In this issue
New team member
We are pleased to welcome Julia Reynolds-Smith to the eCargo team. Julia will be working closely with our customers and development team to constantly improve the overall customer experience of our business applications and support processes.
With a wealth of experience in the IT industry Julia has previously worked as a Consultant/Business Analyst for a number of ERP system vendors. Julia brings a strong customer focused approach to the team, and will champion the rights of our customers to have access to simple, easy to use systems.
Latest product release
You asked for it – and here it is. After feedback from our freight invoicing users we’ve released a whole lot of changes in this area.
Credit and reissue invoice lines
You can now more easily raise a credit against an invoice line and choose to reissue the charge using either the current calculated freight charge, or a manually entered charge. This allows you to correct issues where the wrong freight rate has been applied or the wrong volume was dispatched, and show very clearly on the reissued invoice line what the correct charges/volume are.
You can now also choose to raise a credit now and reissue the charge at a later date.
Comments on invoice lines and invoice PDF
Comments entered against invoice lines will now appear in the invoice PDF file created in eCargo. Details of the original invoice number credited will also be automatically added to the comments of a credit & reissue invoice line. This provides clearer information to your customer or supplier and reduces the amount of queries around why these changes have occurred.
Additional details on invoice export to Excel
We received a number requests to add additional information to the CSV file created from the Export CSV invoice function. We listened and added the following additional fields:
- Quantity, unit of measure and rate; values used to calculated the base freight charge
- Movement date of the consignment; the actual pickup date used to determine which rate to use
- Fuel Surcharge; additional charged added to the base freight charge
Rates export to Excel
Freight rates can now be exported to Excel for detailed analysis. If you do not already have access to this function please contact your eCargo administrator or eCargo Support to be given access.
With these values included customers can now better reconcile individual freight charges with details in their own financial and management systems.
Simpler reconciliation of invoice lines
Invoices which have lines that have failed reconciliation are now highlighted in red, and clearly indicate to you what the next steps are to reconcile the invoice.
Improved layout of invoicing screens
General layout of invoicing screens has been improved to provide faster access to the information you need.
Upcoming features and improvements
The following new features and system improvements are in the pipeline:
Upgrades to servers to improve performance
New web servers are due to be rolled out to deliver improved system performance and more hardware redundancy – that means less time waiting for things to happen and less chance of a single hardware failure causing a system outage.
Improvements to rates management
It’s time for an overhaul of freight rate management in eCargo. As our customer’s requirements become more sophisticated we need to provide simpler ways for these rates to be managed. A series of improvements have been designed and will be rolled out over the coming months in stages. If you have any further feedback or ideas on this area please contact us, we’d be happy to show you our planned improvements.
Did You Know..?
This month we return with two new tips in the 'Did You Know..?' series:
Use tabs in your web browser to run eCargo in MULTIPLE screens to save time
For those invoicing users frustrated with having to flick through many different screens to resolve a rating issue, did you know you can open multiple eCargo screens in your web browser at once by using tabs? 
To do this Right Click on a menu option and select ‘Open Link in New Tab’. This will open the selected page in another tab within the same browser window, do this for as many different pages as you commonly need to visit. [Note you will need Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2 or greater to support tabs]
..and there's more
While we’re talking about tabs, use the CTRL + TAB buttons on your keyboard to flick through the open tabs in your web browser.