What's New in the 2013-VFP9 Version of Adminsoft Professional Practice?

If you are upgrading from the Standard 2008 (or 2009) VFP6 Version for the first time, some immediately significant improvements you should notice are:

Main Modules (Address Book, Jobs, Time & Cost)

  • Shift to a new Microsoft Visual FoxPro runtime engine:  This gives a slightly different look to the toolbar and windows (well this is just "different" rather than an "improvement"), and also fixes some low-level bugs in the old Microsoft runtime engine.
  • Quicker access to secondary data through new page tabs in the Address Book and Jobs windows (e.g. timesheets, invoices, and WorkFlow notes) – and less clutter on the screen.  (You can still open slaved drill-down windows from the Job and Client windows, as these are quite valuable for certain tasks.)
  • New 'Spell-Check' facility (integrated with MSWord and your personal dictionary), allowing you to check the spelling of text in Invoices, and various other items.
  • Send Invoices and Debtor Statements as PDF attachments to email that are generated within our software.  (You can specify your own wording for the covering email body text.)
  • Automatically fills in Post Codes for addresses in NZ and Australia (plus integrity check to search for and fix incorrect post codes).
  • New snap-shot view of the current job's vital tallies in the "Time & Cost" page in the Jobs window.
  • Integration with software from other vendors:
    • Instant link to Google Maps from any job or client with a street address filled in
    • Quick retrieval and display of digital plans that are stored in a separate location from your job filing folders  (e.g. ones that have been downloaded from LINZ)
    • QuickMap:   From the Jobs module, you can open a map (landing on the appropriate location/parcel), based on street address data entered into job fields.  You can populate grid and land title job fields in our software from information held in QuickMap.  It also maintains an Adminsoft layer within QuickMap, allowing you to see the location of all jobs you have done in recent years.
    • Launch any application that is associated with files / documents in your job filing folders (Doc Admin module)

Productivity & Management Modules

  • WorkFlow has been enhanced significantly:
    • It has a new "Diary" facility which lets you view appointments and tasks in a Diary view (with drag-and-drop capabilities for rescheduling them or assigning new tasks to staff.  It also functions like a "whiteboard", to give you a good "see at a glance" view of which staff (and other resources such as vehicles and GPS equipment) are out "on site" on any day (and what jobs/tasks they are working on).
    • It is fully integrated with the new DocAdmin module:
      •  You can raise one or more notes for an individual document, and associate one or more documents (CAD drawings, Word files, Excel spreadsheets, digital photos, etc.) to a particular note. 
      • From your To-Do List, you can easily view any documents associated with a given note.
    • View relevant notes directly, using page tabs in the Address Book and Jobs windows.  (We have also retained the slaved "WorkFlow Notes" windows which can be quite useful.)

  • Completely new Document Administration module.
    • This provides instant access to your job (or client) filing folders from the job (or client) you are viewing on screen.  It allows you to see and open all manner of files and documents (from other software applications - including digital photos and digital plans), at the click of a mouse. 
    • You can set up templates of standard letters (or email / other correspondence). 
    • The software can then use these to generate new documents for any job or client (merging in text data from job and/or client fields), and save the new document into the correct filing folder for the respective job (or client).
    • Has a facility to efficiently process scanned inwards correspondence.  You identify the associated job or client for each document, and they are then renamed appropriately and moved to the appropriate job/client filing folder

  • Completely new "Dashboard" module, which produces valuable management graphs for directors and managers.  Graphs include:
    • New Job starts (count or $ value) over time:  Summary or break down by job type, analysis of top clients
    • Time & Cost:  Invoices, WIP and/or Write ups/offs over time.  Analysis of Top clients over time.
    • Debtors:  Invoices, receipts, and total balances over time
    • General Ledger:  Profit and Loss over time,  Cash-Flow and bank balance history (and projection from budgets)

  • Completely new Job Scheduling module (still being refined as feedback comes in from users). 
    • This allows you to quickly and efficiently produce Quotations (or Estimates), based on standard Project / Job templates (or on a previous Job that is very similar), and then adjusted further to reflect the nuances of the prospective job. 
    • Once a Quotation has been accepted, you can convert it into a job, and assign staff and target dates to various lines. 
    • Staff can then code their timesheets to respective lines in the Job Schedule, and it will monitor progress of each line and the job as a whole. 
    • There is a facility to warn you of any jobs where you are at risk of blowing the target date, (e.g. warning of jobs where timely approval/consent has not yet come back from the local council). 
    • It also provides detailed analysis of job profitability by line, and staff performance against budget across multiple jobs.

Accounts Modules

  • The Creditors module
    • Now facilitates electronic filing (and retrieval) of supplier invoices (that you received via email, or have scanned using your multi-function printer, say).  This is extremely valuable for firms with multiple offices, where supplier invoices are entered by the relevant branch office. 
    • We have also improved the way that items are passed on to respective jobs in the Time & Cost system, for subsequent billing.

  • We now have a Windows General Ledger.  This has an extended version, which supports branch offices and/or divisions.  Unlike some other general ledgers, you do not need to delete old transaction history from past financial years.  This allows you to run comparative reports over several years, and provides full audit trails of things like director’s loans, and asset and hire-purchase history.

  • New "AutoBank" module. 
    • This imports electronic bank statements (from your bank software or Internet banking facility) for various bank accounts (including company credit cards). 
    • It links with your Debtors Ledger, raising new electronic receipts (e.g. by direct credit) for known debtors, and matches up (and validates) batched deposits of cheques. 
    • It also raises new transactions in the General Ledger (automatically coding transactions like bank fees and APs to the GL account code used in the past for similar transactions), and provides automated bank reconciliation. 
    • The AutoBank facility significantly reduces data entry and reconciliation effort in both the Debtors module and General Ledger.  It even provides a nice mechanism for searching through your source bank transactions, if/when you need to do so. 

Miscellaneous

  • Our Transfer Facility module has been enhanced. 
    • This now has a "Remote Synchronization" facility to better support remote branch offices and notebook computers that are used away from the main office. 
    • It also now uses Universal Time for resolving any conflicts.  This better supports offices in different states or countries (i.e. time-zones), and avoids complications if the wrong time-zone has accidentally been selected on a workstation or on a remote notebook computer.
    • (Note that our software also works well in a Terminal Server / Citrix environment, if you wish to implement multiple offices this way instead.)

  • New Sales Administration and Inventory modules (for sales based organisations, rather than professional practices).

  • Automated Updates from our website
    • The software checks for updates (very quick) once each day when (if) the first person with "Administrator" security privileges (for our software) signs into our software.
    • There is also a facility in the Administrator Menu to check for new updates.

  • New enhancements to help System Administrators:
    • Administrator Messages.  Allows you to broadcast a message to all active users, and even force them to close out of the software.  You can set up messages that are repeated daily - e.g. to close everyone out at 11pm at night (so people who go home without closing out of the software won't disrupt the overnight backups or re-build of indexes).
    • Improvements to our backup mechanism.  This now allows "hot backups" during the day, while users are still accessing the software, and means that a computer going into hibernate overnight (with our software still open), does not kill your overnight backup.
    • New scheme for installing and running the software, whereby the program files are copied to the "Windows Temp folder" on the local hard disk and run from there.  This reduces network traffic, and helps things to run even faster.  It also allows "hot updates" (i.e. installing a new release of the software while users are still logged in) - provided that the new version does not need to upgrade the structure of a table that other users have opened.