Learn more about new functionality coming to Bevica. Presented by Claudio Martell, Bevica Product Director, this 30-minute webinar contains new or updated features that will most affect the user experience.
Transcript
1:59
Good afternoon and welcome to today’s webinar. We’re going to be talking today about what’s new in Bevica. So, all of the changes that have come across from Microsoft in the recent wave update. My name is Danusia Jolliffe and I am the Marketing and Customer Services Director here at TVision and Bevica. And I’ll be looking after the housekeeping element, so if anybody has any questions, please do pop them into the chat, and I will make sure they are answered as we go along; or at the end. Or if it requires a more deep, in depth answer, then I’ll ask Claudio to get in touch. So, I’m going to turn off my camera, sit in the background and monitor the chat. I’m now going to pass over to Claudio. Over to you.
2:39
Morning, everyone.
2:40
So, as Danusia said, the plan for today is to go through some of the stuff we’ve been doing in Bevica.
2:47
Give you a flavour of what’s new in the software. What we’re doing in the next couple of months in the product, a bit about Business Central. And then I’ll actually go through some of the new functionality to give you an idea of what it does.
3:02
In terms of the work we’ve been doing in Bevica in the last six months or so, these are the sorts of kind of high-level things we’ve been doing.
3:10
So, whenever we do a release of Bevica, included in those sometimes are hot fixes, little tweaks that we don’t tend to advertise too much. The ones you’re seeing on screen now, tends to be the larger things that we’ve kind of invested into software that really move it forward. So, Excellarant Commission Ordering, that’s something we took from the old version of the product.
3:31
So, if anyone here is on the on-premise version, when I show you Excellarant Commission stuff in a minute, it will look familiar. The same with unpaid reserves.
3:40
So, the ability to store, or put aside stock for a customer.
3:45
Or a group of customers, a salesperson, so they can sell it and you don’t run out. On the paid reserve side.
3:52
Bottling and change of ownership. So, if anyone is managing paid reserved for their customers with bottling and the En primeur process.
3:58
You can move a paid reserve from, let’s say, a six pack, two half bottles, or Magnums if the customer has changed their mind to how they want the bottle stored or purchased.
4:09
And change of ownership is a really nice, easy little feature where you can just say, this paid reserve belonged to customer A and it’s being gifted or moved to customer B and it keeps all the audit in the background.
4:23
On the right-hand side, kind of some, some smaller bits and pieces, but again, nevertheless interesting if, if you’re using Shopify, we’ve done quite a bit of work for Bevica and Shopify on top of the standard Business Central extension. Notifications, in terms of sales orders, purchase orders, item details, customer details. And a nice one is the invoice layout, the pro forma.
4:46
So now on a sales order, you can print the pro forma and send that out to the customer, whereas before you had to kind of manually modify the sales confirmation.
4:56
All the details of everything that we release in Bevica, we do put on Freshdesk. There’s a specific page called Bevica releases. And that will list every single thing we changed in the product, no matter how small.
5:09
So, if you’re ever interested in seeing what the latest things that we’ve released, go to that page, and you’ll be able to read it, and there are links there to tell you how things, how things work.
5:19
So, in terms of the three things I really wanted to highlight today, and show you, because they tend to be the larger ones that I think people will get a lot of benefit out of, is I’m going to go show you some, how to place an Excellar order, and talk about commission ordering, and then show you how the unpaid reserves functionality works.
5:38
Looking forward to the next six months, we’re doing quite a lot of work with Vision and warehouse integration, and with Colina. So, things like improving how errors are trapped, when, if, for example, we’re sending a sales order to the customer.
5:54
Or to Vision, to then pick it for that customer.
5:56
If something happens in that process, and it doesn’t get there, we can report errors back within Bevica, so it’s easy to spot.
6:03
And two new features we’re releasing in the next six months is stock reconciliation.
6:09
So that we can tell, to make sure that the warehouse and us have the same stock levels. And Purchase receipts, so that when they receipt a purchase order of stock, they can notify us and then we can automatically receipt the purchase order in the software.
6:25
We’re also doing a little bit of work on paid reserves and EDI order integration.
6:29
So, if anyone deals with the large supermarkets where they send orders in via EDI, the likes of Morrison’s, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and so on, we’re integrating with a third-party provider called True Commerce to be able to import those orders automatically.
6:44
And then send out sales invoices from Bevica that then gets sent on to the supermarkets.
6:56
As well as the work that we’ve been doing, Microsoft have been very busy and are upgrading the Business Central based products.
7:06
So, the Wave 2 is ongoing at the moment, and these are just four of the highlights. There’s a huge list of things that Microsoft release, and it’s all on their website, they have made a significant improvement in performance.
7:20
So, we’re really eager to see how that pans out in the next six months to make sure that things are working as smoothly as possible in terms of processes.
7:27
Analysis Mode, I’ve mentioned this quite a few times, is one of my favourite releases for this year. So, the fact that from a, from a list in the product can summarise information, and you can create a pivot table.
7:44
And if I have time at the end of today, I’ll quickly show you how that works.
7:48
And then another, another nice one is that from now onwards if there’s any field that’s related to a page that you’re looking at, you yourselves can actually add it, so that page without having us, without having us have to do that for you.
8:03
So, in the past, we would have had to do a bit of development, add a field to a page, which was costly and time consuming, whereas now you can just do it yourselves using customisation on someone’s role centre.
8:18
Next, the next big thing that Microsoft are pushing, like, I’m sure everyone’s seen in the news, is AI.
8:25
So, Microsoft AI is called Copilot, and they have embedded a few features into Business Central and given us the opportunity, to write features in the software that use AI and Copilot. But that’s something that’s just come out in the last couple of weeks. Or we’re investigating.
8:43
No doubt, in the next six months, maybe the next release, or the next Bevica User Group, we will be talking about the sorts of things that we might do.
8:49
Or you might be telling us the sorts of things that you would like us to add to the software.
8:59
Claudio, sorry. Just before you go on, there is a blog that has been published as well, about the, what you were just talking about, about adding fields to the page. So, if anyone wants to find some more about it.
9:09
They can go to the website, that will be live either this week or early next. OK, that’s great.
9:17
In terms of, if anyone wants to know more about what’s new from the Business Central point of view.
9:22
We’ve done our own webinar that’s on our website that Ian did a few weeks ago. That kind of goes into a bit more detail. And then the full detail is on the Microsoft.com website.
9:34
For Business Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023, wave release 2, and we can, we can share the slides later on, so you can go to those URLs if you want to.
9:47
OK, so that was the, the opening, really, just to set the scene on, on what’s, what’s new in the software, both from ourselves and from Microsoft.
9:56
I’m now going to go into the software and show you a bit about Excellars and bit about unpaid reserves.
10:05
The concept of excellar commissions are, really that the stock goes direct from the supplier to your customer and you’re involved in the logistics and the invoicing in some cases of that.
10:17
So, the way that we’ve designed this is by using agreements or contracts.
10:30
Excuse me a second.
10:34
So, we have excellar agreements and commission agreements and think of each of these as a contract between yourselves your customer and your supplier.
10:45
Because this highlights who’s getting the stock, how much they’re paying for it, how much they might have taken, really the details of the software need.
10:53
So then when we create a sales order, we have all the details, and we can more easily create the sales order. So, each of these has a unique number telling us who the customer is, who the supplier is, and the product.
11:05
And if I scroll across…
11:10
The unit of measure, whether the sale is duty to paid or duty free, what the customer will be paying for that stock, and what in what currency. And then from the purchasing side, how we plan to purchase it, the price, and the currency.
11:22
Then, just to keep things in line with other bits of the software, the start and end dates, we can block agreements if we want. And then we have a little area for notes.
11:32
We can create Excellar orders that are duty free from the supplier and either duty paid or duty free at the customer’s end. So, we have that flexibility of being able to do kind of all the logical combinations of duty free and duty paid.
11:49
So, the plan is when you have a new agreement for a product.
11:54
You create a line here and then it’s ready to be used when we do a sales order which I’ll show you in a minute.
12:03
So that’s the Excellar.
12:10
If I go to commission agreements, the principle is the same where we create effectively a contract.
12:16
But here the idea is that the supplier isn’t invoicing the customer for the goods, we are invoicing the supplier for a commission of the value, or the quantity of the goods, when they, when they arrive at the customer site. So, the same idea here.
12:33
We have a unique number for each one, telling us who the customer is.
12:38
We need a customer’s account for the supplier so that we can invoice them.
12:43
Then, again, if I scroll across similar to excellar agreements, we have the products, whether the sale is duty free or duty paid, price, and then the percentage commission that we want the software to calculate for us.
12:57
And again, the reason for doing this is when we come to a sales order, if we’re having to create lots of these in volume, it’s as easy as saying, this particular sales order is for this particular commission agreement, and the software then knows how to set that all up. So, we don’t have to go and find prices, find who the, who were buying the stock from, and so on.
13:20
Both the Commission Agreements and the excellar agreements have dimensions against them.
13:30
They will automatically create a dimension code that matches the Agreement Code.
13:36
And the advantage of this is that this dimension is copied to the sales order so that we can do analysis from a financial point of view, or in Power BI or in Jet add an individual commission agreement or excellar agreement level. So, all the sales orders that are attached to a particular commission code, commission number will be tracked for reporting.
14:01
So that’s the setup.
14:03
The idea is that, or the principle is that many, many of our customers, have huge volumes of excellar and commission orders. So, there’s a little bit of setup at the beginning. But the payoff is when you actually create the Sales order, it’s much easier and quicker to manage.
14:18
So, I’ll show you how that, how that works.
14:22
If I go to a Sales order.
14:25
So, we’re using the same mechanism as all our other sales orders, so to begin with.
14:29
It’s an exact copy of all other sales orders. So, if I click New.
14:37
And then select my customer.
14:44
Now the first thing we have to do that’s slightly different is tell the software that this is a commission or an excellar order, and for that we have the sales document type.
14:55
Where if I expand out the full list, you’ll see here that we have a sales identifier. Where some of them a commission, and some of them are excellar.
15:04
So, you’re able to create as many sales document types as you’d like for different purposes. You might use it for reporting off a filtering.
15:12
But as long as they’ve got the same or the correct sales identifier, then the software will be happy to know that this particular order needs to be processed in a particular way.
15:22
You can also set a default location, so it’s quite normal to have a excellar or commission specific location to keep it away from your normal stock location.
15:32
And if you want, um, to override the prices on the agreement, you can set a default customer price group or a discount group.
15:41
So, in my example here I’m going to select just the normal excellar document type code and once that set I can then say it’s the software.
15:54
Go and find all the excellar agreements or the excellar lines that are available to this particular customer, duty status, date range, et cetera, et cetera. So, this could be a long list of all the products that this particular customer takes.
16:08
And the idea here is that you see all the details. You can’t edit any of these details except for the quantity.
16:13
Say here. You say the customer wants 200 of that product…
16:17
And 250 of that and when you’re ready you say OK.
16:24
And it copies those lines down to the sales orders as specific excellar lines. So, if I do a zoom on…
16:38
the lines … so, if I highlight that line there and then search for excellar.
16:45
You’ll see here that it knows it’s an excellar type line.
16:49
It knows the purchase agreement code, so you can do full reporting at all levels. And it’s also stored the dimension against this particular, this particular line and all the other lines.
17:01
So, this then sits there in the software until you are ready to process the order in terms of creating the purchase order. Again, because the excellar agreement knows who were buying the stock from.
17:16
If I go to Process, Create Linked Order, this is now creating a purchase order for the supplier that we’ve said is going to supply these goods, and it’s created purchase order 116.
17:31
And, again, that is now copied onto the lines, and if I scroll down here from a user’s point of view, the easiest way of then getting to see that purchase order is here in the linked orders area.
17:44
It’s telling me that it’s created a purchase order for this supplier, and that’s the number.
17:50
And, if I drill down into that, that’s the purchase order, though, that I then would manage and send off to the supplier.
17:58
So, purchase orders act independently, sales orders act independently in terms of managing them, but they are linked together.
18:05
So, the software knows, for example, from this purchase order, if I scroll down to the lines, the quantities that we’re trying to purchase are actually reserved against that particular sales order.
18:20
As I scroll across, you’ll see here that’s linked to the sales order number and that particular customer.
18:25
So, there’s a, a hard link there between the two.
18:31
And that hard link means that when I’m ready.
18:39
When I’m ready in terms of invoicing, the sales order, I can just post it as normal.
18:52
I would typically ship an invoice so this will ship an invoice the sales order, creating the customer ledger entry against the customer, and it will receive the purchase order waiting for someone to process the purchase invoice and link it to that receipted stock.
19:10
So, if I say OK to that, the sales order will be deleted because it’s fully, fully shipped and invoiced and the purchase order will remain waiting for that invoicing section, invoicing bit.
19:30
Just let that run through.
19:31
And then we’ll open up the posted sales invoice.
19:47
And again, if I say yes.
19:51
So, the posted sales invoice looks like every other invoice any other invoice but it knows it’s coming from an excellar again.
19:57
So, you can do reporting at any particular level and the GL entries that have been created, the financial entries will all be stamped with that dimension code saying it’s coming from an excellar agreement.
20:12
The process for managing a commission order is very similar. You create the sales order. You tell it who the customer is, then you go to the list of commission agreements that are available. It will add those to the lines, and then we are creating a purchase order in the background, that link to that sales order. That’s more for reporting.
20:31
The, the value on that purchase order is zero, because we’re not actually buying the stock from that particular supplier, but we’re creating it, so that we can then, look at Purchase Orders, Commission, purchase orders, and have a view on, on what we’ve actually shipped from that particular supplier, even though we’re not paying for the goods.
20:50
When you’re ready, you then invoice the sales order as you would any other sales order.
20:55
And that will create the customer ledger entry against the supplier’s customer, with the value of the commission that you’ve, you’ve added to the commission agreements in the first place.
21:08
So hopefully, for those that might know the old way of doing it, it’s a similar concept.
21:14
You can do commission and excellar type transactions in the standard software without the need for this extension that we’ve written to Bevica. It’s a little bit more manual but you can achieve the same results.
21:26
It’s really if you have the volume of these types of transactions that warrants the extra extension and this particular setup, then you might be might be beneficial to use the commission and excellar extension, otherwise you could just use the standard software.
21:46
So that’s commissioner and excellar, are there any questions Danusia? Not at the moment? Feel free to ask any questions if anyone has them.
21:54
So, the second thing I wanted to show you was the unpaid reserves. So, back on the role centre.
22:02
So, the concept of unpaid reserves is that we have stock in the warehouse that we want to put aside, or a customer, or a group of customers, or for any section of our, of our customer base. And we want to put them aside and make sure that no one else will take them other than the ones we authorise to take them.
22:21
So, there’s a little bit of setup on this. Again, the idea is the setups upfront and then, on the sales order, it’s as easy as possible then, to manage that. It all starts with unpaid reserve groups.
22:37
You can create a group for any combination of customers you want, and this is just an example to give you some sorts of ideas that we have in our head that, you might want.
22:47
So, you can create a group that is for one customer specifically, and then any products attached to that group would only be available to that customer.
22:55
You can create groups for salespeople, buying groups, retail groups, wholesale groups, any group you want, because you, you manage, who’s inside each group from this list.
23:08
So, if I click on the wholesale group, you’ll see here on the right-hand side, these are the customers that I’ve assigned to the wholesale group. And there are eight of them.
23:17
If I go to Peter as a salesperson, he’s in charge of these two customers.
23:23
A customer can be in more than one group.
23:25
So, the Asado Bar & Grill have their own Unpaid Reserved Group but they are also part of the wholesale group.
23:32
So, you’ll see later on when we assign products on a sales order that you get to choose which unpaid reserve you take the stock from, or which one you, you down date.
23:45
So that’s the first thing. We create the group.
23:46
And then, we attach the customers to the group by clicking on here, or the customer, button at the top, and you just keep adding them.
23:55
You can use rapid start to populate if you have a long, long list.
23:58
Or if you have a group that you want to be unique to every single customer, there is a little tick box in the set up that will do that automatically when you create a new customer. So, you don’t have to come in here and update them every time.
24:13
The second thing you need to do, then, once you’ve created your group and assigned your customers, is assign the items in the quantities to your, to your group.
24:22
So, to see that from the wholesale, for example, if I click on the number of lines, you’ll see here that these are the Unpaid Reserve, unpaid reserve quantities assigned to this particular group. Each one is a unique number, so we can track exactly where it, where it goes.
24:44
They have a review date, that defaults to a particular date in the future that you can decide, but you can change it if you want to, and they have assigned user ID. So, if you have people responsible for managing these unpaid reserves, you can assign that. And then a note just for some internal texts.
25:02
And then the quantity that was reserved against this particular group, and remaining quantity on the side. So, you can see how that stock is being down dated over time.
25:18
So that’s the set-up, effectively what groups, what customers and what products you are reserving.
25:23
And once you reserve stock against an unpaid reserve, it comes out of free stock or stock that’s available to other people, so you could if you have 100 cases of particular product reserved, the whole hundred. In which case those hundred will only go to the customers that you’re specifying or you can reserve half of it for a number of customers which means that 50 cases are available to anyone who gets there first and puts it onto that sales orders.
25:51
If I click on Sales, just show you how we, how we manage this from a sales order.
25:56
If I create Sales orders, do a new sales order for the Asado Bar & Grill.
26:09
So, in this case, the orders duty paid, but the order will know if you reserve stock duty free, or paid and manage, how you can take that stock.
26:18
But once you’ve created the order in the standard way, you go to, excuse me, prepare and get unpaid reserves.
26:28
And this will show you a list of all the unpaid reserves that are available to this particular customer on this particular order.
26:35
So, you’ll see here that the Asado Bar & Grill has a number of their own unpaid reserves here, with the particular quantities.
26:43
And the unit of measure, they have two, because they’re part of the James Salesperson group, and they have four because they’re part of the wholesale.
26:53
So then to, to take some of the paid reserve.
27:00
Edit the list. There we go.
27:02
I can say, I want one of those, and I want two of those…
27:08
And let’s say I want three of those.
27:10
If the customer wanted to take some bottles from a case reserve, I can just change the unit of measure.
27:17
And now I’m taking three bottles from that, from that case reserve – and when I’m ready I say close and then those details are now added to the sales order.
27:28
And the Reserve is moved from that unpaid reserved to the customers sales order now. So, you see, those are the lines.
27:37
Quantity Reserved, the pricing is standard, so the Unpaid Reserve doesn’t manage the pricing that comes from just a normal sales audit processes.
27:47
And if I scroll across, we should be able to see.
27:55
Maybe not there.
27:58
Let me do a Zoom.
28:07
SKU.
28:10
We do have the unpaid reserve group we took the stock from, the unpaid reserve number. So again, we can do a full reporting, full audit of who created the original reserve and how it’s being down dated over time.
28:25
So really from a unpaid reserve point of view, that’s really it. Once it’s on a sales order, it’s no longer on the unpaid Reserve and now belongs as a reserve on that particular sales order for that particular customer.
28:37
If you delete the lines, it will put it back on to that unpaid reserve because you haven’t posted it. It’s only at the point posting stage that there’s kind of no return if you like.
28:51
So that’s the Unpaid Reserve process.
28:53
A little bit of setup at the beginning, deciding who gets, who gets the stock, if you need to manage a particular individual, in terms of managing it with dates.
29:02
And then it’s all actually processed via the sales orders, just naturally as part of creating sales order when a customer places an order.
29:13
That was what I wanted to show you.
29:16
Any questions?
29:22
No, no questions at the moment, you’ve obviously explained it perfectly.
29:28
So, thank you everyone for joining today. Did you have anything else you want to share?
29:35
So, thank you, everyone, for joining. This webinar will be available on demand on the website very soon. There will also be a link to it in the next Bevica Matters which were coming out early December. And the only other thing to mention is that we will also be running a new sales pricing experienced webinar in January. So, the invitations will be getting out for that soon so you can learn all about that in the very near future. So, thanks again, everyone for attending. And thank you, Claudio for showing us what’s new in Bevica.
30:04
Thanks, bye.
