ChannelOnline 6.1.0 Release Notes

 

The 6.1 Release of ChannelOnline brings new document electronic signature delivery feature, plus Proposal and CPAS improvements with enhance functionality and the business process experience.

 

Documents

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Activity Log 

• All Quote, Order, and Invoice documents have a new ‘Activity’ sub-tab to the right of the ‘Sourcing – All Suppliers’ sub-tab that provides you a view of the who, what, and when about that document.  The Proposal ‘Activity’ sub-tab is next to the ‘Standard View’ sub-tab.

 

Footer Action Bar 

• We have changed the footer on all documents so that you can access it at anytime while you are working on a document.  Instead of having to scroll to the bottom of the page, you can open or close the action footer bar to make all your save, merge, export and send actions.

 

Electronic Signature (E-Sign)

 

• When working on a quote or proposal, a new delivery option will appear at the bottom of the page called ‘Electronic Signature’.
• Clicking the Electronic Signature link will prompt you to enter shipping and payment details if none have been entered.
• Once you provide your template and view options, you will be able to email a link to your quote / proposal directly to your customers.
• Administrators can enable electronic signature as well as manage custom signature fields for e-signed documents from Admin > Company Settings > Electronic Signature.
• End customers clicking on the link in the email will be taken to the online version of the document.  From the document the user may make a comment, accept or decline the proposal.  Once accepted, the quotes get converted into sales orders.

Proposals

 

Proposal creation involves two main phases.  Phase one is to build a customized template with the template designer and enable it for use (two starter templates come built into the application).  Once the template is enabled, phase two involves using it to create proposal documents for customers and prospects.

• Template Designer – As with quote templates you also can create company templates for use with the NEW proposal feature.  In order to make a proposal you will first need to have an available template.  To create, edit, copy and delete company templates, go to Admin > Document Templates, select the Proposal sub-tab and then the desired action.  New components were added to the designer for making proposal templates.  Once you have designed and enabled a template for use, you will be able to use it for creating proposal documents for customers. For more detailed information on how to use the designer for proposal templates go to the Help Center from within ChannelOnline.
• Builder – After you have enabled a template for use you can create a proposal by going to the desired customer and selecting the Create Proposal link underneath the contact information and above the list of quotes and orders.Special components have been created for proposals:
  • Cover Page: the cover page displays the applied theme, or a background of your choosing, plus add important data fields for dynamic generation. (Designer only)
  • Table of Contents (TOC): a table of contents can be added to a proposal by using the table of contents component.  Once added, the component will pickup all headers that have been added to the proposal.  These headers will be displayed in the proposal builder and act as anchors for building and pdf conversion. (Designer only)
  • External Links – Use external links to take users to documents or files stored on a public drive.
  • Add Quotes – This feature allows users to create proposals with options and/or phases in a project plan.  The add Quotes component works in two ways.  By adding it in the template designer, it is used as a placeholder for quotes to be added to the proposal by clicking on the “click here to add a quote.” link in the builder.  When building a proposal users can also add quotes by clicking on the Add component icon and going to the Add Quotes tab in the add component light box.  The feature can only add an available ‘Open’ quote or multiple quotes to the proposal.  Quotes that have already been added to a different proposal or converted into a sales order cannot be added to a proposal.
  • Add Spec Sheets – Add a complete product specification sheet into the body of a proposal document.  In the builder only the top portion gets displayed, but in preview or send you will see the complete information.

The following designer improvements, accessible through buttons at the bottom of the page, can be used with quotes and proposals in the designer and builder:

• • Insert Row: add rows and the number of columns (1, 2, 3 or 4) to add to a layout.
  • Page Breaks: insert page brakes to assist PDF creation and printing of documents.
  • Headers: headers are inserted to help structure a proposal and create table of contents entries.
  • Horizontal Lines: add horizontal lines to the document to create visual breaks or sections.

• Electronic Signature (E-Sign) – The new electronic signature functionality is available for proposals once you have moved a proposal from Draft mode to the Ready for E-Sign state.

 

System Notifications

• SalesReps and account managers can now see a view only version of CPAS orders that are awaiting approval from within Admin.
• By using the alternate approver drop down multi-select function, users can set more than one person as an alternate approver.
• Expired orders submitted in CPAS can be Recalled or Declined to clear them out of the pending approval queue.
• Cleaned up the Approval Event Log for showing employee actions.

Improvements & Fixes

General Items

• System E-mails have a new look.  Under Admin > System E-mails the section has been reworked to be more user friendly.  Templates have been placed into the following groups: Document Delivery, System Generated, Product, StoreSite, and User Accounts.
• Top Navigation changes.
  • The ‘Quotes and Orders’ tab has been renamed ‘Documents’.  Documents no longer takes you to the last customer view you were on but to a recent list of documents.  To go straight to the last viewed customer you now use the ‘Customer View’ tab.  In the ‘Documents’ tab there are now sub-tabs for each document type available: All Quotes & Orders | Quotes | Proposals | Orders | Invoices | RMAs.  NOTE: All ‘Quotes and Orders’ only contains quotes, sales orders and invoices.  It does not contain Proposals or RMAs.
  • Special treatment has been given to the ‘Active’ and ‘Customer View’ tabs to indicate that these tabs reflect the active document (non-locked) and last viewed customer.  The ‘Active’ tab no longer has the document type appended to it, formerly it would read ‘Active Quote’ or ‘Active Order’.
  • Removed the Admin tab; it is now only available in the left navigation list.
  • Purchase Order tab now includes a Supplier RMAs sub-tab.  The following sub-tabs had name changes: “Current Supplier” was updated to “Recent Supplier”, and “All Suppliers” was changed to “Supplier List”.
• The “Quote (On Hold)” status has been changed to be just “Quote (Hold)”.  Use of the (On Hold) status is only now found on sales orders.
• Delivery Status updates for documents.  Now the Delivery Status field will show a numerical value associated with the number of items that belong with that status next to the status type in the header.  These values will only pertain to the Shipped and Delivered Statuses and include the total number of items on an order.  Summary information based on the items in the order will be provided.  Example: a Sales Order with 2 lines, item qty 6 (Line 1: Qty 3 Shipped, Line 2: Qty3 Un-submitted) will look like “Shipped 3, Delivered 0, Total # items 6”
• Update shipping and delivery statuses manually on an order.  Sometimes it is necessary to manually update the statuses on the Sales Order if the connection from the PO is lost.  To do this you must select the checkbox in the Company Settings labled “Enable Manual Status for Sales Orders.”
• Added the following sales stages to the document header for selection: Lead, Qualified, Discovery, Quoted, Commitment, Not ready to Buy, Closed (once converted to SO, Won, Lost or Cancelled).
• Added Probability tracking in 10% increments to document headers.
• Account Manager names are now visible in the header on documents under the SalesRep creating the document.
• Changing a contact on the quote uses the edit icon which produces a drop down in the header instead of calling a lightbox.
• Updates to Customer View.
  • Customer View is now its own tab next to the Active tab and displays the last visited customer record.
  • Customer View now displays all documents types.  When searching for documents associated with a contact you can now do it by document type: All Quotes & Orders | Quotes | Proposals | Orders | Invoices | RMAs.  Note the default is the familiar All Quotes and Orders view.
  • Edit Customer now has places to assign a Service Technician, Customer Service Rep and Credit Manager to a customer company record.
• The document template designer, as well as the new proposal designer will now allow you to create your page’s row layout dynamically, by adding new rows as needed, add horizontal lines, and page breaks (see Proposal section above).  With the added flexibility the number of starter templates was dropped from twelve to four.
• SalesReps will now be notified when an cart on the store site has been saved for later.
• Adding multiple attachments to an email when sending is now available (it only allowed single attachments when it was introduced).
• Set end customer password timeouts from the Admin > Company Settings for all customers (global setting).  End customers will be prompted to update their password after the selected number of days.

 

Fixes

• Fixed a problem with retrieving document revisions for viewing has been resolved.  All revisions should now be visible.
• We resolved an issue that was causing outgoing PunchOut extrinsic fields to not be saved when clicking the ‘save’ button.
• Resolved a handful of errors that IE users would experience due to failed JavaScript execution.
• Fixed a “Narrow your results” filter issue on the right, the selection symbols are now visible and ( >= or <=) and are clickable on hover.
• When importing a configuration to a quote the manufacture field was not populating correctly.
• Some cleanup was performed on the master manufacture file to remove invalid manufacturers.
• When running a report with manual line items the individual line items where being lumped together.  Now they are separated out as unique parts with manufactures.
• In the “Ask Sales” correspondence window when users selected “Send” email in the form they would sometimes stay within that window and not be redirected back to the shopping cart.
• D&H live price and availability update error.
• Invalid file error with Tech Data EDI download and import.