Latest News & Tips

Big news! We’ve just released our largest SalesBinder update yet. It’s all about providing tools to better manage items with different varying attributes (such as size & color). We call this feature “Item Variations“, and it’s the final piece for managing all your different types of inventory.

What can I do with Item Variations?

• Keep track of quantities for items which vary by size, color, style, etc.
• Track quantities in every location for each specific item variation
• Set custom pricing for each of your item variations

How does it work?

• First you create your reusable attributes (size, color, style, etc)
• Attributes can be set as: plain text, unique text, or even preset options in a select menu for things such as “S, M, L, XL, XXL”
• Add variations to any Quantity Item by viewing the item and clicking on the new “Item Variations” button in the toolbar
• Select zero or more attributes that are applicable to your item (selling price and unit cost are also attributes so certain variations can be more/less expensive)
• Everything else works exactly as you’d expect, and if you don’t need item variations it’s completely transparent so you won’t see it

We’re really excited about these new features and would love to hear what you think – so let us know how we’re doing. We have a lot more new features on the way as well and we’ll be making more announcements on those soon.

We’re extremely excited to announce all the amazing new features we’ve released over this past week and we’ve outlined the biggest new features below:

Completely New Email System

A completely new email system has been integrated into SalesBinder which now allows you to:

• specify custom Reply-To email addresses so your customers can simply respond directly to your invoices/estimates/po’s
• rich-text html formatted email messages allows you to customize the look and feel of your outgoing messages by adding things such as bold text or different fonts

Importing Improvements

We’ve greatly improved our importing system so you’re now able to match up your custom fields with your CSV files. We also improved the importing process so it’s smarter and more streamlined.

Packing List Improvements

We added the ability to create custom notes for each of your packing lists as well as the ability to save a default note that will automatically be added to each of your packing lists. You also now have the option to completely hide all packing list functionality if you’re not likely to need these features.

SalesBinder User Profile Photos

We’ve teamed up with Gravatar and integrated their universal profile photo management system into SalesBinder. If you already have a Gravatar account setup, you’ll notice that your profile photo is now displayed beside all of your activity. If you don’t have an account, you can quickly create one (for free) and enjoy knowing your colleagues will see your friendly face instead of the default silhouette.

Over this past month we’ve released a couple maintenance releases which included bug fixes, performance improvements, and some new features based on user feedback.

Packing Lists

We’re pleased to announce that SalesBinder now has the ability to generate Packing Lists for each of your orders.

Packing Lists (aka Shipping lists or Waybills) are a shipping document that accompanies delivery packages, usually inside an attached shipping pouch or inside the package itself. It commonly includes an itemized detail of the package contents and does not include customer pricing. It serves to inform all parties, including transport agencies, government authorities, and customers, about the contents of the package. It helps them deal with the package accordingly.

To create packing lists using SalesBinder is as easy as one-click. When viewing the invoice of a specific order, you can now click on a new button called “Packing List”. This generates a nice PDF file that you can save or print and include in your shipping process.

Improvements

• When adding items to an estimate/invoice you can now search by SKU and Serial Number, in addition to the item name and unique ID number
• Contacts’ email addresses are now hyperlinked to load you default email program
• Dashboard Activity Feed is a little more concise (less duplicate info displayed)
• Friendly messages now appear when searching for something and getting zero results
• Importing Inventory Items is now much smarter:
• if you try to import an item as a “unique item” with a quantity of more than 1, we’ll assume you meant to make it a “quantity item” since that item is no longer unique if you have more than 1 of them
• if you import an item as a “unique item” and a quantity of zero, we’ll correct that as well and set it to 1.
• International currency symbols now display properly for all currencies (some unique currency symbols had displayed as “$” in a few areas)
• When deleting items from your long lists with multiple pages to view (Customers, Prospects, Suppliers, Inventory, Estimates, Invoices, Purchase Orders,  etc.), you now stay on the same page so you no longer have to find your way back once something is deleted

These are just some of the latest improvements to SalesBinder. As you may have noticed, we’re constantly updating our software with new features and usually release something major every 3-4 weeks.

Keep checking in with us to stay up-to-date on our latest releases!

- The SalesBinder Team

We’re pleased to announce SalesBinder now supports custom user permissions! As an account administrator you’re now able to enable or disable access to each specific area within SalesBinder for each Team Member (aka user account). When you disable access to something, it also hides those features from view for that user so it’s not obvious their account has limited access.

Here’s a nice view of how it works, which should (hopefully) be self explanatory:

You’ll notice there’s also an option to hide “Unit Costs & Additional Expenses”. This is a great feature if you want to give your sales people full access to SalesBinder but don’t want to share with them what the company’s real profit margins are.

To get to the new User Permissions area, first you’ll need to be logged in as the account Administrator (the user that initially setup your SalesBinder account). Go to “Settings” and then use the “User Accounts” box on the right side of your screen. You can click on a users name or add a new one to start trying the user permissions. Note: You cannot disable any permissions for the admin account since they’ll always need full access.

We hope this new feature will come in handy for a lot of you. We love feedback so please let us know what you think and if there’s anything else that you’d like to see supported by SalesBinder!

- The SalesBinder Team -

We’ve been busy, and it’s been great!

The SalesBinder team has been hard at work on some great things this year. Most recently we’ve released features such as Account Labels, Custom Units of Measure, our brand new API, and the new multi-photo uploads we released last month. Behind the scenes we’ve also been busy implementing new performance and UI improvements across the board (some of which you should already notice).

In the coming months we’ll be releasing some even bigger updates geared towards improving our Inventory Management functionality further. Within a few weeks we’ll be ready to release one of our most requested features of the year, generating Purchase Orders from a Suppliers list for replenishing stock (more info will be released in a few weeks). We’re really excited about these upcoming features!

An Awesome API Integration Example

We’re pleased to feature a great example of what you can do with our SalesBinder API. Pacific Tractor, one of our long-time customers has recently launched a completely integrated website that ties directly into their own SalesBinder Inventory. What does this mean? It means they’ll never have to worry about constantly updating their website in hopes to keep their ever changing inventory and pricing details accurate. It’s all done automatically. Their website always displays the latest inventory information in real-time.

Since launching their website with the SalesBinder API fully integrated, they’ve seen a clear increase in sales due to them having the ability to include more inventory on their website with less management overhead, and always displaying their most competitive pricing.

Check out this great example for yourself. Visit www.pacifictractor.com.

If you’re interested in creating a similar solution for your business, feel free to contact us and we’d be more than happy to work with you (if you already have a website or not).

That’s it for now. Be sure to check back in the near future to get more info on all our upcoming new features!