered items into the Spam folder, they are placed into the News folder.  I get lots/tons of newsletters, notifications, and general updates from Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, various development journals I subscribe to, and general media sites.  Some of it is interesting, some of it is interesting sometimes; none of it needs to be read right now.  I add these items to my News Senders list, using the Mark as News button, and it goes neatly into my News folder for later review and reading.

​Email is a ubiquitous form of communication.  It is perhaps one of the most important and continuous ways we communicate with each other on a daily basis, whether personal or professional.  In business, everything from order confirmations to status updates, deliverables scheduling, billing invoices, and termination notices are sent via email.  That is where it gets a little sticky, as email is not a guarantee of delivery or that the recipient will see it, much less see it how you intended.

T'is the season for holiday joy, and present buying. The bad guys also need to buy presents, and are well aware that the most online activity of the year is happening right now. As a consequence, the most bad guy activity is happening right now as well. Bad guys are online individuals trying to get into everything from your Amazon buying history to your Gmail e-mails. There is just one thing stopping them from getting into your information -- your password.