|
You can now deposit employee paychecks directly into employee bank accounts
(Canada only, USA to follow soon).
Paychecks no longer need to be printed, although you can continue to print
any paychecks when necessary.
Stubs for electronically deposited paychecks can also be printed.
Added price tables with five quantity break points.
Prior to this release sales pricing was controlled by the sales account price field and the customer account price percent field. This release introduces price tables for greater control of pricing. Each price table has up to five quantity/price break points.
Each sales account has its own price tables so that pricing can be controlled independently for each product. If you do not use price tables, then the sale account's price field is used as usual.
Each customer account also has price tables for additional control, if required. You can add any number of price tables to each customer, and specify a sales account in each one. Suppose you sell WIDGETS to customer ADLER. Normally, the WIDGETS sales account price table would be used. But if you add a price table to the ADLER customer account and specify the WIDGET sales account, then it will be used when widgets are sold to Alder. So you always have the option of using a product's price table, or overriding it for individual customers, and remember, every price table has up to five quantity/price breaks.
Sales and customer accounts now have a table of price tables
and a corresponding view in the window list.
Performance improvement.
Some users will experience a significant performance improvement for certain types of disk related activities. The performance improvement will depend on the type of operation and the disk access speed of your computer.
User feedback indicates that although many computers are tuned for sequential disk access, they may still have relatively poor performance for the type of random access that predominates with NewViews. The actual random disk access performance of your computer depends on a complicated set of factors that include not only the specifications published with a computer, but also the actual disk access drivers (system software) that are installed. This topic is rather technical and goes beyond the scope of this discussion. However, situations have been encountered where newer computers are in fact slower than older, supposedly slower computers, instead of faster as they should be. Experience has also shown, generally speaking, that laptops tend to have poorer random access performance.
In response to feedback from users with a variety of computer configurations, this release addresses the issue and may help close the gap between computers with relatively poor versus good random access disk performance. If your computer already had good performance then you may not experience much of an improvement (say 10 to 15 percent faster). However, cases have been encountered where computers have run over six times as fast for disk-intensive operations such as large imports.
A new command, Print >Consolidation Analysis, was added to print a consolidation. This command is available only on a report's table of accounts (blue). It prints a multi-column report analysis, with a column for each report from which amounts have been totaled. This has the effect of printing a consolidation, and it is useful for many businesses, especially non-profit organizations, that need to report a breakdown of their projects. For example, suppose accounts on four different department/project income statements total to other accounts on the same income statement. Printing a consolidation analysis of that income statement would produce five columns, one for the consolidated totals, and one for each of the four subsidiary reports "below" containing an amount for a department/project.
You can issue this command from any view of a report's accounts. A prompt controls the settings for the report produced. Note that there is no view of this report in NewViews but is can be readily reviewed in a print preview.
2006 Payroll
Canada & USA payroll now include 2006 tax tables.
USA payroll can now print W2s.
USA payroll state table revision list.
Help >About now includes a list of the state tax table revision dates.
Canadian payroll now prints T4s.
Canadian payroll now prints Releve 1s.
Canadian payroll includes new PPIP paycode.
Beginning January 1, 2006, employers in the province of Quebec are required to deduct premiums for the Provincial Parental Insurance Plan (PPIP). This new deduction code has been added to Canadian Payroll.
Canadian payroll now includes the ability to create and print records of employment.
Employees now have a collection of Records of Employment objects, and the corresponding window views that allow you to create, view, and print them.
Prior to this release, each NewViews database consisted of the files database.qw, database.hdr, and database.0 to database.N. The first file, database.qw, has been eliminated and will not be found in database directories from this release forward. Information that had been contained in database.qw has been moved to database.hdr.
The reason for this change is as follows. database.qw was opened with read sharing for purposes that were reserved for future use. All other database files were, and continue to be, opened with no sharing, either read or write. What was happening was that users were attempting to copy databases from one directory to another, usually for backup purposes, when the database was currently open. Windows allowed database.qw to be copied, but not the other files, thus mixing up the files in the target database directory. As a result, typically after restoring a database, NewViews was attempting to recover the database that in fact did not need to be recovered. NewViews never allowed this to happen, but it did report errors indicating that recovery file information did not match corresponding database information.
With the elimination of database.qw, this potential source of confusion should no longer occur.
Some new functionality incorporated into new releases affects window setups. For example, in this release, there is a new employee view for records of employment, and similar new window functionality for the new customer and sales account price tables. This new functionality is not reflected in your windows until you perform a default window setup on the affected windows. However, NewViews automatically detects any windows that require updating and pops up a confirmation dialog asking if you would like to update the window. You can update it at that time or dismiss the dialog, in which case you will be asked again the next time you open the window.
This command provides functionality equivalent to the NewViews for DOS
IMPORT procedure.
At this time only general accounts and general transactions are imported but this
functionality will be extended and generalized in the future.
Other types of accounts, i.e. sales, inventory, customers, etc., and other
types of transactions will also be imported under this feature.
The primary purpose of this feature is to provide a generic
way to import information from external sources such as
database systems and other accounting products.
The Canadian Payments Association has announced new specifications for Canadian checks. Under these specifications, dates must be printed using the format "DDMMYYYY", "MMDDYYYY", or "YYYYMMDD". Also, there are rules controlling the printing of the check amount in words, and the placement of the dollar sign in the amount when asterisk fill is used.
All check printing now contains options to select formats for these items that comply with the new specifications.
Problem/Bug Fixes
Windows XP security alert popped up inadvertently.
When running either a NewViews workstation or server, Windows XP popped up a security alert dialog. The dialog mentions firewalls, protecting your computer, and so on, and asks whether you want to unblock or keep blocking.
Prior to this release, NewViews initialized its internal network sub-system whenever you ran a workstation or server, whether you actually used the network or not. This is what caused the Windows XP security alert. With this release, the sub-system is initialized only when you actually attempt to use it. So the Windows XP warning appears only when you actually attempt to establish communications by connecting NewViews workstations to servers for multi-user access.
The Tools >Fill Column command displayed an empty error message.
The Tools >Fill Column command displayed an empty error message after completing its task. This only occurred when the command was issued from the Windows-style menu bar, not from the NewViews menu that pops up when you click the right mouse button. This release fixes the problem.
Homing in on table rows did not always work.
You control-click the left mouse button on a column title to home in on a particular table row as you type a column value. This functionality did not always work on a journal transaction table (pink) or an account posting table (green), depending on the tag currently set for the table index. The problem normally did not occur, but could occur if you have added and used tags other than the pre-set financial, budget and order tags. This release fixes the problem.
Canadian Payroll - Fixed incorrect taxation calculation for vacation pay.
In some circumstances, vacation pay paid out was being over-taxed.
Canadian Payroll - Added ability to setup a negative Non-Cash Taxable Benefit.
This allows you to selectively reduce the taxable, EI insurable, and CPP/QPP pensionable earnings by a flat amount per pay period, month, or year. This satisfies the need to configure a yearly reduction to taxable and CPP pensionable earnings for members of the clergy.
Single period report was not using "respect normal representation".
A single period report was not using the "respect normal representation" setting when displaying numbers that were moved from column to column.
Print account ledger settings now trims the tag field.
Trailing spaces had not been trimmed from the tag field. They are now automatically removed.
Pay account (PRTPAY) encountered error "Expected integer but got 1.0."
This occurred when 1.0 was set as the next check reference setting. This release fixes the problem.
Pay account (PRTPAY) printed only one check under some circumstances.
If more than one account was being paid, the destination was set to printer, and preview was set to No, then only the last check was printed. This release fixes the problem.
Block >Paste failed in some circumstances.
The Block >Paste command failed when pasting sales transactions. This release fixes the problem.
Importing from NV1 had problems with some special characters.
This problem occurred when the special characters ?, +, and * were encountered in employee account names. An example would be an employee with the account prefix ?B. This release fixes the problem.
Importing from NV1 reported errors when non-numeric paycode values were encountered.
When importing payroll information errors were reported when non-numeric values were encountered for paycodes such as R= or %=. Such non-numeric values are now ignored (i.e. dropped), and no error is reported.
The <Ctrl+ArrowLeft> and <Ctrl+ArrowRight> keys did not work.
The <Ctrl+ArrowLeft> and <Ctrl+ArrowRight> keys caused errors when used on a notes view. They now work properly by moving left/right by one word.
A
version history with build changes is available here.