
<p>Welcome to what&#8217;s new on Shopfront for October 2020! We&#8217;ve got a short list of features and fixes this month because we&#8217;re full steam ahead on a secret project that we&#8217;ll have more details to release about during November.</p>



<p>Note, some of these changes are gradually rolling out. All stores will receive them by the end of next week.</p>



<h2>Minor Features</h2>



<ul><li>When something has been restored from the trash we now keep the screen at the same position instead of scrolling back to the top,</li><li>A loading screen now appears while the favourite reports are first rendering,</li><li>Exporting CSV and PDF versions of the Inventory at Date report no longer wait on the server to generate them and instead you&#8217;ll receive a notification,</li><li>Improved speed of inventory log report for small date periods</li></ul>



<h2>Bug Fixes</h2>



<ul><li>Per product discounts now appear correctly on receipts in complex promotion and discount combinations,</li><li>Docket printing by tag (kitchen printing) correctly prints when the transaction doesn&#8217;t contain any tag,</li><li>Failed payments no longer prevent a parked sale from being cancelled,</li><li>Prevented parked sales from duplicating after they&#8217;re initially parked and then edited (by either adding a customer or adding more products),</li><li>Performing sales offline and then force syncing the register no longer causes incorrect takings for the day,</li><li>Price changes in the future now appear in the revision history when the price activates, not when the price was changed,</li><li>Prevented advanced report from crashing due to eager optimisations,</li><li>Completing a sale which had been parked on a different register and then reparked on the current register no longer fails to upload,</li><li>Automatic banner group promotions that have been made inactive via the promotion index page no longer get automatically made active again after being updated by the banner group,</li><li>Public notes no longer lose line breaks when emailing orders,</li><li>Filtering the sales history by a gift card which has never existed now returns no sales instead of all sales,</li><li>Promotions for a customer group now apply to the customer group instantly instead of after a sync,</li><li>Additional information boolean toggles which default to true now correctly display as enabled,</li><li>[Developer] Embedded API no longer times out when you&#8217;re not listening for an event (forcing the user to wait)</li></ul>


New on Shopfront: October 2020


<p>Welcome to what&#8217;s new on Shopfront for September 2020! Whilst we&#8217;ve got no major features this release, we&#8217;ve got a large number of minor features!</p>



<h2>Minor Features</h2>



<ul><li>Future prices now indicates when a product is inactive,</li><li>Advanced stocktake now indicates when a product is inactive,</li><li>Express promotions now shows a product information dialog when the product&#8217;s name is pressed,</li><li>Dialog boxes have been redesigned for smaller screen (such as mobile phones),</li><li>Public order notes now appear directly in the WYSIWYG editor rather than being embedded into the <code>[order-table]</code>,</li><li>Filters on the index pages (e.g. customers, products) are now hidden by default for small screens (mobile phones),</li><li>Discounted and locked prices now show an unlocked price which is what the normal price would be had the price not been locked,</li><li>Discounts are now based off the &#8220;unlocked&#8221; price (normal sell price including promotions but excluding discounts),</li><li>Products on parked sales no longer send as discounts unless the &#8220;unlocked&#8221; price is different from the current, locked price,</li><li>Whenever a product&#8217;s inventory has changed and the product edit page is open, you&#8217;ll now be presented with a dialog asking to confirm the inventory of the product,</li><li>Revision history tables now highlight the differences between the &#8220;from&#8221; and &#8220;to&#8221; values (green is addition, red is removal and blue is modified),</li><li>You can now return a transfer the same way you can return an invoice,</li><li>The parked sales sell screen option now automatically refreshes when it receives a new parked sale,</li><li>All POS routes are now loaded from the local cache by default which has dramatically improved the speed of opening a page in a new tab which has an ID in the URL,</li><li>Price lists can now discount each item by a dollar amount,</li><li>Scan rebates are now shown on the promotion view page,</li><li>Cursor position now remains in the cash calculator after a routine sync when on the close register page,</li><li>Everyday tickets has been reworked for small (mobile phone) screens,</li><li>Refund reason is now available to be used in advanced reports,</li><li>Login attempts now automatically time out after three seconds,</li><li>Product import CSV will now be previewed before imported,</li><li>Multiple filters can now be selected for the slow moving stock miscellaneous report,</li><li>[Developer] Prices are now guaranteed to be ordered by quantity then price set</li></ul>



<h2>Bug Fixes</h2>



<ul><li>Price changes applied to a family now appears in the revision history for all products, not just the one which the change occurred on,</li><li>Discounts on the register closure view page are no longer being duplicated every time a discounted sale was parked,</li><li>WYSIWYG editors show left-justified image padding correctly,</li><li>Moving between two reports saved to the user quick menu now correctly loads the second report,</li><li>Sales sent via Vendor Connect now correctly send whether the product was a case or single sold,</li><li>Family pricing now checks if it should be recalculated after a promotion has been applied to part of the family,</li><li>Loading a saved sales report filtered by customer now shows the correct customer name instead of just &#8220;Customer&#8221;,</li><li>Prices updated from the stock list now appear in the revision history including all tax,</li><li>Products created from the Master Database without modification now appear in the everyday tickets,</li><li>Tax on freight and fees is now dependent upon supplier setting,</li><li>Prevented duplicate products from appearing on transfers and orders received via Vendor Connect,</li><li>Adjusting a price list override price by profit percentage now works as expected, previously it was overriding the price with the percentage specified,</li><li>[Linkly] (PC-EFTPOS) transactions for some banks were able to be cancelled in Shopfront between the card being presented and Shopfront being informed of the transaction resulting in Shopfront believing the transaction had been fully cancelled, Shopfront now handles this correctly and continues the transaction rather than cancelling it,</li><li>[MYOB] Prevented duplicate invoices being sent to MYOB due to MYOB&#8217;s API timing out but still processing the request</li></ul>



<p></p>


New on Shopfront: September 2020


<p>Welcome to what&#8217;s new on Shopfront for August 2020! This month is full of information display adjustments as well as some major performance improvements!</p>



<h2>Performance and Memory Improvements</h2>



<p>Over the course of this month we&#8217;ve had a focus on performance and memory related improvements and have made some significant gains.</p>



<p>First we looked at how our indexing works as we know that memory takes a large hit whenever that runs and it can run quite often (any modification to a product, customer, promotion or price list runs the reindexing process for the respective change). We keep an index to make searching fast and allows us to provide a dynamic search (such as searching from the middle of multiple different words).</p>



<p>To improve this we took a critical look at when we need to reindex our data and came up with a strategy to perform a &#8220;rolling&#8221; update which batches changes together. </p>



<p>After implementing the batched rolling update we then looked at which &#8220;browsing contexts&#8221; require the index and we&#8217;ve prevented a number of pages from performing a reindex until you&#8217;re back in a page which does require the index.</p>



<p>Both of these changes has lead to a large improvement in both memory usage and performance, but we&#8217;re not done yet.</p>



<p>Prior to this month our icons were loaded using a technology called SVG, this is a very common way to load icons and is great to do a number of transformations to the icons (such as masking and recolouring), however it comes at the cost of a small amount of memory per icon, when you have a small set of icons this memory usage is negligible, however Shopfront currently features over 350 icons so that memory usage stacked up. In order to combat this, we&#8217;ve moved our icons from SVG and instead made them into a &#8220;web font&#8221; which forces the icons to load like a normal font does. As soon as this was implemented we saw a huge reduction in memory usage.</p>



<p>Finally we looked at Shopfront as a whole, previously when you load Shopfront you load all of Shopfront, however you might just be in the register for the day so you don&#8217;t need the order modification or settings pages to be loaded in the background. Using a technique called &#8220;lazy loading&#8221; we have started moving a number of pages to load only when the page is visited. Now this is expected to come with a performance penalty of loading the page, however due to the way Shopfront was designed to work offline we precache all of the page data on your hard drive so you never see the page loading.</p>



<p>After finishing these performance and memory improvements we decided to measure them against some other popular applications and have found that our memory usage is now below Gmail, Jira, Zendesk and Facebook.</p>



<h2>Minor Features</h2>



<p>Whilst a major focus has been on overall Shopfront performance, we&#8217;ve made quite a few other minor adjustments, here are the key changes:</p>



<ul><li>You can now optionally specify tags to show revenue of when closing the register (customise this in the Registers &amp; Outlets settings page),</li><li>We&#8217;ve replaced the select dropdown component with a brand new lightweight version,</li><li>The price calculation is now quicker when product quantities are greater than 100,000 by swapping to an approximate method rather than an exact price calculation,</li><li>The product view page now shows the product&#8217;s status next to its name if it&#8217;s not active,</li><li>Duplicate product dialog for express &amp; advanced stocktakes as well as the order edit screen now shows if an included product is inactive,</li><li>Sales history now defaults to the current Outlet you&#8217;re in if you&#8217;re a multi-store Vendor,</li><li>The roles &amp; permissions page now shows how many users belong in each role,</li><li>A new permission to prevent users from clearing local data from within the POS was added,</li><li>Reduced maximum amount of products and customers to display in the sell screen search to 300 to improve memory usage and loading time,</li><li>The customer view page now shows the group it belongs to,</li><li>Inactive products have been removed from the promotions sale key,</li><li>More information has been added to the login news,</li><li>Order reference is now an available column for advanced reports,</li><li>The promotion view page now shows the Outlet(s) which the promotion is applied to,</li><li>Advanced stocktake now allows entry of &#8220;0&#8221; as a quantity,</li><li>When multiple of the same products are unconsolidated on the sell screen we now distribute the prices using the family price distribution rules,</li><li>The sync no longer paginates the parked sales and instead returns them all at once resulting in a large performance improvement on pages after the first,</li><li>Customer statements can now be run if you have the <em>See Customers</em> permission (previously you could only run them if you had the <em>Modify Statements</em> permission),</li><li>Transferees can now store contact details and automatically email transfers,</li><li>Vendor connections have gained the option to specify how the connection data should be received (either as an order / invoice or a transfer),</li><li>Details of a invoice return are now able to be modified,</li><li>[MYOB] The integration has been completely rewritten in TypeScript and now features better error recovery and a new validation system,</li><li>[Developer] Viewing application history is now significantly faster</li></ul>



<h2>Bug Fixes</h2>



<ul><li>Prevented multiple sell screens from being opened after removing a previous duplicate sell screen,</li><li>Stocktaked products report was previously showing the current date for products that have never been stocktaked instead of &#8220;Never&#8221;,</li><li>Fixed promotions endlessly reindexing resulting in a memory leak,</li><li>Lines on orders which contain a different case quantity between the Shopfront product file and the order now correctly adjust the quantity when changing case quantity to one,</li><li>Opening the browser when in global mode no longer forces register selection,</li><li>Prevented payment of a sale while a product is being added when both hard drive and CPU are at 100%,</li><li>Orders &amp; Invoices now shows correct orders when navigated to when in global mode,</li><li>Gift cards can now be removed after they have been added to a parked sale,</li><li>Sales summary in product view now correctly shows all sales when in global mode,</li><li>Performing a customer payment with a large number of sales no longer results in the rate limiter being hit,</li><li>Logout is no longer forced after two hours from last login, instead it&#8217;s now two hours from last interaction with Shopfront</li></ul>


New on Shopfront: August 2020


<p>Welcome to what&#8217;s new on Shopfront for July 2020! It&#8217;s been a while since we&#8217;ve published one of these (November 2017 was the last time one was posted 😖).</p>



<p>This month we had a huge release with more than three months worth of development including a rewrite of our front-end system from JavaScript into TypeScript.</p>



<p>So without further ado, here&#8217;s what has recently been released for all customers on Shopfront.</p>



<h2>Major Features</h2>



<p><strong>In-page help articles</strong></p>



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-large"><img loading="lazy" width="1024" height="265" src="https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-1024x265.png" alt="" class="wp-image-371" srcset="https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-1024x265.png 1024w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-300x78.png 300w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-768x199.png 768w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image.png 1133w" sizes="(max-width: 706px) 89vw, (max-width: 767px) 82vw, 740px" /></figure></div>



<p>You may have noticed this when we first appeared back in May, but it&#8217;s now been added to a large amount of screens throughout the POS &#8211; we&#8217;ve now embedded some of our support articles directly in to the page through the use of a help icon in the top right-hand corner.</p>



<p>Whenever you&#8217;re on a page which has a linked help article, you&#8217;ll be able to find out more information without even leaving the page. Clicking on the help article displays some relevant articles that might be of assistance to you.</p>



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-large"><img loading="lazy" width="1024" height="817" src="https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-1-1024x817.png" alt="" class="wp-image-372" srcset="https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-1-1024x817.png 1024w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-1-300x239.png 300w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-1-768x613.png 768w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-1.png 1136w" sizes="(max-width: 706px) 89vw, (max-width: 767px) 82vw, 740px" /></figure></div>



<p>We&#8217;ve also started to add more in-page help with any item that might need further explanation. We&#8217;ve started with the general settings page but we&#8217;re going to be adding them to more pages in the coming months.</p>



<div class="wp-block-image"><figure class="aligncenter size-large"><img loading="lazy" width="1024" height="522" src="https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-2-1024x522.png" alt="" class="wp-image-373" srcset="https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-2-1024x522.png 1024w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-2-300x153.png 300w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-2-768x392.png 768w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-2.png 1133w" sizes="(max-width: 706px) 89vw, (max-width: 767px) 82vw, 740px" /></figure></div>



<p><strong>Transfers and sales to other Shopfront Vendors</strong></p>



<p>If you are transferring or selling stock to another store which also has Shopfront, you&#8217;re now able to connect the two Vendors together to automatically send and receive the stock without having to perform any manual entry.</p>



<p>To get started, both sides need to create a new &#8220;Vendor Connection&#8221;, the sender needs to provide the receiver with their displayed &#8220;Sender Code&#8221; which will be entered into the receivers &#8220;Receiving Code&#8221;. From there you can simply either sell stock to the connected customer or transfer stock from the Orders &amp; Invoices page. Stock will be automatically matched between the two stores and the receiver will just have to verify the data is correct before accepting the order.</p>



<p>For more information, check out our <a href="https://shopfront.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045385052">dedicated help article</a> or get in touch with our support team.</p>



<p><strong>Redeveloped Additional Information</strong></p>



<p>Our additional information has been redeveloped and redesigned with several new features being added including default values for fields and new field types (such as drop down lists) as well as a facelift.</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" width="1024" height="814" src="https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-3-1024x814.png" alt="" class="wp-image-374" srcset="https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-3-1024x814.png 1024w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-3-300x238.png 300w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-3-768x610.png 768w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-3.png 1228w" sizes="(max-width: 706px) 89vw, (max-width: 767px) 82vw, 740px" /></figure>



<p>This information can be accessed via the API, printed on tickets or displayed in several parts of Shopfront.</p>



<p>In the coming months we&#8217;ll also be adding several new features to the additional information such as being able to filter reports by additional fields and being able to use additional fields to search for products on the sell screen.</p>



<p><strong>Media Centre Improvements</strong></p>



<p>Whilst there is no visible change to the media centre, behind the scenes it has been significantly improved. Deleting and renaming both files and folders is now considerably faster as is moving between folders. </p>



<p>Along with the internal changes, we&#8217;ve also create a new &#8220;mini&#8221; Media Centre which is now available to use when editing anything with the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) text editor, such as editing the description of products.</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" width="640" height="642" src="https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-4.png" alt="" class="wp-image-375" srcset="https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-4.png 640w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-4-300x300.png 300w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-4-150x150.png 150w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/image-4-100x100.png 100w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /></figure>



<p>The mini Media Centre allows you to quickly insert images into the WYSIWYG without having to worry about the image&#8217;s URL.</p>



<p><strong>Shop MyLocal Integration</strong></p>



<p>We&#8217;ve now released our Shop MyLocal integration as a beta version. Shop MyLocal allows IBA stores to sell popular products online with the prices coming directly from Shopfront and when a sale occurs, the sale automatically appears in Shopfront, preventing the need for data entry.</p>



<p>To find out more information about Shop MyLocal or to get started with it, contact your Business Development Manager.</p>



<h2>Minor Features</h2>



<p>Along with our major features, we also have made numerous improvements to Shopfront, we couldn&#8217;t list them all, but here are some of our favourites:</p>



<ul><li>Promotions can now be applied to multiple customer groups,</li><li>New supplier option &#8220;Freight is included on supplier invoice&#8221; for use when receiving stock from a supplier that requires you to use an external freight company,</li><li>Promotion calculation speed has now significantly improved when cross promotion count is turned off and a large amount of products exist in an active express promotion (one real world use case saw a reduction from 5.8 seconds to 0.2 seconds),</li><li>Numerous information enhancements (e.g. more places now show the product&#8217;s status if it&#8217;s not active),</li><li>Inventory at Date reports can now be exported as a PDF and CSV file, it can be printed and it can be searched,</li><li>Many components on receipts can now have customisable padding,</li><li>Product scanning in express stocktakes is now faster,</li><li>You can now manually set a product to update it without using the future price time setting (go to the Utility Menu &gt; Future Prices),</li><li>Subject lines can now be predefined for customer statements,</li><li>Orders sent via email to suppliers can now be sent as a PDF or CSV attachment (you can set this per supplier in the supplier&#8217;s edit page),</li><li>Selling a product within a basket now shows that it was sold from a basket in the inventory log,</li><li>We&#8217;ve replaced our code editor with a more lightweight version and a nicer colour scheme,</li><li>We&#8217;ve also reduced the size of colour selector component and given it a facelift,</li><li>[Developer] New Embedded API options to allow developers to plug into more of Shopfront&#8217;s user interface,</li><li>[Developer] Embedded applications can now send messages between their embedded pages directly through the Embedded API,</li><li>[Developer] All supplier details can be provided when creating a supplier instead of having to create and then edit the supplier,</li><li>[Developer] Some POS resources (products, payment methods) can now be locked which prevents anyone from deleting the resource except for your integration,</li><li>[Developer] Through the Embedded API you can now modify the current sale in process</li></ul>



<h2>Bugs</h2>



<p>Our release also comes with numerous bug fixes, some of which are:</p>



<ul><li>Express stocktakes now show the inventory log history when a user that has been deleted previously changed the inventory,</li><li>Customer account payments that were made in the future compared to the current statement period no longer affect the current statement period,</li><li>Orders that have a decimal quantity for the received and sent quantities now save correctly instead of being rounded to the nearest whole number,</li><li>Orders now always force the products to be put into the next sync after they&#8217;ve been sent and received,</li><li>Fixed floating point calculation errors during promotion calculation when individual product quantities were above 150,</li><li>Promotion Calculation Manager now correctly updates the current time to expire promotions without leaving the sell screen,</li><li>Transfer history for products now shows transfers to transferees not just transfers to other Outlets</li><li>Refund reason now appears when sale total is equal to zero,</li><li>Push notifications are now more reliable,</li><li>Bulk deleting several hundred promotions at once now works as expected,</li><li>Promotions from banner groups now retain your changes instead of reverting when the promotions are updated,</li><li>[MYOB Integration] Sending invoices to suppliers that have names which contain special characters now works as expected,</li><li>[Linkly / PC-EFTPOS Integration] Prevented pressing cancel while terminal is performing a logon</li></ul>



<h2>Side Note</h2>



<p>That&#8217;s it for this month, we&#8217;ll be aiming to continue to release these &#8220;What&#8217;s new on Shopfront&#8221; articles on a month-by-month basis towards the end of each month. We&#8217;re also going to be changing the way which deployments are handled in Shopfront by introducing release channels. To start with we&#8217;ll be releasing three different versions called Canary, Beta and Release. Most customers will remain on the Release version which is roughly equivalent with how we currently release our updates, however a subset of customers who want access to features faster will be moved onto Canary or Beta.</p>



<p>We&#8217;re planning on releasing a Canary update every week, a Beta update every fortnight and a normal Release every four to six weeks. We&#8217;ll start our new release process at some point about half-way through August. If you&#8217;d like to be involved in the Canary or Beta channel, send an email to our support team.</p>


New on Shopfront: July 2020

<p>It&#8217;s nearly here! Shopfront version two will be released to the first store on the 28th of October, 2019. It&#8217;s been a long time coming, but we promise it will be well worth the wait.</p>



<p>We started the redesign in January 2018, a year after the first version of Shopfront was released. With it comes a huge array of new features and changes that we can&#8217;t wait to show you.</p>







<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p><a href="#redesigned-user-interface">Skip to the feature preview.</a></p></blockquote>



<p>We decided to redesign Shopfront as we had learnt a lot in the first year of our release, we had so many features and improvements we wanted to add and decided it was time to give Shopfront a facelift. Doing so also allowed us to redevelop how a few of our features worked to make it easier to work with.</p>



<p>Now that version two is nearly here, we plan to roll it out quickly to ensure that everyone gets the latest features, after the release to the first store on the 28th of October, we plan on releasing to 10 other beta stores within the next two weeks. After this we will hold the release to ensure there are no major issues we have to deal with. Once a little bit of time has passed (we&#8217;re aiming for late November, early December) we will make Shopfront generally available to all vendors. This doesn&#8217;t mean we will be forcing it upon all stores just before Christmas, but it does mean that if you want to be using the latest features, they will be available to you.</p>



<p>Once the Christmas period is over, we&#8217;ll be looking to move everyone across, with most vendors moving in January 2020. On January 31st 2020, we will be stopping support for version one and on the 24th of February 2020 we will be forcing everyone to move to version two.</p>



<p>If you want to get onto version two as soon as possible, please get in touch with us.</p>



<p>Shopfront version two comes with a huge amount of new features, here&#8217;s a sneak peak at five highly-requested features.</p>



<h3 id="redesigned-user-interface">Redesigned User Interface</h3>



<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide"><figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img loading="lazy" width="1024" height="902" src="https://shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/sell-1024x902.png" alt="" class="wp-image-343" srcset="https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/sell-1024x902.png 1024w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/sell-300x264.png 300w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/sell-768x676.png 768w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/sell.png 1249w" sizes="(max-width: 706px) 89vw, (max-width: 767px) 82vw, 740px" /></figure><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
<p>By far the most obvious change in Shopfront version two is the redesigned user interface. </p>



<p>It&#8217;s a lot flatter, quicker and just generally better to look at (if we do say so ourselves).</p>
</div></div>



<p>It also comes with a lot of new features just purely in the redesign, the entire POS system is now a single page application (SPA), which means that there is no loading between each page. </p>



<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide has-media-on-the-right"><figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img loading="lazy" width="497" height="726" src="https://shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-10.41.58-am.png" alt="" class="wp-image-344" srcset="https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-10.41.58-am.png 497w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-10.41.58-am-205x300.png 205w" sizes="(max-width: 497px) 100vw, 497px" /></figure><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
<p>As can be seen on the right, we&#8217;ve added a couple of menu groups (utilities and marketing) and we&#8217;ve had to rearrange where a few items are in the menu.</p>



<p>Performing orders and receiving invoices is now in the menu as &#8220;Orders &amp; Invoices&#8221;, promotions, shelf tickets and the media centre have been moved to the new Marketing menu and the Utilities menu has been added which contains the mail log, trashed items and future prices.</p>
</div></div>



<h3>New Cash Management</h3>



<p>Shopfront version two also comes with new cash management functionality, we&#8217;ve split version one&#8217;s manage takings into two parts, a close register part and a manage cash part. This allowed us to create better permissions, display cash movement history and add a couple of other features.</p>



<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide"><figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img loading="lazy" width="1024" height="591" src="https://shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-10.48.39-am-1024x591.png" alt="" class="wp-image-345" srcset="https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-10.48.39-am-1024x591.png 1024w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-10.48.39-am-300x173.png 300w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-10.48.39-am-768x443.png 768w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-10.48.39-am.png 1119w" sizes="(max-width: 706px) 89vw, (max-width: 767px) 82vw, 740px" /></figure><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
<p>The new manage cash screen displays the register open time, the recent cash movements (which you can reprint) and allows you to put cash into the drawer, remove cash from the drawer and swap cash denominations.</p>
</div></div>



<h3>Reworked Customer Accounts</h3>



<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide has-media-on-the-right"><figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img loading="lazy" width="1024" height="694" src="https://shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-11.04.27-am-1024x694.png" alt="" class="wp-image-347" srcset="https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-11.04.27-am-1024x694.png 1024w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-11.04.27-am-300x203.png 300w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-11.04.27-am-768x520.png 768w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-11.04.27-am.png 1327w" sizes="(max-width: 706px) 89vw, (max-width: 767px) 82vw, 740px" /></figure><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
<p>The way you deal with debtor payments and outstanding sales has been completely redeveloped to make it easier to use and provide more options for you to manage your customer accounts.</p>
</div></div>



<p>You can now perform customer payments while you&#8217;re offline, create a payment that is unallocated to an invoice, cancel and refund payments as well as being able to provide change for cash customer payments. We&#8217;ve also prevented outstanding customer payments from automatically being allocated to the next invoice.</p>



<h3>Creation Wizards</h3>



<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide"><figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img loading="lazy" width="1024" height="693" src="https://shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-11.14.25-am-1024x693.png" alt="" class="wp-image-348" srcset="https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-11.14.25-am-1024x693.png 1024w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-11.14.25-am-300x203.png 300w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-11.14.25-am-768x520.png 768w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-11.14.25-am.png 1328w" sizes="(max-width: 706px) 89vw, (max-width: 767px) 82vw, 740px" /></figure><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
<p>One of the most powerful features coming to Shopfront is the creation wizard, these are available for when you&#8217;re creating a product, creating a customer and creating a promotion.</p>
</div></div>



<p>These creation wizards and excessively customisable (you can write your own JavaScript code to program them) and allow you to create products, customers and promotions in your own way.</p>



<p>For example, people can use the customer creation wizard for creating a customer from the register and making sure your staff get the customer&#8217;s name, phone number and company or you could make sure your staff get the customer&#8217;s name, email address and their pet&#8217;s name.</p>



<h3>Reporting Query Language</h3>



<p>Ever wanted to run a really customised report? Let&#8217;s say you wanted to run a report that allowed you to see any products that you&#8217;ve sold for less than $100 and are making more than 30% profit on &#8211; and show the current inventory as well as the user that sold the product.</p>



<p>In version one of Shopfront this would have involved looking at multiple reports and probably result in you having to take the data into Excel. </p>



<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide"><figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img loading="lazy" width="1024" height="696" src="https://shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-11.20.18-am-1024x696.png" alt="" class="wp-image-350" srcset="https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-11.20.18-am-1024x696.png 1024w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-11.20.18-am-300x204.png 300w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-11.20.18-am-768x522.png 768w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-17-at-11.20.18-am.png 1326w" sizes="(max-width: 706px) 89vw, (max-width: 767px) 82vw, 740px" /></figure><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
<p>With Shopfront version two, you can now run your own complex reports using our custom built reporting query language. It&#8217;s similar to SQL, but provides an easier to use syntax that is designed around our data.</p>
</div></div>



<h3>Feature sneak peak</h3>



<p>But don&#8217;t go thinking we&#8217;ve only changed these four things, here&#8217;s a sneak peak at 55 other changes that are available from day one:</p>



<ul><li>General<ul><li>New user dashboard screen</li><li>Can use markup instead of profit percentage</li><li>Can customise the date and time format</li><li>Can customise the start of the week</li><li>A whole lot of new permissions</li><li>Can recover trashed items</li></ul></li><li>Sell Screen<ul><li>Discounts are now built into the sales transaction rather than through a sales key</li><li>Sell rate discount type added</li><li>Predefined discount sales key added</li><li>Live inventory displayed when searching for products</li><li>Can automatically log out after a period of inactivity</li><li>WYSIWYG receipt editor</li><li>WYSIWYG customer display editor</li><li>Can show products as unconsolidated</li><li>Payment methods can be assigned to colours</li></ul></li><li>Manage Takings<ul><li>PC-EFTPOS displays the settlement receipt in close register</li><li>Can set the float for each day</li></ul></li><li>Sales History<ul><li>Sales are no longer paginated, they use infinite loading now</li><li>Can view multiple sales at the same time</li><li>Can modify payment methods on sales</li></ul></li><li>Product Management<ul><li>Transfer history now appears in the product view page</li><li>Can mark a product as don&#8217;t sell or don&#8217;t order</li><li>Additional information can be bound to types (number, string, boolean, etc)</li></ul></li><li>Orders &amp; Invoices<ul><li>New &#8220;Outstanding&#8221; filter added</li><li>Added receiving credit notes</li><li>Can generate orders from both sales and reorder points</li><li>Can exclude stock from being included in generated orders when already on order</li><li>Can add an entire classification or supplier to an order</li><li>Can verify an invoice total by entering it in before receiving an invoice</li><li>Can reset quantities to zero when receiving an invoice</li><li>Purchase rebates can be received when inputting an invoice</li><li>Can see who created, sent and received an order</li></ul></li><li>Stocktaking<ul><li>Stocktakes can now be named</li><li>Can see who else is currently in a stocktake</li><li>External stocktake history is now available</li></ul></li><li>Customer Management<ul><li>WYSIWYG statement editor</li><li>Can customise the email signature for customer statements</li></ul></li><li>Price Lists<ul><li>Can add all categories to a price list</li><li>Price lists can now be set to a higher price than the everyday price</li><li>Price lists can now have minimum price rules to ensure prices don&#8217;t fall too low</li><li>Price points are now longer fixed to the product&#8217;s price points</li></ul></li><li>Promotions<ul><li>Can set the start and end times for a promotion</li><li>Natural language edit screen</li></ul></li><li>Media Centre<ul><li>Items can be deleted</li><li>Items can be renamed</li><li>More file types are supported</li></ul></li><li>Reporting<ul><li>Reporting dashboard can compare previous periods</li><li>Reporting dashboard can be filtered by outlet</li><li>Time zones are correctly handled when swapping between daylight savings</li></ul></li><li>Register Closures<ul><li>Can be filtered by date, time and outlet</li><li>Register closures now use infinite loading rather than pagination</li></ul></li><li>Developers<ul><li>Version two of the JSON API (GraphQL)</li><li>Release of the Embedded Application API</li><li>Release of the Payment Method API</li><li>Release of the Reporting API</li></ul></li></ul>



<p>These are just a few of the features we&#8217;ve been working on, but there are so many more that we can&#8217;t wait to show you. </p>

Shopfront Version Two Preview

<p>We&#8217;re back looking for another Customer Experience Agent! We&#8217;re looking for someone to be both in the office assisting our customers on the phone and out on the road setting up new clients.</p>
<p></p>
<p>We develop a point of sale system ready to take on the world. We&#8217;re a small, fast moving, agile team, passionate about developing the best products for our customers.</p>
<p>Travel all over the country to help our customers get up and running with our software so they can look after their customers. Your job will be mixed between being out on the road training our clients how to use our system and being in the office offering support to our existing clients. Technical knowledge is not required and we will fully train you.</p>
<p>Shopfront has been fully released as of the start of this year and we&#8217;re growing quickly. We want someone to grow with the company in this full time position.</p>
<p>We&#8217;re looking for applicants who have previously worked in retail or hospitality, have a valid driver&#8217;s license, are happy with travelling interstate and love making customers happy.</p>
<p>Your responsibilities will include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Setting up hardware for our system,</li>
<li>Training clients in person and over the phone on how to use our system,</li>
<li>Identifying, reproducing and documenting bugs found,</li>
<li>Ensuring customer satisfaction,</li>
<li>Contributing to the ongoing learning and success of the team, by sharing knowledge through mentorship, collaboration and aiding in documentation.</li>
</ul>
<p>Sounds good? Send us an email at <a href="mailto:careers@shopfront.com.au">careers@shopfront.com.au</a> including both a cover letter and a résumé. Having experience in operating or managing a business is a bonus (but not required).</p>

Customer Experience Agent Required

<p>Welcome to the November edition of New On Shopfront, we&#8217;ve introduce our Media Centre, created Promotional Shelf Tickets and presented our Public Roadmap.</p>
<h2>Table of Contents</h2>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>Media Centre</li>
<li>Promotion Shelf Tickets</li>
<li>Public Roadmap</li>
<li>Fixes</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p></p>
<h2>Media Centre</h2>
<p><img loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-266" src="http://shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Screen-Shot-2017-12-07-at-1.25.46-pm-1024x469.png" alt="" width="525" height="240" srcset="https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Screen-Shot-2017-12-07-at-1.25.46-pm-1024x469.png 1024w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Screen-Shot-2017-12-07-at-1.25.46-pm-300x137.png 300w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Screen-Shot-2017-12-07-at-1.25.46-pm-768x351.png 768w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Screen-Shot-2017-12-07-at-1.25.46-pm.png 1121w" sizes="(max-width: 525px) 100vw, 525px" /></p>
<p>Introducing the media centre! It&#8217;s a single consolidated place for all the media that you upload into Shopfront. We&#8217;ve started small by replacing all the previous places that you could upload media, but in the next month we will be adding user and product images. Shortly, you&#8217;ll even be able to use our master database images that we&#8217;ve collected for our products.</p>
<h2>Promotion Shelf Tickets</h2>
<p><img loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-265" src="http://shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Screen-Shot-2017-12-07-at-1.21.14-pm.png" alt="" width="751" height="446" srcset="https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Screen-Shot-2017-12-07-at-1.21.14-pm.png 751w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Screen-Shot-2017-12-07-at-1.21.14-pm-300x178.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 706px) 89vw, (max-width: 767px) 82vw, 740px" /></p>
<p>Tired of having to hand write or copy all the data from your promotions? We&#8217;ve now introduced our promotional tickets to make printing your promotions and ensuring consistency a breeze. To access the promotional tickets, open the menu, expand Stock, click on Shelf Tickets and then select Promotional Tickets.</p>
<h2>Public Roadmap</h2>
<p>Want to help shape the future of Shopfront and develop the features that are most important to you? Check out our <a href="https://trello.com/b/ZBbDB2h7/shopfront-public-roadmap">Public Roadmap</a> where you can comment and vote on the upcoming features we&#8217;re adding &#8211; or even suggest your own!</p>
<h2>Fixes</h2>
<ul>
<li>Creating a product from a temporary product on an order no longer shows negative profit.</li>
<li>Inventory Report first load for multiple stores now displays totals as expected.</li>
<li>Change is no longer displayed twice on email receipts.</li>
<li>Gift Cards no longer have weird rounding results for remaining sale balance.</li>
<li>Making promotion inactive no longer require force synchronisation.</li>
<li>Payments using the sales keys now appear in the finalise sale screen.</li>
<li>Prevented cash sales from duplicating when rounding is turned off.</li>
<li>First load precision reports no longer display invalid field name.</li>
<li>Additional decimal places are no longer shown for reports when they are not required.</li>
<li>Adjusted cost on index page for products when base quantity is not one.</li>
<li>Can now remove deleted products from everyday tickets.</li>
<li>Increased the speed of the reporting dashboard.</li>
<li>Significantly increased the speed of the synchronisation for the sell screen.</li>
<li>Prevented Tyro from locking with previous transaction when exiting the integration early.</li>
<li>Increased the speed of cancelled sales actions report.</li>
<li>Prevented sales history from displaying duplicate sales when using payment method filter.</li>
<li>Prevented scanning of barcode when returning a product.</li>
<li>Changing a price in Capped Pricing no longer results in negative gross profit percentage (when meant to be positive).</li>
<li>Adjusted returned filter in sales history to display all sales that had an item returned, rather than just sales which only had items returned.</li>
<li>Cancelled orders now get removed from notifications.</li>
<li>Electronic orders can no longer send when supplier codes are missing (without confirmation).</li>
<li>View promotions from register now displays promotions that have expired from within the last two weeks rather than the start of time.</li>
</ul>

New On Shopfront: November 2017

<p>Ready to transform the retail industry into a new era of productivity? Shopfront requires someone to take our point of sale system to the next level through the design and development of the user interface of our cloud based system.</p>
<p></p>
<p>We develop a point of sale system ready to take on the world. We&#8217;re a small, fast moving, agile team, passionate about developing the best products for our customers.</p>
<p>Create amazing, simple to use user experiences and take charge with leading the design while pushing your product vision from the get-go. You&#8217;ll start but beginning the redesign of our point of sale system and the continuous improvement of the system, but you&#8217;ll also be working with us to drive customers to us through the use of design on our social media and the eventual redesign and improvement of our website. We&#8217;ve got a huge number of ideas that we can&#8217;t wait to implement with you.</p>
<p>Shopfront is currently in the beta stage with nearly 100 customers and growing rapidly, with full readiness to market planned at the end of this year. We want someone to grow with the company in this full time position. The position is based in Tullamarine, Victoria.</p>
<p>We&#8217;re looking for applicants who have previous experience in UX design for SaaS organisations, can take your design to HTML and CSS and are looking for someone to completely own the design process. Experience with JavaScript is not a required, but it is a large bonus.</p>
<p>Your responsibilities will include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Conceptualising web and mobile design ideas,</li>
<li>Executing all visual design stages from concept to front-end,</li>
<li>Working with our team to design and develop our current and future products,</li>
<li>Working with our stakeholders to ensure a consistent and enjoyable customer experience,</li>
<li>Contributing to the ongoing learning and success of the team, by sharing knowledge through mentorship, collaboration and aiding in documentation.</li>
</ul>
<p>Sounds good? Send us an email at <a href="mailto:careers@shopfront.com.au">careers@shopfront.com.au</a> including both a résumé and your portfolio. Experience in retail or hospitality is also a bonus (but not required).</p>

UX Designer / Front-End Developer Required

<p>Welcome to the October 2017 edition of New on Shopfront, this month we&#8217;ve fixed a huge amount of bugs, changed the way that sale discounts work and added a couple of nifty features along the way</p>
<h2>Table of Contents</h2>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>Park Sales with Payments</li>
<li>Sale Discounts Rewritten</li>
<li>New Promotion Revision History</li>
<li>Create Return from Completed Order</li>
<li>Reorder Reports Can Now Include Transfers</li>
<li>Fixes</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p></p>
<h2>Park Sales With Payments</h2>
<p>Customer wants to put an item on layby or needs to come back after getting cash out? No longer do you have to put the products on account (and thus removing the items out of inventory) or using your own custom layby system. Simply create a sale, pay off an amount and then put the sale on hold like you would normally. When they come back, just retrieve the held sale and the payment is sitting there waiting to be completed.</p>
<h2>Sale Discounts Rewritten</h2>
<p><img loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-248" src="http://shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Discounts.png" alt="" width="500" height="942" srcset="https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Discounts.png 500w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Discounts-159x300.png 159w" sizes="(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px" /></p>
<p>We&#8217;ve rewritten how our sale discounts work (note, this does not affect the way that single product discounts work) in order to provide a simpler and more predictable behaviour. Previously we were attempting to predict how you thought the discount should work. This worked well for simple discounts, however it became quite complex when you discount products, have products on promotion and then add products after the discount has been applied.</p>
<p>We now remove all other discounts when you apply a sale discount and then proportionally increment (or decrement) the discount when you change the quantity of a product.</p>
<h2>New Promotion Revision History</h2>
<p><img loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-249" src="http://shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Criteria.png" alt="" width="884" height="145" srcset="https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Criteria.png 884w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Criteria-300x49.png 300w, https://wp.shopfront.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Criteria-768x126.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 706px) 89vw, (max-width: 767px) 82vw, 740px" /></p>
<p>Previously when you&#8217;ve edited a promotion, we showed you that you edited the promotion, but not what changed in the promotion, that has now changed. We&#8217;re working hard to provide you with even more detail in the future and to make our revision history nicer and easier to use.</p>
<h2>Create Return from Completed Order</h2>
<p>Finished receiving your invoice but half the product&#8217;s haven&#8217;t arrived or have you received an invoice into the wrong store? It&#8217;s really time consuming to create the return from hand, which is why you can now return create a return from an existing completed order, all you then need to do is make the required modifications and you&#8217;re all good to send it!</p>
<h2>Reorder Reports Can Now Include Transfers</h2>
<p>Transfer a lot of stock and use our dynamic sales reorders? To prevent you from needing to check all of the normal transfers that you do, we can now take them into account when calculating the stock you should order to save you time and to prevent you from running out of stock too early.</p>
<h2>Fixes</h2>
<ul>
<li>When receiving invoices, fees and freight now distribute exactly (prevented entering an amount and then the amount changing after it was distributed)</li>
<li>MYOB invoices now use the provided invoice date rather than the date they are entered into Shopfront</li>
<li>Filters for actions reports now work across all report types</li>
<li>Cancelling a sale after a register has been deleted no longer results in an error</li>
<li>Customer payments no longer hang after being applied</li>
<li>Emailing after using &#8220;View All Statements&#8221; in customer report now works as expected</li>
<li>Applying a customer payment to a customer with no sales now works as expected</li>
<li>Initial MYOB integration redirect now takes you back to your Vendor (you no longer need to specify which Vendor you are)</li>
<li>Emailed reports have the date range back in the subject</li>
<li>Classifications no longer display temporary products</li>
<li>Total of a percentage field in a report no longer adds up the column</li>
<li>Customer birthdays are now blank rather than &#8220;0000-00-00&#8221;</li>
<li>Increased cash movement amount limit from $9,999.99 to $999,999.99</li>
<li>Sales keys no longer display error after deleting a product that was on them</li>
<li>Numerous MYOB AccountRight integration fixes</li>
<li>IBA Promotions now import with amount as expected ($20 instead of $20.01)</li>
<li>Banner Group promotions now download into &#8220;Banner Group&#8221; promotion category</li>
<li>Price sets can now be removed</li>
<li>The touch screen number keyboard now hides when typing using physical keyboard</li>
<li>Can now cancel sales with only cash applied without having to remove the cash first</li>
<li>Fixed missing tab in customer modify screen when the customer was not part of an &#8220;Account Customer&#8221; group</li>
<li>Using autofill for customer payments now uses negative invoices first</li>
<li>Profit percentage for pricelist price now changes when price override mode is enabled</li>
<li>Fixed single item costs averaging when receiving multiple ALM invoices at once</li>
</ul>

New on Shopfront: October 2017

<p>On the 26th of October 2017, we experienced a widespread bug that resulted in PC-EFTPOS integrated EFTPOS not working upon the second transaction attempted per page load.</p>
<p>The incident was caused due to faulty code introduced to our production server while implementing a new feature. We believe this affected approximately one-quarter of our customers.</p>
<p>We apologies to all of our customers that were affected and this article explains why the issue occurred and what we are doing to prevent this from happening in the future.</p>
<p></p>
<h2>The Feature</h2>
<p>When you use our EFTPOS integration, we load the integration page in what is known as a &#8220;frame&#8221;, this is essentially another webpage loaded inside the current webpage. We then send and receive data from that page to process the EFTPOS transaction.</p>
<p>Upon finalising the sale and selecting EFTPOS as the payment method, we then reload and display the frame. This works well for the most part as the frame is cached so it can work offline, however when you have an internet connection that is slow or drops in and out you may notice a white flash for a couple of seconds when the page loads which results in slower transaction time.</p>
<p>Our solution to this problem is to prevent the page load from occurring after the first load, which leads to our problem.</p>
<h2>The Problem</h2>
<p>For this change to work, we had to rewrite the way we handle integrations and had to modify how the integration communicated with the POS. We tested with both an existing install and a new install and after determining that the changes worked as we expected we put the code into production.</p>
<p>However, the code didn&#8217;t work as expected due to how we cache data in the register for when you go offline.</p>
<p>Upon visiting the register for the first time, we complete a &#8220;full synchronisation&#8221; of your data and we also cache a large amount of code that allows the register to operate when offline. Upon future requests (page loads) we then serve the code from the cache and we update the code in the background (which means that the following request then uses the latest code). We use this method as it results in swapping back to the register quickly from any page and being able to work instantaneously when offline rather than having to wait for a request to fail before swapping to the cached code.</p>
<p>So, you may have spotted the issue already. We refresh the cache when you visit the page, that means that the register code would be updated before the EFTPOS integration code if you did not complete an EFTPOS transaction when the page first loaded (the code would be using different versions). This resulted in the issue of &#8220;Returning to CloudPOS&#8221; as the EFTPOS integration was waiting for the page the reload.</p>
<h2>The Solution</h2>
<p>Upon learning of the problem, we instantly rolled back the code, which prevented the problem from occurring on additional customers, however this didn&#8217;t fix the problem for people currently experiencing the issue (for the same reason as above). We then made additional code changes and uploaded a fix (at the point of writing we have not yet fully implemented the original feature as it is undergoing rigorous testing in all environments that we can find) which attempted to force the browser to update the entire cache. We then also published a way to manually update the cache on this blog.</p>
<h2>Publication</h2>
<p>We first shared the post on the blog, however to reach the most amount of clients we posted the fix on our Facebook page and we also made use of the &#8220;Team Message&#8221; to display the fix to all clients.</p>
<h2>Future Prevention</h2>
<p>In order to prevent this from occurring in the future we are implementing version splitting across Vendors (which was the plan from the start once we reached enough clients for this to become viable). This will mean that certain clients will run on the &#8220;latest&#8221; code, other clients will run on &#8220;beta&#8221; code and all other clients will run on &#8220;stable&#8221; code. New code will then have to pass through from &#8220;latest&#8221; to &#8220;beta&#8221; before making its way to &#8220;stable&#8221;. While this will mean slower roll-out of new features, it will result in errors being picked up earlier.</p>
<p>We are also implementing automatic tests for our EFTPOS integration, we already have a large amount of tests that are constantly increasing for other areas of the POS, however we had not yet implemented tests for our EFTPOS integrations due to the additional requirement of EFTPOS hardware.</p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>Once again, we sincerely apologies for any inconvenience this has caused and we are hard at work to prevent issues like this from happening in the future.</p>