1] New price structure including a FREE version
Small companies can start using Pearl Express for FREE. As a business grows and demands more from its IT systems, it can upgrade to Pearl Starter, Standard or Premium rather than face the expense of installing new software. Read how Pearl has helped businesses grow to multi-million turn-over organisations.

It’s an exciting launch for us. To date we’ve been working tightly with a few larger companies, and now our goal of making Pearl available to all businesses is a reality. There’s nothing out there in the market that does what we do at this price

2] New user interface
The new user interface has now been rolled out to all clients and is proving popular. It is really simple to use, looks great and contains new charts/graphs so can access key business information at a glance. In addition we have packed in more features, including:

- New CRM features like Email Marketing
- A credit card processing console with Secure Trading
- A web portal for their customers to re-print invoices/statements, make payments, track jobs/orders and more.

3] New website
We just launched a smart new website www.thisispearl.com that allows new clients to sign up on-line. Everything like billing and upgrades are now done automatically on-line. We design loads of websites for clients, read more about our design services.

4] Great reviews in the Press
“Wow – Pearl really has it all.” Ben Kepes, CloudAve.
“Much of what Pearl is already doing meets the needs of [Accounting] practitioners”. Dennis Howlett, AccManPro.

How fast can you develop a mature web ERP app is the question? What’s the time to market from ground zero? At what point do you launch your product in “beta” version, if you do at all? We’re where we are after more than 8 years of development, experience and mistakes. We’ve been putting 200% effort into the product rather than pre-launch hype, which is why you may not have heard much about us yet. Admittedly, we’ve really ramped it up in the last 24 months, but even so – 24 months is a fair while, but look carefully at what Pearl can do and you’ll see why.

Replicating an offline system is one way to get out there fast, and that looks like what Sage were planning at the start of ’09 – but we’re seeing plenty of users ditching Sage for lighter, more basic systems. Software like Sage Line 50 has a huge number of superb features, but because it’s been around for ages and ages, it’s also got lots going on that can intimidate a less exprienced user. One of the reasons that the web based apps out there are picking up users two-a-penny is because they are SIMPLE.

Now simple is good because it’s easy to learn, looks clean and feels great to use. But try and pack in a load of features that are pretty essential to a larger SME (eg decent stock control, batch product management, full ecommerce integration) – and it gets pretty tricky to keep it simple… so the challenge is to keep it simple whilst powerful.

Pearl has tackled this problem in a number of ways-

1/ User Interface
We’ve released the new Pearl UI, in preparation for the launch of Pearl Express at the start of May. It’s colour coded, clear and gives you access to every page on the system within two clicks whilst not baffling the user with too many options. Everyone loves it! What do you think?

Colours in Pearl

2/ Colours
Throughout Pearl you’ll see the ability to colour code things like order statuses, customer labels, and events. At a glance you can get a good feel for what the screen is trying to tell you without needing to actually read it. It’s also handy for preventing errors – for example if your order is in red (“ready to ship”, perhaps), then you’re not going to inadvertently send off another quote.

3/ Multiple subscription levels
Pearl Express – the free version of Pearl – is a reduced functionality package with a fraction of what Pearl can offer, yet it still has more features than many other apps out there. Users can get used to Pearl without being overwhelmed, and then move up to our other price plans as their company grows, all the way up to the higher end of SME, with 50+ staff and £10m+ turnover, all managed in the same application: no data transfer, no learning curve – just the same system from day one.

4/ Configuration options
So you don’t need stock control? Just turn it off. Same for time billing – there’s no need to clutter the screens with features that you don’t need. The inline configuration screen allows the user to make these choices and set their system up exactly as needed.

So where does this take us? We’ve got experience with multi user, multi departmental, multi site clients in a huge variety of sectors, and clients that have more than 1.5 million product lines, as well as Mr. Bob who’s running his building company using Pearl just for book keeping. If you can make it simple for Bob, then with a bit of sneaky design, Mr. Corporation is simply 100 Mr. Bobs all tapping away happily at the same Web2.0 web based app.

It’s taken us the best part of a decade, and we’ve still got a fair way to go in some areas. My punt is that it’s not going to be an easy task for Xero, Kashflow and some of the others to move from the “accounting” space into the “business management” space. A number of companies have gone for the merge (Tactile and Freshbooks for example) … but with web based apps moving so fast I have a feeling that’s only going to end up being another systems fragmentation dead end. That’s why we built Pearl. One system. No limits. (hey, isn’t that someone else’s tagline?)

We’re charging on towards Pearl 2.0 … due to hit the virtual shelves on May the 1st. Everything is slotting into place nicely. The new user interface is really proving to be rather a hit, and we’re packing more features in while making it easier to use at the same time.  The biggest problem is that we may run out of 1.xx version numbers before we get to the start of May!

New payment plans
In a move towards easier billing, and a simpler growth for Pearl in the future, we have updated our payment plans (pricing structure). Most of our existing clients won’t see much of a difference, and in many cases your monthly fee now works out cheaper. 5 days before your next bill is due, a screen will pop open in your Pearl account offering you the option to confirm or change payment plans. If you have account terms with us you can put the bill on account, otherwise you will need to pop your credit card details into the screen before the next monthly bill is due. For more information on the new pricing structure, see here. The eagle eyed amongst you will notice that there is a FREE version. Sssh.

Web based accounting from Pearl

Payment allocation screen
This screen in the accounting area will now prevent you from posting payments for invoices before the invoice date – which confuses the way that Pearl allocates invoices. To pre-pay an invoice, you should be using a “payment on account”.

Super administrator
You can set any of your staff to be “system administrators” – these people have access to change staff privileges, re-assign campaigns and affiliates once set, and generally have more administrative options. Visit Setup::Licences and Permissions to see who they are.

List contacts with no campaign or owner
There are now search options within the CRM to find those contacts that need to be assigned a campaign or an owner.

New PDF generator
You’ll all be glad to hear that we have ditched the previous company that was building your invoice and quote PDFs; we’ve installed our own top-of-the range PDF system onto one of our quieter servers. PDF generation is now reliable, faster, and also the page breaks are much neater. We have had to put one or two tiny style overrides in place (for example font size) – so if you notice that these are affecting your PDFs then get in touch with us via helpdesk.

Pearl CRM dashboard

New widget : _deliveryEmail_
If you want to include your customer’s delivery email address on a purchase order, for example.

Multi storefront product / domain managment
If you’re managing multiple storefronts from the one Pearl account with different products per domain, then you can now use the APM (Batch process) to add, remove and update domains in bulk.

Look-ahead search in Supplier and customer quick-invoice
You’ll notice if you’re using Pearl Accounts that the quick invoice screen now has a look-ahead search box – which means that it is now much easier to find your supplier (or customer). NOTE that the customer or supplier must be a primary contact to be found in the list.

PO status on fulfilment of sales order
If you are using order fulfilment, to create Purchase Orders for a sale, then you can see the status of each Purchase Order from within the “Cost” tab on the sales order. Handy.

Changes to Chart of Accounts
We have a number of users moving across to Pearl from other software such as MYOB, Sage and TAS books, and to make their life simpler, as well as the accountants that work with them, we are making a few changes to the way that you can configure your chart of accounts. Before version 1.86 you have the option of creating bank accounts only between codes 1200 and 1250. You can now assign any code between 1000 and 2000 to be a “bank account”. For those of you moving from an older version of Pearl, all your bank accounts will have been automatically assigned. We’re going to be introducing the ability to tie a Purchase code (5000s) to a matching sales code (4000s) for accurate cost-of-sales analysis in the near future.

Credit notes
Pearl has a new template – “Credit note” – this is used in place of the “Invoice” template to create PDFs where the value of a sales order is less than zero. Your credit note template has been created automatically from your Invoice template. Edit it if you like in the Setup area.

Email marketing
We’re nearly there … mass email marketing is disabled in this version as we put in the final tweaks and tests. We plan to have it rolled out by the end of this week, which will be Pearl version 1.88 or 1.89.

Secondary reference now available for Purchase Orders
The “customer reference” field in the “other” tab in orders was previously only available for Sales. It’s now available for Purchase Orders too – don’t forget you can type this reference into the orders quick search box to find the order too.

Purchase Orders attach as PDF
When emailing a PO out to your supplier, Pearl will now save a copy on the order in the attachments tab.

Web based EPOS

EPOS V2
The second version of the EPOS screen has now been launched – including the following updates:

• Fewer clicks to create an order
• Ability to require staff to log in with a PIN number rather than select from a menu
• 60 second time-out: No need to re-identify yourself for each sale if it’s busy at the till
• Customer quick-add is easier and more intuitive

We will be adding some more features to EPOS over the next week, too.

Accounting data import
You can now import a whole set of accounts into Pearl from Sage, TAS and MYOB, including Chart of Accounts, Trial Balance, Debtors and Creditors. This feature is available until you have entered 10 transactions into the accounting system. We’ll be running a full press release on this one soon – but if you need it nownow, then get in touch.

Secure Trading credit card payment console
This is a pretty big feature release – and we’ll also run a specific release on this one. It gives you the ability to take credit card payment directly from within your Pearl screens … the payment turns up in your bank account a few days later! Fees are competitive, and Secure Trading offer an excellent hand-holding setup service for new users. To see it in action, set a sale to payment method “Secure Trading”, save and use the “take payment” link.

… more coming soon!

Especially with the new brigade of web based apps, they need to have confidence that the software provider is going to be around in 5 years time – which is of course much more of an issue with an externally hosted offering than it would be with a local install of Sage or Quickbooks.

The accountant needs to be totally familiar with the system before they can attempt to answer questions about it, which requires a commitment before they have even made the first sale.  And if they are selling Pearl, well wow, there’s a lot that you could be learning about!

Softly softly :- start off nice and easy. Luckily we’ve got the Pearl Express version which is a light, FREE business app (Sales, CRM) with Pearl Accounts plugged in. Even so it’s never an easy sell. Some practices have the vision, and some don’t. The past few days have given me a renewed confidence in the future of web based business software, and accounting in particular.

And as a special treat, we have written a tool  to allow an accountant to transition a client from Sage, MYOB or TAS books to Pearl in literally 3 ludicrously simple steps. Customers, Suppliers, TB and all. Watch out for the press on that one next week.

Also on the cards at Pearl HQ this week has been an upgrade of the Flash sales and product reporting, more AJAX look-ahead functionality in the accounts area, and a faster slicker way to top up your SMS credits.

Bon weekend, les internauteurs…

The company has been managing multiple teams of contractors across multiple sites, with stock purchase orders being sent direct to suppliers for goods paid for by the subcontractor team, engineers being notified of new work automatically from the system by SMS, time being logged against each job and invoices being raised to clients directly from a combination of time logged and materials used. The company then self-bills for the subcontractors and gets a clean, up to date view on the whole company operation. It’s a lot to ask from a team that are used to working from note books and whiteboards, but it’s gone well. We’ve also been commissioned to re-brand and re-build their old website to help them approach larger suppliers and have a more professional public presentation.

For more information, have a look at the case studies section of our site.

We’ve also learnt more about what people find easy, what they find hard, and of course come back with yet more improvements and modifications to the system. Watch out for more features in the order clone screen (which allows you to copy one sale to another, or to a purchase order on a different price list), and a totally revamped accounts import tool for bringing new Sage, TAS and MYOB users onto Pearl automagically.

If you didn’t know we did websites too as part of Pearl, have a look at some of our recent projects:

www.motorkwik.com – 100% Pearl driven AutoTrader style site, including tracked and paid banner ads

www.moonclimbing.com – sales and international distribution of climbing gear

www.nwav.co.uk – full ecommerce, accounting and drop-ship systems for an audio visual equipment supplier.

We’ve got plans to offer an alternative email solution too for those users that host their website on a PearlCart package, but don’t want to move their domains to our servers and their email client to PearlMail. This will offer a few levels of email to CRM integration, from single user to enterprise, finally closing one of the gaps towards the Pearl “business software in a box” solution.

Chris

You can now send clients and prospects professional newsletters and announcements in minutes from within Pearl without spending time transferring all your contact data from one system to another.

For those who don’t yet use email marketing to keep in touch with clients and prospects, this might be a simple way to start. Email Marketing is available in all versions of Pearl including Pearl Express – the new FREE version of Pearl. Although you do have to pay for emails sent.

To celebrate the new release, we’re giving away 1,000 email credits to new businesses that register for Pearl, just mention this newsletter when you sign up.

Working together, PayPal and Pearl have developed a unique integrated solution that automatically keeps sales, refunds, payments, accounts and bank in sync. Pearl now connects directly your PayPal account to retrieve all the information needed to keep business accounting up to date. Follow these easy steps to link your Pearl and PayPal account.

Click here to read more about Pearl on the PayPal website.

Cameron Mclean, PayPal Merchant Services General Manager has said “This is a very exciting integration for PayPal. This makes the process for small businesses far simpler and quicker which is important to businesses as it will save them time and money.”

Pearl will instantly show all your PayPal transactions, where:

* The customer has paid for a shopping cart on a Pearl e-commerce website
* The customer has paid for an invoice using a Pearl web portal
* The customer has paid an amount on account using a Pearl web portal
* The business has received funds into their PayPal account (not via Pearl)
* The business has issued a refund using the PayPal control panel

To celebrate the integration, we are offering 2 FREE Pearl CRM licences to existing PayPal customers who register for Pearl before 1st May 2009. Simply mention your PayPal email ID when you register … spread the word!