Fast-forward your business to 2009

Upgrades are one of the most important Cover benefits, so we take great pleasure in introducing you to Pastel Accounting 2009 and, thereby, offering you even greater security, flexibility, efficiency, and control.

What’s particularly gratifying to us as developers is that this is very much your upgrade – because, although we monitor trends, one of our most important sources of ideas for new product development is customer and channel feedback.

Join us now on a whirlwind tour of your upgrade’s new features and benefits, but for the complete set of features, refer to the What’s New in 2009 guide.

TOP FOUR REASONS TO UPGRADE

1. Pastel Bank Manager New! Add-on module for Xpress and Partner ^{Time Saver}

Pastel Bank Manager is one of the most exciting new modules in the 2009 upgrade.

With Pastel Bank Manager, you can download your bank statement into Pastel and then let the system automatically update your books. Simply download the electronic bank statement from your bank – it works with all major SA banks – and map the bank transactions to the correct ledger accounts in your books. This only needs to be done once. Thereafter, the system automatically assigns the transactions for you after each subsequent import. Manually capturing transactions off your bank statement – a time-consuming chore – will become a thing of the past. Also, while add-on modules normally incur an extra charge, as a special benefit, Pastel Bank Manager is free until your next Cover renewal.

Pastel Bank Manager automates a dull, but necessary task. What a pleasure.

2. User Groups and User Access New! Feature in Xpress and Partner ^{More Control}

With security and fraud becoming an ever-greater challenge, we’ve made it a major focus of the upgrade. Specifically, you will now be able to restrict access to sensitive financial information by user. In addition, we’ve made the entire process more flexible through our new user group functionality. It allows you to categorise certain people within a group, giving them certain access capabilities, but with the option to further personalise a particular user’s rights.

For instance, you may have three or four debtor’s clerks, each responsible for different parts of your debtor database. Grouping them allows you to do one set-up for access rights for all of them and, when someone else joins the group, you simply attach them to the overall group without having to do a separate set-up. Furthermore, access settings for individuals within a group can be personalised. For example, if there’s a debtor’s clerk who occasionally also has to do invoicing, their access settings can be customised to allow this, without affecting the access rights of the rest of the group.

The levels of access control you can impose now range from the type of document a user can process to the type of functionality a user can access. For example, you can:

• Allow an employee access to a particular report they need, but not all the financial reports or the trial balance.
• Give one user the ability to only do quotes and another the ability to only do invoices, depending on the business requirements.
• You can even determine which users should do the online back-ups and which shouldn’t.
  

This feature is considerably more sophisticated than the previous version’s User Types and allows you to fine-tune the system to your specific needs. In other words, you now have real control over user access and, therefore, your business.

3. System Audit Trail New! Feature in Xpress and Partner ^{added security}

The System Audit Trail tightens the security of your overall system by tracking the date, time and user who makes any system set-up changes such as allowing inventory quantities to fall below zero and renumbering customer or inventory codes. This feature promotes accountability, minimises mistakes and deters users from fraudulent behaviour.

When the system settings are modified, this new report provides a full history of the changes. There’s no set-up involved; the system automatically records the changes and safeguards your business.

4. Transaction Audit Trail New! Feature in Xpress and Partner ^{added security}

The Transaction Audit Trail provides a chronological sequence of transactions to help with data interrogation.

This includes those “behind the scenes” postings and transactions, and will simplify investigations into anomalies or queries. For instance, it will be possible to identify deleted transactions because each transaction is now uniquely numbered and listed in the order that processing occurred, so any deleted transactions will not appear in the Transaction Audit Trail. Thus if transactions INV000102 to INV000107 have been deleted, for example, then the transaction history will jump from audit number 750 to 775.

This new feature also allows the user to extract only transactions relating to a specific batch, including the related generated entries.

Both the System Audit Trail and Transaction Audit Trail features will be very useful in forensic auditing investigations. Information is power, and with added security comes peace of mind.

MORE REASONS TO UPGRADE...

Pastel Cash Manager New! Add-on module for Partner only ^{improved cash flow}

Pastel Cash Manager is a debtor’s management system that’s suitable for any business in any industry that seeks to optimise their debtor’s collection process. Unlike other products which tend to focus on the macro-level, this is a hands-on practical system that automates the daily control of the debtor’s book.

For instance, Pastel Cash Manager generates automatic chase lists for follow up, eliminates the need for scribbled notes on the age analysis, provides instant reconciliations of invoices outstanding per aging category per debtor, calculates actual days outstanding per invoice, monitors payment history and tracks all calls made to debtors and promises made. It also does all the conventional projections such as cash flow forecasts and average age of debtors.

Pastel Cash Manager enables you to pro-actively and quickly improve cash flow – a must in today’s business climate.

Gross Profit Reports: average cost or last cost Enhanced! Feature in Xpress and Partner ^{flexible reporting}

All reports displaying Gross Profit, such as Sales by Item or Sales by Customer, now have the option to use either average cost or last cost. This is particularly useful if your costs vary considerably.

Point of Sale (POS) Enhanced! Add-on module for Xpress and Partner ^{added security more flexibility}

We have listened to customer suggestions and improved POS in a number of ways.

Security in the POS module has been tightened. For example, you can assign rights to specific fields, determining which fields a user can change and, as a double protection, allow a particular user the right to change a field, but only if a supervisor password is entered. This is useful, for instance, when you’d like the teller to have the flexibility of processing a discount on an invoice, but only with supervisor permission.

There is greater integration between the core Pastel Accounting application and the POS module. Quotes, Sales Orders and Purchase Orders will now be available in POS if processed in Pastel Accounting, and available in Pastel Accounting if processed in POS.

Receipting Enhanced! Add-on module for Partner only ^{time saver}

The improved Receipting module allows you to receipt money against multiple customers, suppliers, or GL Accounts, saving you considerable time.

For example, a school can now include school fees, books and school trips all on a single receipt. This enhancement was specifically developed for schools, but is also applicable to other businesses.

On-line backup integration New! Feature in Xpress and Partner ^{easier backups}

You now have tighter integration into Pastel IronTree’s online backup solution, because you can register for and launch online backups from within your application.

Looks do count New! ^{new looks}

We’ve also given Pastel Accounting 2009 a mini-face lift by adding some fresh new graphics and icons – nothing drastic, just enough to enhance the user experience.

ALSO AVAILABLE

Xpress and Partner Cover custaomers can also look forward to a host of other useful additions and enhancements such as supplier categories, an import mapping facility, an increase in document reference field sizes, order numbers, supplier invoices on hold, and more.

If you’re an Xpress user
Some features that were previously only available in Partner are now available to you! This includes the ability to create considerably more cashbooks and access to the helpful Count Inventory assistant.

If you’re currently on version 9.1.4 or lower
Statistics show that people spend about 30 percent of their time capturing data and 70 percent looking for it. Our advanced drill-down feature reduces the 70 percent by an order of magnitude - what used to take hours, now takes seconds.

Drill-down functionality allows click-of-a button access to the information behind a field. For example, the sales account in your trial balance reflects a certain amount. Suppose you’d like to see the detail behind that number, simply click your mouse while hovering over the balance and Pastel will instantly show you the detail. But perhaps you want to see the actual make up of the last entry on the current screen, for example, an invoice for another amount. Once again, simply hover, click and you’ll get the detail.

If you’re not currently enjoying the benefits of drill-down functionality, this makes your reasons to upgrade even more compelling.

Tried and tested
Remember, we always test our Beta versions live at customer sites. So the upgrade you get has already been operating successfully in live businesses.

Tip: Check out your What’s New guide for more information about the Pastel 2009 features. See the Installation guide and Tips and Tricks article for guidance while installing your upgrade.

Contact us

Registrations: 011 304 3900 or registrations@pastel.co.za
Support: 011 304 3300 or support@pastel.co.za
Website: www.pastel.co.za