Invoice and Bill Adjustments

Perhaps the biggest change in CMS 5.0 is the way that adjustments to invoices and bills are handled after posting. These changes were designed to prevent problems such as discrepancies between CMS and your accounting software (caused by changes to invoices and bills after synchronizing), and invalid payment situations (such as payments applied to different customers or vendors than their related invoices or bills, and overpayments with no audit trail).

In order to make a change a posted invoice or bill that affects accounting, users must now explicitly choose "File-->Modify" before they will be able to make the change. Fields that are synchronized with accounting or affect financial reports are considered "restricted" fields. If you change any restricted fields on a posted record that has been synchronized to accounting or paid, then the current record will be reversed, and an adjustment record will be created. If you only change non-restricted fields (such as the invoice received date or invoice postmarked date on a bill), then the record will be directly modified and no adjustments will be created.

As an example, if a user opens posted invoice "373" that has been exported to QuickBooks, and changes the total amount from $1000 to $1500 and clicks save, you will end up with the following in your CMS database:


The advantage to this functionality is that to export these changes to accounting, CMS simply needs to export two new invoices, and any past invoices that may have occurred within a closed period will not be modified. If we make a second adjustment to this invoice on Feb 1st, and change the amount to $800.00, then the following will be the result:

Notice that CMS leaves you with an audit trail of all changes to this invoice after posting. Furthermore, if you attempt to open invoice 373, CMS will open the latest version of the record automatically (in this case INV-373-A2), so you always know what the total invoice amount is.

We feel that this change is one of the most significant of our 5.0 offering, and many customers who have switched to 5.0 have found that it significantly reduces synchronization errors and inconsistencies between CMS and their accounting software. Please call us if you have any questions about this change and one of our friendly customer service staff will be happy to explain further.

Change can be a good thing!

How familiar does this sound: You've found a fantastic software package that you love - it saves you time, keeps you organized, and even makes formerly mundane tasks fun. Then they release a new version - and everything's different. They've moved all the menu options, the settings have completely changed, and what used to take 5 minutes now takes 30 minutes of tedious searching through menus and configuration settings for what you need.

Many people are naturally resistant to change, but even technophiles among us can sometimes be heard saying "the last version was WAY better". At Tailwind, we know that we've caused some of you to say this about CMS in the past, and we want you to know that we've been listening.

In the past year, Tailwind has made a number of policy changes to ensure that new versions of CMS are as bug-free as possible, and do not change existing functionality. Here's what we've done:

1. Rigorous Pre-Release Testing: We now have dedicated testing staff who check all candidate builds before they are released to customers. Changes and new features are the focus of this testing process, but all standard functionality is also tested extensively. The build is not released unless they sign off on it.
2. Automated Testing: We are in the process of separating business logic code from the user-interface in CMS. This has a number of benefits for customers, including the fact that we can create automated testing functions for critical functionality within CMS. Once these automated "unit tests" are in place, all new builds of CMS will need to pass these tests (in addition to the manual tests done by our staff) before being released to customers.
3. Leaving Current Functionality As-Is: If we feel that certain functionality should be changed to improve the way it works, we create a system configuration flag which defaults the system to the old functionality. A recent example of this is the "Dispatch: Allocate dispatch revenue based on mileage only" setting. When enabled, CMS uses a much more intuitive algorithm based on mileage only for determining how much revenue should be displayed when multiple trucks or carriers are moving a single load. However, to prevent your dispatch revenue figures from suddenly changing unexpectedly, we made this a configuration flag. Check your configuration settings regularly after updates to look for new settings. HINT: Any settings that are set to values other than what we recommend will be bold in your system configuration.
4. Change Notification: Whenever a stable build is released, if it contains a bugfix or feature your company requested, we'll send you an email to let you know that the new version is available for download from the customer portal. Furthermore, you can now click on What's New to see a complete list of all changes between your current version of CMS, and the new version.
   

The result of all of these changes is that Tailwind is now releasing less frequent, higher quality builds. We think this is a good thing, and we hope these changes make the upgrade process a lot less stressful.

Ability to search for suppressed records in CMS 5.3.38

A common error customers encounter when exporting invoice and bill payments to QuickBooks is "Related invoice/bill does not exist in accounting." This is usually caused by the fact that someone has suppressed an invoice or bill for one reason or another. Until now, determining which records have been suppressed from exporting to accounting has been very difficult. So, to help with this, we have added the ability for users to search for suppressed records from the receivables and payables module.

After clicking on the search icon (binoculars) from the receivables or payables module, the search form now includes the option to search for suppressed records. This can greatly help users to reduce errors when exporting to their accounting software.

What's New in CMS 5.3.82

It's been 3 months since our last stable 5.3 release, but based on the feedback we've received so far about CMS 5.3.82, we think you'll agree that it has been worth the wait. As always, the complete change log is available in our customer portal, but we thought that a more user-friendly summary of the most significant improvements would be helpful.

1. Show latest of outstanding invoices on incoming cheque wizard even if group outstanding amount is $0.00: If a posted invoice is adjusted to $0.00, the original, reversal, and adjustment records will all appear on the Receivable Aging Report as separate line items. This change allows users to create a zero-dollar check in the incoming check wizard to clear these items off of the aging list.


2. Fuel Import - GasBoy: We've added support for importing electronic fuel files from Gasboy.


3. Add the ability to edit the total field in the incoming invoice wizard: The incoming invoice wizard, which has long been known as a very efficient method for quickly entering large multi-line bills, now allows users to enter the total line amount, allowing CMS to calculate the taxes and subtotal automatically.


4. Add "accounting status" option of "suppressed" on receivable/payable search form: Invoices and bills that have been suppressed in the Accounting Sync can now be located quickly using this new search feature in the Receivables and Payables modules.


5. Ask to delete related dispatches when orders are canceled: CMS will now ask the user if they want to delete related dispatch(es) when an order is canceled (unless there are other orders remaining on the dispatch).


6. Additional enhancements for fuel import: The new fuel import screen that was included with CMS 5.3 has been modified to make the fuel import process easier for users without advanced requirements.


7. Numerous bug fixes: We are constantly testing and correcting reported issues in CMS. Based on feedback from customers who have already been upgraded to 5.3.82, we are very confident about the integrity of this release.