• In Order Entry program 1, Prepare Orders, detail tax totals could double under some circumstances - this problem was only reflected in the detail tax section on printed orders, which few use. The actual amount of tax charged was correct.
  
  
• In Order Entry program 1, if you manually added a freight amount on the third screen, the freight calculation could disappear if you then immediately printed the order or went to screen 1.
  
  
• Order Entry program 54, Order From Estimate - if you assigned a new customer when transferring an estimate to an order, the new customer's secondary salesperson was not automatically added to the resulting order.
  
  
• The credit card interface used by Accounts Receivable, Point of Sale, Billing Order Entry and Quick Sale did not properly recognize a manually specified path for REQ files. Worked fine if you used the default directory.
  
  
• Import Data program 4, Read Delimited, has been changed due to Unix compatibility issues.

Job Cost program 19 (Update/Transfer Payroll) can now transfer piecework pay from your Payroll checks to Job Cost work orders. Previously Job Cost would only transfer salary and hourly pay. You should keep in mind when using this new feature that since Job Cost itself does not recognize piecework as a distinct type of labor (all Job Cost employee labor is based on hours), that the units posted in Payroll will transfer as hours. In other words, if you are paying an employee for 10 units of piecework in Payroll, it will show on Job Cost screens and default reports as 10 hours. As long as you keep this in mind there is really no functional difference between the two. You could, of course, change Job Cost screens and reports to reflect a more neutral term ('units' instead of 'hours') if you wish.

A few additional notes on this new feature:

• Payroll allows you to post a combination of both regular pay and piecework pay on a single employee check detail line. While this feature is rarely used, it is worth pointing out that Job Cost program 19 will not transfer such details since they represent a mixture of hours and units, which makes it impossible for Job Cost to come up with a reasonable rate per unit because of the combination. Job Cost program 19 will display an error message if it encounters such a posting. If your employees receive both piecework and regular pay that needs to update to Job Cost, simply post these as separate pay details on their check.
  
  
• Payroll also allows you to post a number of hours as a reference on piecework pay, so that you can indicate that the employee took so many hours to do some number of units. Be aware that this reference number of hours will not be used when updating piecework pay to Job Cost, the number of units is always used.
  
  
• And one final item: we discovered when working with this program that a salary pay posted with zero hours (permissible but not usually done) would update to Job Cost with no cost because zero hours multiplied by any amount is zero. We have changed this so that if the number of hours on a salary pay posting is zero, Job Cost will change it to one hour so that the calculations multiply out properly. Note, though, that salary postings should preferably have a 'real' number of hours associated with them in order to create a meaningful posting in Job Cost.

In System Administrator program 11 (Modify Reports) we have added a new feature whereby you can set the number of decimals you wish to see on individual percentage fields. This addresses a request we've had many times over the years from users who dislike 4 decimals on discount percentages printed on orders and invoices. As you know, if you assign a 5% discount on an invoice, the system often can't assign that exact percentage to a line item on the invoice. For instance, a 5% discount on an item that retails for $1.89 comes out to a price of $1.7955. Of course you can't charge a customer that, so the price is rounded to the nearest penny, $1.80. By rounding the price, we no longer have an exact 5% discount. The actual discount given is 4.7619%, and this is the figure that we have to show as the discount percentage for the line item on the printed invoice.

Some users object to that, saying that customers are confused by these fractional percentages, especially when the rounding ends up like our example above, where the exact calculated discount is less than what the seller may have promised (just as many will come out higher, of course). Customers can get pretty hot under the collar when they think they're being shortchanged, even by 4/10s of a penny!

Therefore, our new feature allows you to decide how much decimal accuracy you would like to have print on these discount percentages. Given the example above, if we switched the decimal setting on the discount percentage to zero, the report would round the 4.7619% to 5%, and the customer is happy.

One caveat: Keep in mind that the smaller the prices you deal with, the wider the swings that the discount percentage can take, even such that a setting of zero decimal places could still give you a different percentage than the one you assigned on the invoice. Take for instance, an item that costs 7 cents. If you assign a discount percentage of 10% you get a price of 6.3 cents, which rounds to 6 cents. Using the rounded figure to recalculate the discount we come up with 14.28571%, well away from the original 10%. No matter how much we round, we'll never show a 10% discount for this item. If you deal with this situation, we recommend that you simply don't show the discount percentages on the invoice - let the customer see how much they saved in dollar terms and be done with it.

To use the new feature in System Administrator program 11, load in the section of the report format you want to change, select Edit, and place your cursor on the percentage field you wish to change. Press TAB and select Specify. A menu displays two options, one of which is Decimals. Choose Decimals and select the decimal accuracy you wish shown on the report. Save the format and you're done.

The release date of Unix version 4 is Monday, February 28, 2005. Here is the suggested retail pricing for this release:

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