It was brought to my attention this week that we need to do a much better job at telling everyone about all the features we keep adding!

A little background: we were at the Midwest Accounting & Finance Showcase in Chicago this week, and we were lucky enough to be picked by Greg LaFollette for his walking tour where he brings a large group of accountants and consultants to a selected group of booths, and gives us 11 minutes, a microphone and a loud speaker.  While Danny was speaking and listing features, Greg turned to me and said “now, how come I didn’t know you guys had document management in there now?”.  Good point, I told him.  We’re so focused on listening to feedback, adding features and capabilities to Method that we forget to stop and tell the rest of the community what we’ve done.  I guess it is pretty cool that you can upload scanned receipts and attach them to QuickBooks transactions!  Oops...we should have told everyone a few months ago when that capability came out!

So here are a few big things that are brand new in the platform this week:

1. Multicurrency
We now support multiple currencies!  QuickBooks 2009 introduced the currency option to US versions of QuickBooks this year.  This enables you to set a currency in your Chart of Accounts, Customers, Vendors and most transactions (for example Invoices, Bills, and Item Receipts).

You'll need to install a new Method Integration Engine to get this feature.  It will not automatically update.  In Method, go to QuickBooks > Customize, click Show Installations Steps, and then click Install now for Step 3.

Also, you will have to customize the screens in Method that you want to see the currency on. By default, your currencies will be synced, but will not actually show up in Method until you customize your screens and drag the Currency and Exchange Rate fields onto the screen.

2. “Select PO” on Bill and Item Receipt
We added the "Select PO..." button to the standard Bill and Item Receipt screens, allowing you to associate an existing Purchase Order to a Bill or Item Receipt just like you can in QuickBooks.

To use this feature, just go to Vendors > Bills, or Vendors > Items Receipts, choose the Vendor you have a Purchase Order for, click the Items tab, click Select PO, and then follow the on-screen steps.

3. Escape key closes Popups

I personally am so used to clicking the Escape key in QuickBooks that I found myself time and time again clicking Escape in Method before remembering I have to use my mouse to click "Cancel" or click the "X" in top right.

That's why I'm psyched about the fact that you can now click Escape in all popup up screens and the popup will close as if you had clicked the "X".

4. Complete Save, Close on CRM

This one actually come from internal feedback from our team, since we use Method CRM for our own use.  When closing a CRM activity, rather than changing the status to Completed, and then clicking Save & Close, we added a new button called, "Complete, Save & Close".  We also added this to the other tabs (Send an Email, Schedule a Follow Up), to save from always having to go back to the first Add / Edit Activity tab.  We've been using this internally for weeks now, and love it, so we pushed it out to all Method users.

5. Up to 20 new lines in a grid

Previously, on an Invoice, Bill, or any other screen where you list line items, you had only 3 new lines of data entry before you clicked Update, and then clicked New Line again.  This is fine most of the time, but in scenarios where you need many lines, you will find clicking Update and New Line inefficient.  You can now edit the screen, edit the grid, and in Step 6 of the grid wizard specify the number of new rows you want to see when New Line is clicked.

6. Show / hide grid columns

You can now customize grids so that they include a number of hidden columns that can be shown on-demand.  This is a big deal in case you sometimes need more information for searching, filtering or data entry, but these fields aren't always needed, so they don't need to clog up your screen.

For example, in the screen below, I added a "Location" column and a "Class" column to my Existing Invoices grid, so that I can quickly search for all invoices in a certain inventory control Location, for a certain Class - but I default them to be hidden since I normally don't need to do this.

That's enough for today.  There's really another 20 or so little improvements that didn't make my list........but we don't need to show off!

What's next? Right now we’re working heavily on making Method work on Windows Mobile browsers.  Let me tell you, we’re in a time warp - like it’s 1998 over here and Microsoft has just realized that the "Inter-web" is for real. In other words.....it's a big coding challenge since IE Mobile is extremely behind the times.  If you are interested in signing up for a beta of this, please reply to this post, or send an email to method@methodintegration.com. We're especially interested if you are in the field services industry.  There are goodies in it for you.  I'll explain when you email....

Paul